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Zucotti Park First Aid

Last weekend, November 12th and 13th, my son and I went to Zucotti Park in lower Manhattan New York,  where the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement had established its epicenter. We were lucky to get a hotel room just around the corner from the park and spent a good part of two days mingling among the occupiers, talking to them about the movement and learning more about the people involved. The first thing you noticed when you came around the corner from Nassau Street towards Broadway and Zucotti  was the huge array of police that surrounded the park. It seemed likely that there were more police than park mainstream OWS residents, though by then the resident population of the park had reached about 1600 (see Jeff Sharlet below). The police had huge communication trucks and many different kinds of squad cars; I couldn’t  tell if Homeland Security was there, and while I didn’t see any cars bearing that label, there were many unmarked cars in the police car mix. In the post-9/11 world, getting Homeland Security involved means that the movement (like the events we saw for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in 2008) had reached threshold for a national security threat, but so far, it didn’t seem like that had happened. Of course, as we know, Homeland Security funds and trains police departments to serve as their proxy and many police departments have paramilitary squads that are prepared to carry out lethal assaults.  It was clear that the huge police presence surrounding the park was not going to allow the OWS movement to get up and walk towards Wall Street without a serious confrontation.  Two days after our visit, the police shut the park down, evicted the occupiers and confiscated or destroyed their belongings. Last night (Thursday, November 17) a crowd estimated at 32,500 by the NYPD occupied major blocks of the city, including the Brooklyn Bridge and simply overwhelmed the police. This morning Mayor Michael Bloomberg might be wishing he had left the movement in Zucotti Park where it seemed joyfully contained and a picture of industry.

I had a hard time thinking of Zucotti Park as a park when I first saw it–it is tiny. Located one block from the World Trade Center, it is currently owned by Brookfield Office Properties, a commercial real estate firm, headquartered in New York. When the building was first constructed in the 1960s by US Steel, they built a 50 + story structure at One Liberty Plaza.  They agreed with the city to provide a publicly accessible space, available 24/7  (this was one of those trades where the corporation gets to add more floors to a building and create a park to compensate the city).  Originally it was named Liberty Plaza Park, but later renamed Zucotti Park after John Zucotti, former chair of the City Planning Commission and current chair of  Brookfield Properties. It was badly damaged in the 9/11 attack and served as a launching site for the cleanup.  The renaming came after they remodeled the park, post-9/11. But because it is not actually a public park, it doesn’t carry with it the restrictions of public parks in New York, one of which bans tents without a permit. You can read more about the history and dilemma of Zucotti Park here.

How it all began: Jeff Sharlet of Rolling Stonehas written a fascinating account of the OWS movement and its early history. From the first paragraph of his article:

• “It started with a Tweet – “Dear Americans, this July 4th, dream of insurrection against corporate rule” – and a hashtag: #occupywallstreet. It showed up again as a headline posted online on July 13th by Adbusters, a sleek, satirical Canadian magazine known for its mockery of consumer culture. Beneath it was a date, September 17th, along with a hard-to-say slogan that never took off, “Democracy, not corporatocracy,” and some advice that did: “Bring tent.“”

The OWS movement members often refer to this space as “Liberty Park.” At first glance, the park looks like a wall to wall space of a crowded  tents,  some of which were made by joining colored plastic sheets, while others were of the small conventional variety that you use for backpacking or camping.  Many people stay all night and some people are invited to spend the night, either as a small group or as individuals.  At the time of our visit, many were talking about the need for a well-insulated winter sleeping bag and a much better tent to replace their makeshift plastic sheets;  most were confident that public donations would solve that problem (the site where I donated had already raised over $500,000 for the cause). Police did not allow generators to be used, claiming that the noise level would be too high. But, to charge batteries, the Zucotti Park residents used stationary bicycles connected to an electronic arrangement that allowed recharging of computer and cell phone  batteries and those willing to peddle for a while for their contribution to the workload were always welcome.  In general, it was a very friendly environment and if you entered the park with some apprehension about your compatibility with the protestors, you could immediately relax. After all, just about everyone is a member of the 99 per cent and thus a colleague to those in the movement. And you are generally treated in that way. This group wants to grow.

