Physicists have coaxed particles of light into undergoing opposite transformations simultaneously, like a human turning into a werewolf as the werewolf turns into a human. In carefully engineered circuits, the photons act as if time were flowing in a quantum combination of forward and backward. “For the first time ever, we kind of have a time-traveling machine going in both directions…
The rural-urban voter divide has plagued the United States for nearly three decades, and only continues to increase. For decades now, rural districts are typically governed by Republican House members, while suburban and urban areas tend to be governed by Democrats.
New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall spoke with many political science experts who have done extensive research on how rural voters’ growing “resentment” continues to fuel a rural-urban “apartheid,” and why it will likely persist for years to come.
MAGA politician Ron Johnson’s Senate win over Democrat Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin last year, Edsall wrote, is the one of the best case studies for “rural realignment and the role it plays in elections.”
READ MORE: Republicans don’t serve their states. They immiserate them
Johnson is a Trump-backed lawmaker who staunchly denies the reality of climate change, has referred to Jan. 6 rioters as “people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement,” and proposed cuts to social programs. Still, he has managed to win reelection.
Edsall talked to Marquette Law School scholar Craig Gilbert who found in his analysis that Johnson’s votes were much lower in the “red and blue suburbs of Milwaukee” compared to his 2016 race, but the group of voters that ultimately steered his win came from “white rural Wisconsin.”
He won the rural vote by 25 points in 2016, but that increased to 29 points this time around, leading him to victory.
University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Katherine Cramer summarized the reasons for this shift in her study “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” highlighting three points: “A belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers; a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources; and a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.”
Edsall likens rural voters’ resentment towards Democrats to the “upheaval in the white South after Democrats, led by President Lyndon Johnson, won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
But the start of the rural-urban split, according to Boston College political scientist David Hopkins’s book “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics,” began during a “conflation of cultural and racial controversies starting in the late 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s,” such as two major Supreme Court abortion rulings and the 1993 debate over gay people in the military.
However, Hopkins says the milestone that really solidified the divide was the 1992 presidential election, as it started “the emerging configuration of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ geographic coalitions that came to define contemporary partisan competition.”
After the election, the percentage of House Democrats representing suburban districts increased by nearly 20 percent while Democratic seats in rural districts dropped from 24 percent to 5 percent.
READ MORE: Robert Reich: Agricultural ‘monopolies are slowly killing rural America’
Hopkins wrote in a 2019 study, “The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992-2018, that “Democratic suburban growth has been especially concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, reflecting the combined presence of both relatively liberal whites (across education levels) and substantial minority populations, but suburbs elsewhere remain decidedly, even increasingly, Republican in their collective partisan alignment.”
One of the reasons Republicans continue to pull in rural voters, Jordan Gest of George Mason University gathered in recent research, is that “Republicans are now beginning to attract socioeconomically ascendant and white-adjacent members of ethnic minorities who find their nostalgic, populist, nationalist politics appealing (or think Democrats are growing too extreme).”
Harvard postdoctoral research fellow Kristin Lunz Trujillo and University of Minnesota Ph.D candidate Zack Crowley, in their research found, “the key factor driving rural voters to the Republican Party: anger at perceived unfair distribution of resources by government, a sense of being ignored by decision makers or the belief that rural communities have a distinct set of values that are denigrated by urban dwellers.”
The scholars also found that, “culture differences play a far stronger role in determining the vote than discontent over the distribution of economic resources.” And stances on what they call symbolic issues “positively predict Trump support and ideology while the more material subdimension negatively predicts these outcomes, if at all.”
The great and the good have been congregating in Switzerland this week for the latest meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) – a (normally) annual conference that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn accurately described as a “billionaires’ jamboree”.
This year’s event was the first Davos summit since the start of the pandemic. And much has clearly changed since then.
The word “polycrisis” provides a fair summary of the discussions at #WEF23 – used by multiple speakers over the past five days to describe the concatenation of dangers and threats that the global economy currently faces.
“Economic, environmental, social, and geopolitical crises are converging and conflating,” declared WEF founder Klaus Schwab, opening this year’s symposium of the international elites.
This despondent message was reiterated in the WEF’s annual global risks report, published in advance of the latest powwow of CEOs, bankers, and establishment politicians.
“The risk of recession; growing debt distress; a continued cost-of-living crisis; polarised societies enabled by disinformation and misinformation; a hiatus on rapid climate action; and zero-sum geo-economic warfare…” – the list goes on.
All of this, and more, was on the minds of Davos’ delegates this week – a reflection of the deep mood of pessimism that grips the ruling class, and of the dire perspectives for capitalism in the months ahead.
