Final Chaos Read online

  Chapter 2

  She Could Smell You

  a Mile Away

  My dad, Carl, was born in Switzerland. When he came along, Jack and Angela and Angela’s stepsister were living in the Alps near where the Swiss highlands intersect with neighboring countries, Italy and France, on land that had been in Angela’s family for many years. According to Dad, his mother, Angela, the brilliant scientist who inadvertently ended the World Water Wars, stayed at home with him and his twin sister, Elsa, to “ensure they would be raised properly.” She homeschooled them in their early years before they entered public school. When the children went off to school, my grandmother, Angela, started working at the advanced theoretical computing laboratory about a 30-minute train ride from home.

  Dad told me many stories, and I wish I had recorded them. He always spoke affectionately of the good old days of his youth in Switzerland:

  I have very fond memories of those times, growing up with the glorious beauty of the Swiss Alps in our backyard. We had a number of animals, including several Norwegian Elkhounds, my mother’s favorite breed. Our house was interesting, spacious and open. It gradually morphed into the mountains behind us. The dogs’ environment ran in the opposite direction; they were always welcome in our home. The most magnificent elkhound was my mother’s dog Elskede. He slept in her bedroom on his own bed. He would start the day at 4:30 in the morning, cuddling with my mother, and then work his way downstairs to visit Elsa and me.

  Dad was also a dog person and did research raising and training rescue and therapy animals. My love of animals came naturally, and as a child, I wanted to be a veterinarian.

  Nevertheless, Mom was not too pleased when I decided to pursue my love of mountaineering and skiing instead of going to college. The planet had partially recovered from the global warming crisis and, although to a lesser extent, snow again blanketed the Alps.

  I spent five years in my early twenties scaling some of the world’s tallest peaks. I was guiding a trek one summer when I met my future wife. I realized then that in order to compete for her affections, in the long term I would need to get an education.

  My sister, Elsa, loved flowers and scents. She raised gardenias in a small sunroom, where she would sit and take in the fragrance while reading. She aspired to be a maker of perfume; she also attended the university and worked with Dad’s special olfactory dogs. These amazing animals could detect the smells of molecules at concentrations of one in a trillion. Elsa had adopted one of the dogs, Freya, that had developed blindness. This dog had the ability to smell in three dimensions and had mapped out the world with her nose in lieu of her eyes.

  Elsa and Dad also experimented with pheromones, which are molecules that can modify behavior. My father always said that the way to a man’s heart was through his nose. We knew he was referring to the essence of a person rather than the pump inside their chest, and that consciousness was the domain of the brain. He was correct, of course. History has been altered by the aroma of a home-cooked meal or the scent of perfume and flowers.

  In dogs, this special olfactory sense that can detect pheromones is distinct from their usual sense of smell. When dogs encounter people and other dogs, they frequently place their snout in socially inappropriate places – at least from the point of view of their owners and the recipient of this olfactory screening. Dogs obtain a great deal of information in this way, creating a profile to identify others. Friend or foe, or perhaps a mate?

  Dad and Elsa’s work revealed that female dogs appeared to prefer male dogs that were genetically unrelated to them, detected through their sense of smell, as candidates for siring pups. Interestingly, once a litter of puppies was born, these “sperm donors” took second place to the female’s new family. Elsa called this “the brown widow syndrome,” a more palatable social isolation imposed by the mother of the puppies in contrast to the fate imposed by the black widow spider, who kills her mates.

  Then, one fateful day, I was climbing with a group of friends near Chamonix when I received an emergency call on my communicator. It was Mother. She was hysterical. Elsa had been in a skiing accident and had been transported to the nearest hospital. I descended rapidly and arrived at the hospital 12 hours later.

  Although an excellent skier, Elsa had apparently caught an edge, resulting in a high-speed collision with a tree. Mother and I spent the night by her bedside. Dad went home to care for the animals and found Elsa’s dog, Freya, in the backyard howling. Given her keen sense of smell, the animal could have detected Elsa’s presence at a great distance; however, she knew something was wrong.

  We hoped and prayed that my sister would emerge from her coma. Unfortunately, her condition worsened. The brain injury was extensive. Dad insisted that Freya be brought to her bedside — for comfort for both of them. It was only after spending an hour lying next to Elsa that the dog calmed down.

  That evening, the dog jumped down off the bed and placed her snout on Mom’s thigh, then lay on the floor. Freya knew what was happening. She comprehended Elsa’s departure and fundamental death. Signaling her acceptance, she led the rest of us to the same devastating conclusion. Needless to say, this was a life-changing experience for all of us. Having determined what Freya already knew, that brain death had occurred, the doctors prepared my sister’s body for organ donation. Mother requested Elsa’s bone marrow and ovaries be cryogenically preserved.

  My sister’s death affected all of us in different ways. I decided to return to school. In a sort of compensatory way, I became interested in traumatic brain injuries. I volunteered at a local rehab hospital, which was a difficult experience but taught me about our frailty and how amazing and precious a gift the human brain truly is.