Around the periphery of Zucotti, there were a few quacks, hyping some distorted vision of the World, but they were not members of the OWS movement.  I stopped to talk to one person who seemed very bright and articulate, but when he started advocating that the people in Zucotti were too lazy to work and then began quoting from the Bible, swearing that the earth was only 6000 years old and that evolution couldn’t be true because turtles always seemed to be turtles and if anyone needed to evolve it was surely turtles. As I politely parted company with the young man, it occurred to me that he was a victim of Ronald Reagan, or Reaganism, because it was Reagan who first advocated that creationism should be taught alongside science in the public school system (OK, we have the Scopes trial, but that was long ago and culturally far away: Reagan brought the issue back into our living rooms).  Our culture has been dogged by this creationism/intelligent design/science dilemma ever since and this young man sounded like an unfortunate victim, not unlike what’s still going on in much of the country. Education is critical for a modern, civilized society and we seem to be losing our grip on this requirement. This too is part of the neoliberal plan designed to reduce the cost of labor, but it has reached a runaway toxic level of intrusion.

Library in Zucotti Park

Once you begin to move from the outside periphery to a more central region of Zucotti, you are more likely to run into people who have stories to tell and sensible solutions to propose. The OWS movement has been criticized for not articulating a set of demands and many within the group have tried to inject a demand strategy. But the movement has rejected such pleas and prefers to remain a group that is growing and is certainly content to say “hey if you want to announce your objections to the system, go ahead, you are part of the 99 per cent and we don’t intend to speak for you. We encourage you to speak for yourself.” It is a group that largely emerged from the arts and communications fields rather than from progressive academics or union types. In that sense they do not carry the traditional leftist point of view, though some individuals do harbor that sentiment. The OWS movement represents, in effect, a perfect democracy where everyone has a legitimate view and the right to express it. There are many who feel that the lack of a cohesive set of demands by the group will eventually be their undoing, but right now, they have a growing sense of confidence that they have tapped into a vein running through America and they intend to pursue what has so far been a successful strategy. It is quite astonishing to recognize that the movement is only two months old.  Every person is allowed and even encouraged to express themselves. I saw one sign denouncing the communications giant Verizon for its corporate practices, but in Zucotti, there is more of a focus on Wall Street and the banks. Many in the park had signs specifying specific reasons for change and some cited historical events to make their point. Those that made specific points (the need for a constitutional amendment to declare that corporations are not people–surprisingly I think that that one might actually get through) are generally well informed about the subject and eager to converse. And everyone is talking and communicating and arguing. Virtually everyone was approachable and polite. I found that a common theme among those that have attended college is a heavy debt from student loans. In this respect, they have all been victims of corporate greed. But this is a group that has respect for education and many want to return to complete their degrees or get into graduate school. This is especially evident if you go to the wearethe99percent website and read the statements submitted by individuals. Members of the movement have also started a newspaper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal, which has received high marks for its journalistic quality.

A few paths through the park interior allow people to move through in single file, but most of the paths are all so narrow, that to me, they looked more like a  representation of the extracellular space of the brain. In the middle of the park, there was a big food line. Food is free for anyone who enters the park and it mostly comes from donated food sources, manned by dedicated volunteers, many of whom have just arrived and are anxious to contribute. There was a library at the Broadway end of the park, consisting of a large tent with plastic boxes filled with donated books. You can check a book out and don’t need a library card. And because the area has no real public library facility nearby, neighborhood parents came to the library and checked out books for their children. It was a picture of industry and the OWS movement was proud of this additional effort for the cause. When the police came in and destroyed the Zucotti camp, early Tuesday morning (November 15 at 1:00 AM)  the library books were confiscated or destroyed and the OWS movement is trying to get them back, as they look for a place where a new library facility can be established.

RFM in Zucotti: proof of presence

At the other side of the park, but still on the Broadway end, meetings are held in which discussions take place on matters brought up in the General Assembly of OWS, where meetings take place regularly, at which time they try to resolve issues about the focus and direction of the movement. They are also very big on behavior and want this movement to be non-violent. Once the General Assembly meetings are over, people gather in the park to deliberate on the issues that have been raised in the meetings.  The police did not allow the protestors to have microphones and loud speakers, so they developed the art of the “people’s mic,”  which is that when a single person raises an issue, they speak in short segments of a sentence and then wait until the entire group repeats the words, so that everyone understands what is being said. Very good if you’re hard of hearing. It works very effectively, with a couple of moderators standing in front of the crowd to help coordinate the effort. It’s a mechanism that seems to provide a bonding experience and errors for complex statements that were hard to repeat generally evoked laughter. It is through the General Assembly meetings and discussion of the ideas through the “people’s mic” where deliberations are made; anyone can speak, though it generally makes sense that you already attended the General Assembly meeting. They have hand position rules to reject, accept and listen to a speaker who has the floor. Sometimes contentious issues come up and various suggestions made at the Assembly are rejected by the group. The interior also has a First Aid tent and has some internal security. In addition, there was a large blue plastic tent that served as the communications center where people were broadcasting live feeds that you can watch on the OWS site.