Like the host of any good party, Schwab was determined not to let a bit of bad weather ruin the event.
Trying in vain to lift spirits, the WEF chief urged attendees to break free of their “crisis mindset”. The only problem being that there was little positive news for his guests to talk about.
Clutching at straws, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told audiences that the outlook for the world economy had marginally improved in recent weeks. But she quickly backtracked, extinguishing any hopes of ‘green shoots’, by adding that “less bad doesn’t quite yet mean good”.
The head of the IMF noted that headline inflation seemed to be falling, and that China’s emergence from its zero-covid lockdown should give a boost to global economic growth. But on both fronts, Georgieva struck a note of caution.
Although price rises have slightly slowed, she stressed that they are still going up at a rate far above central bankers’ two percent target. And the hardline approach being taken by the US Federal Reserve, European Central Bank (ECB), and others – hiking interest rates in an attempt to curb inflation – is almost certain to push economies everywhere into recession.
Indeed, just a few weeks ago, the IMF director estimated that one-third of the world economy would likely experience a downturn in the year ahead, with “three big economies – the US, EU and China – all slowing down simultaneously”.
“Even countries that are not in recession,” Georgieva continued, “would feel like recession for hundreds of millions of people.” A rosy picture indeed!
But it’s not even a case of from the frying pan and into the fire, the IMF head noted, speaking on the panel at the concluding session of #WEF23.
With inflationary pressures – such as the Ukraine war and the breakdown in world trade – continuing, she stated, we are likely to end up with the worst of both worlds: economic slump alongside rising prices.
Unemployment will go up, Georgieva declared. But inflation won’t necessarily be quelled. “A cost-of-living crisis and a job,” is already a disaster for ordinary people, she said. “A cost-of-living crisis and no job,” is a catastrophe.
Similarly, the IMF chief warned that China’s reopening could prove to be a double-edged sword for the rest of the world.
On the one hand, she said, Chinese demand for raw materials is likely to boost growth for countries that export these primary commodities.
On the other hand, this same surge in demand – particularly for sources of energy – could act to push up inflation internationally. This would force central banks to raise interest rates even further: increasing borrowing costs for indebted households, businesses, and countries; and pushing economies (outside of China) even deeper into recession.
Even with this caveat, however, bourgeois economists’ predictions are likely to prove to be overly optimistic.
The regime in Beijing might have abandoned its zero-covid policy. But that doesn’t mean that the Chinese economy will return to booming growth.
The ruling class held out similar hopes in 2021, when lockdowns ended in the West and governments told citizens to learn to ‘live with the virus’. Back then, sanguine commentators talked about the prospects of a new ‘roaring twenties’, forecasting a robust rebound from the corona-crash.
Instead, however, a brief recovery – fuelled by pent-up demand, deficit financing, and monetary printing – has given way to a new era of inflation, instability, and crisis for capitalism. And China is set to follow this same trajectory, albeit with a slight delay.
Just as with the rest of the world, the virus and associated lockdowns are not the only thing that has hurt the Chinese economy in recent years. Underlying the covid-chaos is the organic crisis of capitalism, which is expressing itself in China most notably in terms of the massive bubble in the property market.
Xi Jinping’s regime can try to prevent this bubble from bursting, but only by creating further contradictions and turmoil for Chinese capitalism.
Those looking to China to rescue the rest of the world economy – as it partially did in the wake of the 2008 crash, with its unprecedented programme of Keynesian spending – will therefore be sorely disappointed.
Indeed, it is precisely the interventionist measures and inflationary policies of the Chinese state over the last decade-and-a-half – and by the ruling classes everywhere in response to each-and-every crisis – that have paved the way for the mess that capitalism and its representatives find themselves in today.
As ever, bourgeois hubris will soon turn to crisis.
Throughout the proceedings in Davos this year, one particular fear stood out: the rise of protectionism and the fracturing of the world market.
Are we seeing the end of globalisation? This was the question on everyone’s lips. And despite attempts by various speakers to calm nerves, those paying any attention to #WEF23 will not have been reassured.
“Concerted, collective action is needed before risks reach a tipping point,” the pre-summit WEF report urged.
“A great deal of whether we can lift optimism depends on the people in this room,” stated the IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva, appealing to her audience of business leaders and policymakers. “Be pragmatic, collaborate, do the right thing, keep the global economy integrated for the benefit of all of us.”
But her pleas fell on deaf ears. Indeed, to paraphrase the famous proverb: there are none more deaf than those who will not hear. And with the world economy slumping and markets shrinking, bourgeois politicians are in no mood to cooperate with one another. Instead, it is every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.