  I also realized that prevention was the best medicine and that treatment and rehabilitation of brain injuries had a long way to go before we could reanimate the patients in the rehab unit who were existing in various degrees of coma.

  I talked to my dad about doing a project to see whether we could lessen some of the effects of brain injury. I kept thinking of woodpeckers, who spent their lives hammering their heads against trees. How did they do that? Or did woodpeckers die of chronic traumatic brain injury unbeknownst to us? Perhaps they were a natural model and we could learn something from them.

  We obtained a dozen birds and built a habitat for them, where they spent their time busily pecking away at rotting logs. I quickly ran into a number of obstacles with this experiment, not the least of which was my lack of training and skills to see the project to completion. I also discovered I was not able or willing to euthanize the birds to examine their brains. We would just have to wait and see if one of them developed dementia and died to complete the study.

  I learned from my experience at the neuro rehab hospital and those woodpeckers that I needed an education. Then there was your mother to whom I had lied about already being enrolled in school. I was uncertain about exactly what I was going to do but started off studying psychology. In keeping with a childhood dream, I moved to the United States. The family had connections to Colorado, which was well known for veterinary medicine and its tall mountains. I did a lot of climbing while taking the prerequisite classes in biology and chemistry that were necessary to apply to veterinary school. I applied twice, without success, and determined I needed to rethink my long-term plan. The idea of medical school briefly entered my mind, but ultimately, I decided to remain in the field of physiological psychology.

  Once I had the education and skills, I continued to collaborate with my dad. He traveled a lot but split his time between Switzerland and Colorado. He helped me to develop a training center for rescue animals and incorporated them into the treatment of soldiers suffering from PTSD after the global war. Our work gained national recognition and culminated in my receiving a Presidential Freedom Award and honorary Doctor of Medicine.

  I became involved in public health and was awarded the position as the first, and ac
cording to many it was long overdue, Psychologist General of the country. Our family has been involved in neuroscience and mental health for two generations. Our work continues now at the direction of my son, Nicholas Jennings, CEO of Reset.com.

  Dad had thousands of stories about his many life experiences before he became Psychologist General. His own father Jack’s descriptions of the events that occurred during the Water Wars struck him deeply. In particular, the behavior of the animals, mostly the dogs, that could sense the approaching presence of death and that history-making disaster on the battlefield. That was the singular event that led Jack Jennings, my grandfather, to study pheromones and research the training of rescue animals while the family sequestered in the Alps, recovering from the war.

  Here at Reset.com, we do a lot of interesting things to help people recalibrate their lives to a level of chaos they can easily handle. Although it’s not necessary to realize the benefits of our services, we believe we better serve our clients by revealing the science behind our company’s processes. To that end, we have developed a few short and, we think, interesting paragraphs on the essential scientific concepts behind the brain reset process.

  Here, I’ll step you through the topics of cell biology (apoptosis), mathematics (chaos), and neuroscience (the Brain Lab). You may be wondering how this is all connected? By the end of the story that follows, you’ll understand.

  Chapter 3

  Not So Basic Science

  the chaos bakery

  Welcome to the Chaos Bakery, an eatery for the open-minded. Ingredients go in and baked goods come out, but what you get is always in doubt. Baking with a chaos oven can be very challenging, even for the most accomplished bakers. Here, recipes are viewed as only suggestions.

  We have invited our expert pastry chef John Dough to illustrate the nuances of chaos baking. John is going to walk us through a recipe for making scones.

  John Dough is pleased when eight delicious light brown scones emerge from the chaos oven. He has used this recipe thousands of times. The scones are a big hit and are flying off the shelves at the Chaos Bakery.

  One day, the staff of the bakery calls John at home in a panic: The Chaos Oven was turning out muffins instead of scones. The Chaos Police are called in to investigate. According to the staff, the oven was initially producing scones, then odd variations in sizes and shapes of scones appeared, and then suddenly muffins appeared.

  John confirms that the recipe has not changed. Frustrated, he decides to obtain a scale and graduated measuring cups, a timer, and a thermometer so that the baking process will be more precise. Using these tools, he prepares another batch of scones, and for the moment, these measures appeared to have corrected the problem. However, much to his chagrin, after a while, muffins emerged from the oven and then the chaos oven was producing donuts.

  Despite being more precise in measurement of ingredients and very careful about the quantities in the recipe, the chaos oven continued to occasionally produce muffins and donuts instead of scones. In bewilderment, John changes the sign on the Chaos Bakery to read fresh scones and sometimes muffins or donuts baked daily. He has now learned that scone baking in a chaos oven is very sensitive to the initial conditions (inputs of ingredients, in this case), a hallmark of chaos theory.