Originally, the group only numbered about 60 people when they first met on September 17, 2011 and it was hard to see that they were going to get anywhere. V for Vendetta masks  were quite popular but seemed to convey a more violent confrontation when what the protestors wanted was a non-violent beginning. Drugs and alcohol were not allowed in the park, though you certainly knew that pot was on the menu. Today the OWS movement has spread not only in America, but throughout the World. About 1600 different OWS movements are flourishing globally. By the time we went, OWS was serving more than 3000 meals a day and something like 1600 people were bedding down in the park each night.

The 99 percent versus the 1 percent is a very catchy and simple phrase. It also has meaning in terms of wealth distribution. According to Joseph Stiglitz, published in his article in Vanity Fair, the top 1 percent of our society bring in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year and in  terms of wealth, they own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Twenty-five years ago, the numbers were 12 and 33 percent, respectively. Few would deny that we have a wealth distribution that is completely out of control and the neoliberal system we have been living under for the past forty years has proven to be too toxic and too radical for our cultural survival, and it is incompatible with the mounting threats we face for a healthy future for the planet we live on.

Tent City in Zucotti Park, November 12, 2011

After being evicted from Zucotti Park, the OWS movement in New York and many other cities, created a massive turnout that overwhelmed the police, whose intentions were to brutally block the demonstrators from taking over things like the Brooklyn Bridge. I have heard a rumor that the OWS library was re-established on the Brooklyn Bridge, though it’s unlikely to have permanent residence there. This movement is strikingly different than anything I have ever seen. Though they do not have demands per se, there is little doubt that they will have an impact on the coming election of 2012 and they already have sent both political parties scrambling to come up with approaches that might ameliorate them and that, in and of itself, could have a powerful transforming effect on the future direction of our economic policies and our social safety net. These are people who shun the neoliberal emphasis on individual liberties and instead promote the idea that we are all in this together–we must create an interdependent society and move away from what imprisoned and impoverished most of us for the last forty years. It will get worse before it gets better, but the OWS movement has started the spirit of revolutionary excitement that may now be impossible to contain. That is what many of us are hoping for.

RFM

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Ever since David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel (Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine for 1981) began their pioneering work on the function of the visual cortex, beginning in the 1960s, we have been confronted with trying to understand where it will all end–how sophisticated will our visual cells or any other cell type become and will we eventually build a single cell so sophisticated that it will be responsible for the identity of our grandmother? If so, should we lose our grandmother cell, will we also lose the capacity to recognize her? Individual neurons in the visual cortex show an increasing degree of sophistication and stimulus generalization as one goes upstream from the inputs that come from our retina. From circular, center-surround cells of retinal origin, the brain begins, not to extract a visual code from the retinal signal, like a morris code interpreter, but rather to use the building blocks of retinal origin and combine them in new ways, as if the visual cortex had access to a massive Lego set with which to construct a lot of different buildings of different architectures, vintages and colors with an increasing degree of sophistication and abstract representation of the visible world. Each building block as an input from the retina. One must keep in mind that the high speed movie we see in front of our eyes everyday, advancing at non-flickering frame rates (at least 30 frames/sec), in vivid color, with textures and contours that are often invented or exaggerated–that amazing scene in front of us is achieved because the brain is a massively parallel processing machine, which uses the continuous information provided by 1.2 million ganglion cell axons emanating from each eye, to achieve an unparalleled performance in visual display and art recognition. Not only are we continuously aware of the detailed visual information in front of our eyes, but we become instantly informed about the emotional content of our brain imagery: images can instantly evoke laughter or tears depending on their content, our visual memories and our emotional capacities. Each year, the Academy Awards fails all of us as humans for not recognizing the features of our visual system that make movie appreciation even remotely possible. Where’s the Oscar? What’s the category?