From Brexit to Biden’s ‘Made in America’ programme: economic nationalism is being served up in country after country, as each ruling class implements ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ policies in an effort to export the crisis.
And as supply-chains are rejigged, industries are reshored, and tariffs are imposed, costs will go up, further fuelling inflation, with workers left to pay the bill.
Once again, we see a stark demonstration of how the nation state – alongside private property – stands as a fundamental barrier in the way of the development of the productive forces, as protectionism threatens to turn the looming world recession into an even-more ominous depression.
The real elephant in the room, however, was that of class struggle.
From Sri Lanka to Peru; Iran to China; Britain to France: the working class is starting to move across the world. And these strikes and movements are only the beginning.
The strategists of capital can sense the precariousness of their system. At the same time, they have no solutions; no alternative but to impose austerity and attacks – demanding that workers pay for this crisis.
This is provoking and preparing revolutionary explosions in all countries. The billionaires, bosses, and bankers in Davos therefore have every reason to be terrified.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries? Do you have personal experiences with them? I’d love to hear from boosters and critics alike, especially if your commentary is grounded in something you’ve observed at work, school, or elsewhere in your life.
Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
“What if diversity trainings are doing more harm than good?”
That’s the headline of a recent New York Times op-ed by Jesse Singal, the writer, podcaster, and author of a 2018 Atlantic cover story, who delves into the multibillion-dollar diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) industry. While its advocates claim that “diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps and so on,” Singal writes, in practice there is “little evidence that many of these initiatives work.” And the type of diversity training “that is currently in vogue—mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for D.E.I. problems—may well have a net-negative effect.”
I have a theory about why programs of that sort might fail. After Donald Trump was elected, I studied the political-psychology research on authoritarian personality types. I was especially impressed by the work of Karen Stenner, who found in her scholarship that “a good deal of what we call racial intolerance is not even primarily about race, let alone blacks, let alone African Americans and their purported shortcomings” (though anti-Black, ideological racists do of course exist and African Americans are harmed regardless of what drives intolerance). “Ultimately,” Stenner contended, “much of what we think of as racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as ‘difference-ism,’” defined as “a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness.”
As I explained in a 2019 article:
The distinction isn’t merely about word choice. It has critical implications for fighting and easing both racism and other forms of intolerance. For example, in an entirely separate experiment meant to manipulate the way authoritarians viewed “us” and “them,” subjects were told that NASA had verified the existence of alien life––beings “very different from us in ways we are not yet even able to imagine.” After being told that, the measured racial intolerance of authoritarian subjects decreased by half, a result that suggests a general intolerance of difference that varies with perceptions of otherness, not fixed antagonism against a racial group. Their boundaries (and thus their behavior!) can be swiftly altered, Stenner emphasized, just by this simple cognitive device of creating a “superordinate group”: making “black people look more like ‘us’ than ‘them’ when there are green people afoot.” Under these conditions, the authoritarians didn’t only become kinder to black people, Stenner noted; they also became more merciful to criminals—that is, less inclined to want a crackdown on perceived moral deviance.
As I went on to explain:
Stenner’s book reaches a conclusion that cuts against one of the main progressive strategies for fighting racism in American society: the belief that if we have the will, everyone can be socialized to respect and value difference. “All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest way to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors,” she wrote.
The appearance of sameness matters, and “apparent variance in beliefs, values, and culture seem to be more provocative of intolerant dispositions than racial and ethnic diversity,” so “parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness” seems wise when possible.
Put more simply, perhaps 15 percent of humans are psychologically ill-suited to dealing with difference—and when DEI-industry programming deliberately raises the salience of race in a given organization with the intention of urging anti-racism, the effect is to exacerbate differentism.
In an article that dovetails nicely with Stenner’s insights, Matthew Yglesias once explained why he believes that raising the salience of race in public-policy debates is frequently bad for anti-racism.
He wrote:
A deep body of scholarship across history, political science, and economics all broadly point toward the conclusion that increasing the salience of race can have harmful results.
One particularly frustrating example I came across years ago at Vox is that Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt found in experimental settings that telling people about racial disparities in the criminal justice system made people less supportive of reform.
And you could react to that by thinking “wow, that sucks, people shouldn’t be so terrible,” but I think most people believe there are tradeoffs between harshness in the criminal justice system and public safety. And while more progressive-minded people would say that’s overstated, there are clearly some margins on which it’s true. So if you tell people a penalty will be applied in a racist way, for many of them, that’s appealing—the system can crack down on dealers and addicts while they personally can rest assured that if their kid happens to be caught doing drugs, he’ll be okay. By the same token, a friend who’s running for office told me that many of the people she speaks to who are most agitated about crime also hate traffic cameras. My guess is that’s precisely because traffic cameras don’t engage in racial discrimination, and nice middle-class white people don’t like the idea of an enforcement system that doesn’t exempt them.