  Most people have a general understanding of the meaning of the word chaos. We intuit it to be a situation or place characterized by great disorder. “This place is a total mess” or “That situation is a total disaster.” The dictionary defines chaos as complete disorder and confusion. Synonyms include disarray, disorganization, turmoil, and pandemonium. Greek mythology defined Chaos as a primeval state of existence, the earth, wind, water, and fire from which the first gods appeared. Physicists and mathematicians discovered that deterministic systems, which are those governed by accepted mathematical and physical laws, the swing of a simple pendulum, for example, can behave unpredictably, appearing random and demonstrating great sensitivity to initial conditions; they termed this chaos.

  Edward Norton Lorenz was an early student of chaos. A mathematician and meteorologist, he published in 1963 a paper entitled “Deterministic Non-periodic Flow” in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. Lorenz developed a mathematical model of weather prediction, running simulations on an early computer. He found grossly different weather patterns resulting from very small differences in the initial conditions.

  He concludes in his paper that if two states differ only by an imperceptible amount, they may evolve into two completely different states. Therefore, any error in observing the initial state might preclude prediction or forecast of the future. This “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” became known as the Butterfly Effect, that is, the notion that something as small as the flap of a butterfly wing can alter initial conditions so as to affect global weather, resulting in a tornado in another location.

  An interesting aside: If we were to solve the Lorenz equations and graphically depict the results in what is known as the “phase space,” a very interesting and, I think, beautiful picture emerges. This graph has become known as the Lorenz attractor, a signature hallmark of chaos, as shown below.

  ­—

  apoptosis

  Seasonal variations are the hallmark of life on earth. The orbit of the earth and its tilt relative to our sun produce the seasons. That of the moon about the earth, the ocean tides. The biological world also manifests its own rhythms, periods, and life cycles. Every spring, biological clocks awaken, and new life emerges from the hibernation of winter. The planet becomes alive with the appearance of new leaves, grasses, and flowers. New generations of animals are born.

  The phenotype, or size, shape, and appearance, of multicellular organisms is expressed by the manner in which their cells are arranged into the tissues and organs that comprise them. These structural and functional arrangements are specified by the master blueprint in DNA.

  Cells grow and multiply, increasing in size and number, passing through their lifetimes, or cell cycles. A cell’s decision to divide or reproduce is regulated by its DNA. Some cells divide rapidly and have short life spans, and some cells live a very long time and almost never divide. Cells, like individual humans, pass through life cycles whereupon they grow, mature, reproduce, and hopefully contribute to the organism and society in which they live. At the end of life, ultimately experiencing the effects of aging and senescence, death follows. It is estimated that humans lose from 20 to 70 billion cells daily in the global cellular economy. This process of programmed cell death is termed apoptosis.

  Apoptosis. What a strange word. It can be pronounced with the accent on the second P, as in the word helicopter; however, the medical word -ptosis sets a precedent for pronunciation where that P is silent.

  The ancient Greeks used this word to note the falling of petals from flowers and leaves from trees. In a more medical sense, we can envision the shedding of dead tissues from the body, such as in a peeling sunburn.

  Good health requires a balance between removing damaged cells and regenerating new ones. Cells can “kill themselves” internally in a process that involves the mitochondria, the power plants of the cell. Apoptosis can also be triggered by external toxic substances that initiate the process whereby the cell digests itself. Disease may result from deregulated apoptosis. At the risk of oversimplification, an imbalance between generating new cells and removing old or dysfunctional ones can lead to poor overall health of the organism.

  It has been postulated that degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s may result from overactive apoptosis. In the converse situation, when apoptosis is inhibited, cells that have lost the ability to regulate their life cycle grow into tumors, a hallmark of cancer.

  Some cells live on. Paradoxically, this can determine our fate as to whether we live in the present or in the past tense. In 1951, a patient named Henrietta Lacks died from cervical cancer. Cells from a biopsy of her cancer were
cultured in the laboratory and have developed into a cell line that is still used in research today. These rapidly dividing cancer cells are said to have attained immortality because they are able to continue to divide beyond the theoretical limit. They do not experience apoptosis and can survive indefinitely under proper conditions in the laboratory.

  Some cells die. The well-known tumor suppressor gene P53 has been described as “the guardian of the genome.” Capable of inducing DNA repair, cell cycle arrest, and apoptosis, this gene is frequently found to have mutated in human cancers, becoming useless in those responsibilities. Ironically, rogue cells that escape apoptosis and result in fatal malignancy can remain alive in the laboratory after the host organism has died, just as Henrietta’s cells have done. Theoretically, the cells terminated and removed from our bodies by apoptosis today allow us, the larger organisms, to survive into the future.

  We contain within ourselves the genetic programming and molecular mechanisms for self-destruction. Regulation of which determines our survival.

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  Neuroscience

  Sitting on top of our body inside our head and encased in a protective shell of bone lies the most sophisticated supercomputer known. The brain has an estimated 100 billion cells, each with multiple synapses, resulting in an estimated 1x1014 of connections. The computing power of this parallel processor we call the brain is enormous.