Vision rules! We are overwhelmingly visual animals, with a visual brain that developed so much power, we eventually learned how to read and through that medium, we began to change the world we live in. Except for hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes and the coming global climate change and mass species extinction, we learned to rule the world and turn the tables on the remaining species that had previously hoped to dine on us. Vision controls our brain, even though it tells lies about the visible world around us, through mechanisms such color-constancy, Mach Bands for enhancing edges, contrast gain, chromatic adaption and movement distortion to name just a few deceptive tactics of our visual apparatus. The brain is a plastic organ, waiting to change and develop according to the experiences we present to it. The “lies” are actually generated by the retina’s commitment to improve our edge detection, recognizes boundaries and colors and detect the movement and project the estimated arrival times of moving objects. From stationary retinal inputs, the cortex begins to build larger regions of visual field receptivity. From small circular receptive fields, larger regions of light sensitivity are constructed that are made of lines of different orientation covering a larger retinal region and these respond preferentially to movement in one direction, as well as prefer information from one eye over the other in an organized set of repeated columns. All of the processing that takes place within the visual cortex, with multiple parallel streams of Lego block construction, still represents early coding for some of our most important visually related events.
Brain imaging studies have revealed that a “letterbox” region lies, on the left side of the brain, near the occipito-temporal border that is associated with the identification of letters of the alphabet and words we have learned. It’s estimated that the human word capacity is somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 words accomplished when we are adults, through the repetitive, daily act of reading and challenging our brain with new words and their meaning. Written language has fundamentally changed the world and contributed substantially to the growth in intellect and the recognition that reading and writing are fundamental to progress. In the hundred years between the 20th and the 21st century, the percentage of people who are literate has increased dramatically and will continue to grow, given the essential entree it provides into advanced cultures.
Outside of the visual cortex per se, in the medial temporal inferior  lobes, close to the hippocampus that plays a big role in laying down memories that are eventually stored in the cerebral cortex, memories of the declarative type, available to our verbal recall, researchers have determined the encoding properties of single brain cells which turn out to display surprisingly specialized and unique properties. In the less than 1% of epileptics that do not respond to the litany of antileptic medications, removing the localized offending tissue is the only way to reduce or eliminate seizure activity. But since the legendary patient H.M., neurosurgeons carefully explore an epileptic focus with recording electrodes to make sure they don’t remove essential structures committed to the patient’s memory. At the cellular level, no two brains are wired alike, so one has to be careful and record from the cells near the lesion and avoid removing brain tissue that has stored or can store part of the human engram. These studies, which often require hours with a patient’s brain exposed and recording electrodes inserted into brain structures to explore single cell properties near the epileptogenic site, have revealed surprising properties of human neurons that contain memory information about people. One such cell recently described (Quiroga et al., Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain, Nature, 435,1102-1107,2005) in a patient was the “Jennifer Aniston Cell.” This cell responded to images of Jennifer Aniston very distinctly; it did not require her face in any particular position or special clothing. An image of Jennifer Aniston in any position or posture fired the cell vigorously, whereas other similar images of famous people did not.  Interestingly, when the image of Jennifer Aniston was coupled with Brad Pitt, the cell was silent. Not only did the cell respond to an image of Jennifer Aniston, but it responded as well to the auditory or written form of her name. Was this then the long lost grandmother cell we had been searching for during the last 50 years? If you destroyed that single cell, would the patient lose all memory of Jennifer Aniston? Naturally, it was unethical to do something like that, but the authors did feel that their results, with included 993 units, with about 14% of cells committed to human identities (Halle Berry was also popular, as was Bill Clinton, the Beatles and cartoons from The Simpsons and Michael Jordan); to qualify as a human identity cell the cellular response to the picture had to equal to the mean plus five standard deviations of the baseline, with a least two spikes in the post-stimulus time interval.  Repetition is the means we have for forming strong, long-term memories. So perhaps all of us have Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry and Bill Clinton cells. Since the study was done in 2005, the experimenters did not have a chance to look for Obama cells, but by now they are probably there, perhaps in all of us, maybe even more strongly integrated into the brains of tea baggers. The authors argue that their findings favor the interpretation that the cells from which they recorded are in fact, the missing grandmother cells that were postulated to exist, but have never really been found until now.  The  obvious question that comes up is whether there is more than one representation of Jennifer Aniston? And if one Jennifer Aniston cell is knocked out, will another one quickly takes its place through the methods of laying down a new long-term memory from the background neural engram already active in the brain? One of the most riveting of all issues related to brain function involves the question about the grandmother cell, or in this case the Jennifer Aniston cell. The fact that such a cell exists, when the theory to which I ascribed for many years held that Jennifer Aniston was represented by an overlapping population of cells, so that her identity was determined by a network, not a single, cell has been seemingly shattered by this report. Thus we must now acknowledge the likely fact that we store images of people we know or have seen enough times and encode the representation of these individuals into the discharge properties of a single cell. That cell is so sophisticated that it responds to Jennifer Aniston independent of position, expression, hair style, clothing or facial expression. But, do we have one or many Jennifer Aniston cells in our brain and can those cells be recalled for updating to new folks, once we lose interest in Jennifer Aniston? Of greater relevance is the question about who or what is it that reads the Jennifer Aniston cell to report it to our consciousness? Is the Jennifer Aniston cell one cell removed from our conscious identity? Is consciousness the readout of our cortex, with specialized Jennifer Aniston cells making the task more simplified? Stay tuned! There’s a notable human issue residing in these discoveries. Recordings from awake humans during surgical exploration for epilepsy-related surgery is about the only way we can get at this question and the results of Quiroga et al., have come down pretty hard in favor of us having brains with grandmother cells! But what if we find the same cells in the Chimpanzee? Will that give us pause? Do Chimps care about Jennifer Aniston if they see her on TV enough times? Do we also need language, both written and verbal to even form a Jennifer Aniston cell? All these questions remain in the future, but we can no longer deny the grandmother cells of our present and future brain.