In the specific case of the cameras, I think we should have more of them and that the aim of our criminal justice system more broadly should be to catch a larger share of offenders in a non-discriminatory way and then punish them less harshly. Ideally, everyone who speeds would get caught and fined and the fines wouldn’t necessarily be very high, but people would stop doing speeding because the odds of detection are overwhelming.
And in the general case, I think it’s clear that the goal should be to reduce the salience of race in public debate and focus on the direct objects of reducing poverty, making policing more accountable, improving schools, reducing air pollution, expanding health insurance coverage, and otherwise solving the big problems of American society. All of this would, mechanically, close racial gaps. But highlighting that is genuinely counterproductive.
I mention these writers at such length because many diversity-loving people find it surprising that DEI training could be counterproductive, and Stenner and Yglesias’s work offers plausible explanations for why. But the intersection of politics, psychology, and race is exactly the sort of wildly complicated subject area where epistemic modesty and airing diverse viewpoints is vital for truth-seeking, so I hope that fans of DEI training and members of the industry will stand up for their work.
But to defend the industry in aggregate will require a lot of explaining. As Singal wrote, “Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is ‘disappointing,’ wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, ‘considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.’”
The Harvard Business Review has been publishing articles that cast doubt on the efficacy of mainstream DEI approaches for years. “One reason why I found Jesse’s piece so compelling is that he’s echoing arguments I made more than a year ago,” David French wrote in The Dispatch. “I quoted from a 2018 summary of studies by Harvard University professor Frank Dobbin and and Tel Aviv University professor Alexandra Kalev that said, ‘Hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that anti-bias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.’”
In French’s telling, that scholarship has implications for the culture wars:
We fight a tremendous amount over diversity training—even to the point of violating civil rights laws and the First Amendment—to either mandate or prohibit certain forms of DEI instruction when DEI instruction doesn’t impact hearts and minds much at all. It’s Diet Coke. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that just doesn’t deliver what its advocates hope for, nor does it foster identity politics in the way that many of its opponents fear.
… People just aren’t that malleable. For good and ill, we’re built of sterner, less flexible stuff, and periodic Corporate PowerPoints or group learning sessions can’t really shape peoples’ lives.
For more, see a podcast debate that Jane Coaston hosted on diversity initiatives and my 2021 profile of the entrepreneur and public intellectual Chloé Valdary, who offers an alternative approach to DEI training that she calls the Theory of Enchantment. Finally, for a deep dive into the history of the diversity-training industry, see Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s 2002 book Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.
“There’s No Planet B”
In Aeon, Arwen E. Nicholson and Raphaëlle D. Haywood reject the possibility of humanity moving off of Earth:
Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our worries behind?
No. All these stories are missing what makes a planet habitable to us. What Earth-like means in astronomy textbooks and what it means to someone considering their survival prospects on a distant world are two vastly different things. We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere.
Without them, we cannot survive. Astronomical observations and Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one we evolved with. There is no plan B. There is no planet B. Our future is here, and it doesn’t have to mean we’re doomed.
Gas Stoves and Asthma
Emily Oster attempts to evaluate the data.
Berlin’s Failing Army
Spiegel International argues that even with war raging in Ukraine, and the attendant need for German contributions to European security, the German military is in dire shape. It reports the following:
In June, the Bundestag passed a 100-billion-euro special fund for the German military, and in December the Budget Committee released the first 13 billion from that fund for eight defense projects, including the new F-35 combat aircraft. “It is clear that we must invest much more in the security of our country in order to protect our freedom and our democracy,” the chancellor said in his February address to the nation. Scholz also formulated his political expectations: “The goal is a powerful, cutting-edge, progressive Bundeswehr that can be relied upon to protect us.” The question is: How much progress has been made on fulfilling that pledge. Since then, after all, the Defense Ministry has been producing little in the way of announcements about restructuring and reform, instead landing on the front pages due to gaffes and catastrophic shortcomings.
One example: The commander of the 10th Tank Division reported to his superiors that during an exercise with 18 Puma infantry fighting vehicles, all 18 of them broke down. It was a worrisome incident given that the ultra-modern weapons systems are a key component of the NATO rapid-reaction force. There is a lack of munitions and equipment—and arms deliveries to Ukraine have only worsened the situation. “The cupboards are almost bare,” said Alfons Mais, inspector general of the German army, at the beginning of the war. André Wüstner, head of the German Bundeswehr Association, seconds him: “We continue to be in free fall.” The situation is so bad that the German military has become a favorite punchline of late-night comedy shows … The German military, to be sure, is no stranger to mockery and ridicule, but it hasn’t been this bad in a long time.