RFM

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From its inception, the Huffington Post (HuffPo) has proven to be a popular blog and newsletter site, featuring innovative news stories and commentary, particularly on contemporary politics. And, the site tends to promote an agreeable, progressive agenda on most issues, with a strong anti-Bush push at a time when it was sorely needed. Having said all that, I subscribe but I don’t read it very much, just because it’s quite a bit lower on my preference scale when compared to other sites that I more routinely visit. And, when I do visit the HuffPo site, I don’t go very deep into the article array, but usually wind up there because of something that caught my eye in their headline.  Recently however, I ran across an article in Salon by Rahul K. Parikh that shocked me a bit to learn about some of the bizarre medical therapies and ideas about diseases that seem to appear quite regularly on HuffPo.  So, I went back again to their website and explored some of the medical and “wellness” entries and came away convinced that extraterrestrials had taken over their medical advice section and were propagating their own personal stories or biases as medical facts. I learned that, from its inception, HuffPo has been a repository for fringe health articles, often written by people with celebrity status who unvettedly vent their pet peeves on topical issues, which, in many cases, reflect a high degree of ignorance, while promoting medical quackery and pseudoscientific explanations for diseases and therapies. Something about celebrity status seems to give one a free pass on health credibility issues. Most of these articles either directly or indirectly reflect a mistrust of modern medicine. HuffPo has even tried to resurrect homeopathy; they seem to share with Oprah a tendency for promoting unproven claims for better health, while thumbing their noses at evidence-based medical explanations. Time and again, we get reminded of how trivial it is to assert a new cause of a disease and how difficult and time consuming it is to actually prove  a causative relationship for any disease. And, by bringing in celebrities, giving them space for their views, Oprah’s show and the HuffPo get better ratings and readership and help generate more profitable advertising. So, in the end, the medical travesties promoted by Oprah and HuffPo are all about ratings and selling advertising space. Capitalism is king!

Almost discounted out of hand in many of the HuffPo articles on health, is evidence-based science and medicine: for many articles, the assumption is that traditional medicine  got it all wrong, or is covering up the truth in a kind of CIA-like conspiracy, probably involving the drug companies. A common theme on HuffPo is that vaccination causes autism; an example of an article promoting this view (though by no means the only one) was written by comedian/actor Jim Carrey, wherein he promotes the now disproven relationship between vaccination and autism. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reviewed the issue of vaccinations (mostly the MMR vaccine for measles-mumps and rubella) and autism very thoroughly in 2001 and 2004, with a separate 2001 study on the vaccine carrier thimerosal; this work strongly endorsed prior conclusions that no causal relationship existed between vaccination or the carrier thimerosal and autism. Another good summary, in addition to the NAS publications, about the lack of a relationship between vaccination and autism can be found here. Nevertheless, all recommended children’s vaccines are now available in thimerosal-free delivery systems [thimerosal is an organic mercury compound that is metabolized to ethylmercury and thiosalicylate; it was used beginning in the 1930s to protect vaccines from bacterial infection, but,  largely because of consumer complaints, it was removed from all required children's vaccines]. In February of this year, the U.S. Court of Claims (the “people’s Court”) ruled on an autism case by stating: “The evidence is weak, contradictory and unpersuasive,” concluded Special Master Denise Vowell. “Sadly, the petitioners in this litigation have been the victims of bad science conducted to support litigation rather than to advance medical and scientific understanding” of autism. In addition to the courts, The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Institute of Medicine in the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) all agree that there is no demonstrable relationship between autism and vaccines. Does anyone believe that any or all of these organizations would form a conspiracy of obfuscation about vaccinations that would eventually have to come out if at all true? Vaccinations have been one of the great hallmarks of life-expectancy advancement throughout the world and if something is wrong with the procedure or its actions, these organizations would be the first to reveal it, not the last–it’s called evidence-based medicine and institutional self-survival.

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