Is This Morning in America?
David Brooks argues in The Atlantic that the future is brighter for the country than many now imagine:
If a society is good at unlocking creativity, at nurturing the abilities of its people, then its ills can be surmounted. The economist Tyler Cowen suggests a thought experiment to illustrate this point. Take out a piece of paper. In one column, list all of the major problems this country faces—inequality, political polarization, social distrust, climate change, and so on. In another column, write seven words: “America has more talent than ever before.” Cowen’s point is that column B is more important than column A. Societies don’t decline when they are in the midst of disruption and mess; they decline when they lose energy.
And creative energy is one thing America has in abundance.
Provocation of the Week
At Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Davis, California, some workers are trying to unionize. Faith Bennett reports on their grievances in Jacobin:
Like many other baristas and service workers, Peet’s employees are challenged by schedules that are delivered on short notice, unreliable hours, lean staffing, and difficulty securing coverage. As a result, café positions have high rates of turnover. But members of PWU are invested in making the job more sustainable for themselves and more tenable for those who come next.
In Davis, Peet’s workers report that they are often scheduled for shifts that are deliberately shortened so that they are not afforded breaks. Meanwhile mobile orders exacerbate understaffing issues: the company does not place restrictions on mobile orders, which often leads to a torrent of tickets, not all of which are picked up, and delays of drinks ordered by customers who arrive in person. The current practice around mobile orders exhausts baristas and contributes to frustration of customers, who sometimes direct that frustration toward staff.
Although it is possible to turn off the mobile order system, this can only be accomplished if staff from a given store put in a request to the district manager, who oversees operations at approximately seventeen locations. Having this request granted for even an hour is a rare occurrence … mobile orders, a lack of breaks, and understaffing curtail the ability to chat with regulars who look to baristas for social interaction.
That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.
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Mark Garlick /Science Photo Library / Getty Images
Undergoing a brush with death may sound terrifying. But people who have had a near-death experience (NDE) typically report feeling peace, comfort, and calm throughout the ordeal.
Perhaps it’s the brain’s way of coming to terms with its mortality. Or perhaps something more complex is going on.
Scientists have several theories to explain some of the surprising sensations associated with NDEs, such as physiological changes in the brain as brain cells die.
But a lot about NDEs remains a mystery, in part, because it’s practically impossible to study in real-time, said Dr. Bruce Greyson, a professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia and co-founder of the International Association of Near-Death Studies.
Researchers must rely on anecdotes, memory recall, and in some cases, animal studies to understand how brains change from a NDE and what it could mean for future medicine.
NDEs can trigger a lot of peculiar sensations, including feeling like you’re floating above your body or an out-of-body experience.
Tara Moore / Getty Images
When it comes to describing NDEs, there are two sides to the coin: what’s physically happening to you versus what you’re perceiving on a psychological level.
Physically, NDEs are typically associated with extremely painful events, including a head injury, heart attack, or respiratory arrest.
But psychologically, the brain tends to shut down the sensation of pain — or at least the memory of it.
For example, Julia Nicholson — a former CEO, executive leadership expert, and business consultant — said that she saw the faces of her loved ones vividly flash before her eyes, one by one, during a near-fatal car crash in 1980.
“I don’t remember feeling any pain until I arrived at the hospital,” she recently told Newsweek.
Seeing loved ones — deceased or living — is common among NDEs, as is seeing a bright light at the end of a tunnel.
Other people have reported more corporeal sensations like that of leaving their body, floating above it, feeling physically drawn into that tunnel with the light at the end of it, or having a spiritual encounter with a supreme being, aliens, or lost loved ones.
And all the while, during these other-worldly experiences, people rarely report having felt fear or pain — it’s usually an overwhelming sense of calm and love.
Some of these phenomena can’t be explained by science — at least not yet. But in 2022 the NDE research community received something it had never witnessed before: the brain scan of a dying man.
And it unveiled some secrets that, up to that point, scientists could only speculate.
Shown here is an EEG cap that helps researchers measure brain activity. The man shown here is not the man who died during an EEG scan.
Chris So / Contributor
In 2016, a then-87-year-old man was connected to an electroencephalogram, or EEG, when he unexpectedly had a heart attack and died. Researchers later published the results in Frontiers of Aging Neuroscience.
An EEG measures electrical signals that the brain produces in order to help diagnose or examine certain neurological conditions like seizures and memory loss.
Sure enough, doctors were monitoring the man for a series of recent seizures when his heart suddenly stopped beating.
In the paper, researchers reported that during the 15 seconds leading up to the man’s heart attack, the EEG scan revealed high-frequency brainwaves called gamma oscillations, which are thought to play a role in creating and retrieving memories.
“It is very hard to make claims with one case … but what we can claim is that we have signals just before death and just after the heart stops like those that happen in the healthy human when they dream or memorize or meditate,” lead study author Dr. Ajmal Zemmar told Insider’s Anna Medaris.
Of course, these scans are of a man seconds before death and not exactly equivalent to an NDE, where the person survives. However, such activity may help explain why people see memory flashbacks or faces of people they know during an NDE, Greyson said.
Moreover, EEG scans of people attempting to remember their NDE also provide more clues to what an NDE does to the human brain.
The temporal lobe, highlighted here, is responsible for language and visual memory, among other things.
PALMIHELP / Getty Images
When people recall an NDE, the brain “shows increased activity in many different parts,” Greyson said, “such as those associated with memory, vision, hearing, and emotion.”
In particular, the temporal lobe, which is responsible for helping process sound and encode memories, is thought to be associated with out-of-body experiences and memory flashbacks during NDEs, said Dr. David San Filippo, an associate professor at National Louis University and a near-death experience researcher.
“That has led some people to believe that near-death experiences are simply biological, chemical reactions to the brain dying,” San Filippo said.
To that point, a study in rats suggested that the overwhelmingly positive experience people report with NDEs may be linked to a flood of serotonin the brain releases. This may be the brain’s way of gradually preparing the body for death by inducing feelings of euphoria and pain relief, San Filippo said.
While animal studies can offer clues, they’re not an analog to what may be happening in a human and therefore more research is warranted on this topic, Greyson said.
Some researchers think NDEs are just as much spiritual as they might be biological.
Across different age groups and among people in different countries, reports of NDEs are strikingly similar, especially in regards to encountering a spiritual deity or feeling part of something bigger than life on earth, San Filippo said.
“We hear the same story. It might differ based on cultural or spiritual beliefs, but it is essentially the same,” San Filippo said. “That leads us to believe that a near-death experience is a transpersonal experience happening outside of the brain.”
Understanding more about NDEs could help both terminally ill patients and their loved ones through stressful and uncertain times.
Motortion / Getty Images
While researching NDEs is a challenge because they’re hard to predict, as researchers come to better understand these phenomena, it could inform new therapies and treatments for people facing terminal illnesses, and their loved ones.
For example, San Filippo said that people in his studies who have had an NDE and recall feeling calm and comforted during the experience report that they no longer fear death.
“If we can learn more about what causes a positive near-death experience that is comfortable and peaceful, we could possibly develop a powerful therapy for people who are in turmoil or struggling,” Rasouli said.
Rasouli added that it could make the concepts of death and dying “become less mysterious and subsequently, less frightening” for us all.
“I think people benefit from hearing stories of NDEs and are comforted by the idea that death is a process and the pain ends,” San Filippo said.
‘Polycrisis’ is the buzz word among leftists right now. The word expresses the coming together and interlocking of various crises: economic (inflation and slump); environmental (climate and pandemic); and geopolitical (war and international divisions). Indeed, I raised a similar idea early last year.
So it is no surprise that the latest Human Development Report from the UN is so shocking. According to the HDR, the world is more pessimistic than at any point in modern history stretching back to before WW1.
The HDR analysed language trends in books over the past 125 years. It reveals a sharp increase in expressions reflecting “cognitive distortions associated with depression and other forms of mental distress”. Over the past two decades the language reflecting overly negative perceptions of the world and its future has surged. Indeed, today’s distress levels are unprecedented, exceeding those during the Great Depression and both world wars.
What’s also revealing is that negative views about the world began to soar around the turn of the century – even before the Great Recession. This surge coincides with my own economic insight that the major economies of the world entered what I call a new Long Depression, the third in the history of modern capitalism after the depression of 1873-95 and the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The intensity of negative views about the prospects for humanity has never been higher – way higher than in either of the two world wars of the 20th century. We are in a combination of: an economic depression; where real incomes stagnate or even fall; poverty increases along with widening inequality; and where investment to boost the productive forces and solve the environmental disaster now engulfing the world is lacking. And where instead of global cooperation by governments to solve this ‘polycrisis’, we have increasing conflict between nations, both economic and military.
Achim Steiner, Administrator United Nations Development Programme, presented the HDR 2022. This is how he introduced it. “We are living in uncertain times. The Covid-19 pandemic, now in its third year, continues to spin off new variants. The war in Ukraine reverberates throughout the world, causing immense human suffering, including a cost-of-living crisis. Climate and ecological disasters threaten the world daily.”
He went on: “Layers of uncertainty are stacking up and interacting to unsettle our lives in unprecedented ways. People have faced diseases, wars and environmental disruptions before. But the confluence of destabilizing planetary pressures with growing inequalities, sweeping societal transformations to ease those pressures and widespread polarization present new, complex, interacting sources of uncertainty for the world and everyone in it.”
“People around the world are now telling us that they feel ever more insecure.” Six out of seven people worldwide reported feeling insecure about many aspects of their lives, even before the Covid-19 pandemic. And the political consequences: “Is it any wonder, then, that many nations are creaking under the strain of polarization, political extremism and demagoguery—all supercharged by social media, artificial intelligence and other powerful technologies?”
Steiner pointed out that “in a stunning first, the global Human Development Index value has declined for two years in a row in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The decline in the global HDI puts it back to the time just after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement! So no progress there. Every year a few different countries experience dips in their respective HDI values. But a whopping 90 percent of countries saw their HDI value drop in either 2020 or 2021, far exceeding the number that experienced reversals in the wake of the global financial crisis. Last year saw some recovery at the global level, but it was partial and uneven: most very high HDI countries notched improvements, while most of the rest experienced ongoing declines.
At least 15m ‘unnecessary lives’ were lost from the COVID pandemic, mostly in low- and middle-income countries. But even the US saw its life expectancy fallen to the lowest level in 26 years. Indeed, US life expectancy is now below that of China!
New vaccines were developed to fight COVID in double-quick time, including some based on revolutionary technology and they saved an estimated 20 million lives in one year. But the poorest in the world received the least medical support because highly unequal vaccine access “The pandemic has been a painful reminder of how breakdowns in trust and in cooperation, among and within nations, foolishly constrain what we can achieve together.”
COVID has not gone away, but governments and people have decided to live (and die) with it. The aftermath remains and even worsens. Billions of people now face the greatest cost-of-living crisis in a generation. They are already grappling with food insecurity, owing largely to inequalities in wealth and power that determine entitlements to food. Global supply chain blockages remain, contributing to rising inflation in all countries at rates not seen in decades.
As for the climate, the HDR reminds us that in recent years have seen more record temperatures, fires and storms around the world. The latest International Panel on Climate Change Report is a “code red for humanity.” In essence, as science has advanced, the climate models are, with better precision than before, predicting more disasters ahead. As “the climate crisis marches on, alongside other planetary-level changes wrought by the Anthropocene.” Biodiversity collapse is one of them. More than 1 million plant and animal species face extinction. “We have even less of an idea of how to live in a world without, say, an abundance of insects. That has not been tried for about 500 million years, when the world’s first land plants appeared. This is not a coincidence. Without an abundance of insect pollinators, we face the mindboggling challenge of growing food and other agricultural products at scale.”
The polycrisis is affecting humanity’s mental wellbeing through traumatizing events, physical illness, general climate anxiety and food insecurity. “The effects these have on children in particular are profound, altering brain and body development, especially in families on lower social rungs, potentially diminishing what children can achieve in life.” Inequalities in human development are perpetuated across generations; “it is not difficult to see how the confluence of mental distress, inequality and insecurity foment a similarly injurious intergenerational cycle that drags on human development.”
With economic depression and ecological disaster comes uncertainty, insecurity and political polarization. Large numbers of people feel frustrated by and alienated from their political systems. Armed conflicts are also up. For the first time ever, more than 100 million people are forcibly displaced, most of them within their own countries.
What is to be done? The UN offers its model for a more hopeful future: investment, insurance and innovation—the three Is.
But innovation and new technology, the UN admits, is a double-edged sword. “Artificial intelligence will both create and destroy tasks, causing tremendous disruption. Synthetic biology opens new frontiers in health and medicine while raising fundamental questions about what it means to be human.” Indeed, will these new technologies increase inequality, reduce job possibilities or expand them? I have discussed this issue in previous posts.
Then there is investment. The HDR talks about public investment, particularly for the environment. But says nothing about the vested interests that stand in the way of such investment. Finally, there is insurance: more protection of human rights, access to basic services and minimum incomes, and more democratic accountability. None of this basic insurance exists for the majority of the world’s near 8bn people.
The UN report is devastating in its examination of the human condition in the 21st century. But it offers no convincing explanation of why there is a ‘polycrisis’. Achim Steiner tells us that “the hero and the villain in today’s uncertainty story are one in the same: human choice.” Really, so if we chose to do things differently, we could. So why doesn’t humanity choose a different path? Well, it is because “not all choices are the same. Some—arguably the ones most relevant to the fate of our species—are propelled by institutional and cultural inertia, generations in the making.” Institutional and cultural inertia? Surely, the reason lies with the reality that only a tiny percentage of humanity can choose; the rest of us do not have the power to choose (at least not individually). It is the class division with capitalism, between those who own and control and those who must work for them and obey, that is the fundamental cause of this polycrisis, “generations in the making.”
Known as the “god molecule” to psychedelics enthusiasts, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is said to produce vivid and strangely similar hallucinations for many who take it.
Now, a new extended-state version of the powerful drug may help psychonauts stay there longer than ever before. Among their eccentric goals: to see — and document — whether people are actually entering a shared alternate dimension when they take the stuff.
As The New Republic reports, the Colorado-based psychedelics startup Medicinal Mindfulness is currently seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration to study what it’s calling DMTx, an extended-state, intravenous drip version of DMT that will induce in users trips far longer than the roughly five-to-ten minute experiences the drug typically provides.
DMT carries with it a ton of intriguing qualities, including that studies suggest our brains produce the drug naturally and that those who have taken it often experience variations on the same theme: entering what seems to be another plane or dimension replete with its own ethereal beings, sometimes referred to as “machine elves,” who are there to welcome them.
While the overwhelming majority of people who’ve taken DMT report a positive experience, the relatively short trip length means that any contact people claim to have with these beings tends not to last too long — confusingly, however, aficionados frequently report that those short trips feel like hours.
With DMTx, however, Medicinal Mindfulness is hoping to lengthen the trip via IV drip to hours or even days, which would, they hypothesize, make it last for an untold amount of time on the other side.
As of now, DMT is legal only for specific, government-approved research purposes in the US, though states like New York and Colorado are looking to legalize it further as researchers and New Age types continue to praise its therapeutic and spiritual uses.
As David McQueen, the cofounder of the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness and key organizer of the DMTx program, told TNR that some of the experiments the group hopes to achieve following FDA approval will look into whether two people hooked to IV drips in different rooms would be able to communicate inside the trip — all, of course, under medical supervision.
To be clear, that finding would be astonishingly surprising, and suggest that what we think we know about reality and consciousness is deeply incomplete. In other words, it would be trippy as hell.
As unlikely as that would be though, we’ll certainly be watching.
More on psychedelics: Former CEO Sues Company That Fired Him for Microdosing LSD in an Investor Meeting
The post Startup Trying to Test Whether People on DMT Experience a Shared Alien Universe appeared first on Futurism.
An international team of physicists has cooked up with a new theory that could allow for objects to travel faster than the speed of light — and while they say it wouldn’t technically violate the laws of physics, it would lead to phenomena so mind-bending that it’d make the end of “Interstellar” look normal.
To wit, according to ScienceAlert‘s analysis of the team’s new paper in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, travelers moving faster than the speed of light would “experience” multiple timelines at once.
How, you might ask? Through a “1+3 space-time” framework, which flips the idea of three spatial dimensions and one time dimension in favor of three time dimensions and a single spatial dimension.
“The other three dimensions are time dimensions,” said coauthor Andrzej Dragan from the University of Warsaw in Poland in statement about the work. “From the point of view of such an observer, the particle ‘ages’ independently in each of the three times.”
Does that make any sense from our puny human perspective? We’re honestly not sure.
But it is a mind-bending exploration of an exotic what-if, not to mention yet another example of researchers playing around with the decidedly “Star Trek” concept of faster-than-light travel. An added bonus? In theory, the scientists say, the framework might even help reconcile Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum mechanics, two sets of rules in physics that have yet to play nicely after many decades.
“This new definition preserves Einstein’s postulate of constancy of the speed of light in vacuum even for superluminal observers,” Dragan said in the statement. “Therefore, our extended special relativity does not seem like a particularly extravagant idea.”
Look, it sounds very cool. But then again, so did “Tenet” — and we all saw how that one turned out.
More on quantum physics: Physicist Says the Laws of Physics Don’t Actually Exist
The post Traveling Faster Than Light Would Mean Experiencing Multiple Timelines Simultaneously appeared first on Futurism.
This issue’s Review of the Month discusses Marx’s role as the foremost revolutionary critic of bourgeois Enlightenment humanism. To this day, his conception of “the universal metabolism of nature” remains a powerful antidote to the phantasmagoric “dark ecology” posited by today’s posthumanism. | more…