🍄 The Hard Cell

The human being is a colossal body of work. And we just cannot figure ourselves out. But thanks to the “fractal brain network”, something does it all so we don’t have to.

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Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. Does our subconscious love for fractals tell an evolutionary story?

After all, the universe is an infinite multidimensional system of fractal patterns and our mind is a fractal of the universe. Yes, we are all astronauts!

“We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.”
- Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson

Our relationship with our cells and ourselves? It’s complicated. ‘Despite working with embryos for more than 20 years, I still have no answer to the question that stumped Aristotle and drove developmental biologist Hans Driesch to the paranormal: “What life force, or entelechy, compels the inanimate substances surrounding us to self-​assemble into cells, embryos, tissues, and bodies?” writes physician and researcher Ben Stanger, in One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine [WW Norton, 2023]. “At an intellectual level, it is easy enough to view it all as a matter of chemistry, an assortment of organic reactions, each governed by a thermodynamic calculation taking the reactants to a lower energy state. But at a gut level, this remains unsatisfactory. It is something the mind can know but not comprehend, like the near impossibility of perceiving that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sands on earth.” [🍄 But one thing on Earth does outnumber the stars: Microbes! More on that in our book Thriving with Microbes.]

The Big Cell Bang

It takes a universe of cells and atoms to raise a human into being. Just one drop of blood contains 250 million cells and our brain is a web of approximately 100 billion neurons, working their way through 100 trillion connections. A big brain like that and you probably know that the atoms that make up your body are the same atoms that formed the Big Bang. Meaning every atom in your body is billions of years old.

Hydrogen, the most common element in the universe and a major feature of your body, was produced in the Big Bang 13.7bn years ago. Heavier atoms such as carbon and oxygen were forged in stars between 7bn and 12bn years ago, and hurtled across space when the stars exploded. Some of these explosions were so powerful that they also produced the elements heavier than iron, which stars can't construct. We are truly ancient. Or as Carl Sagan said: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

“Surprisingly, not all the useful DNA in your chromosomes comes from your evolutionary ancestors—some of it was borrowed from elsewhere,” reports The Guardian. “Your DNA includes the genes from at least eight retroviruses. These are a kind of virus that makes use of the cell's mechanisms for coding DNA to take over a cell. At some point in human history, these genes became incorporated into human DNA. These viral genes in DNA now perform important functions in human reproduction, yet they are entirely alien to our genetic ancestry.”

An excellent adventure

“Each of us began life as a single cell,” writes Stanger. “From this humble origin, we embarked on a risky journey fraught with opportunities for disaster. Yet, amazingly, we reached our destination intact, emerging as dazzlingly complex, exquisitely engineered assemblages of trillions of cells. This metamorphosis constitutes one of nature’s most spectacular yet commonplace magic tricks—and one of its most coveted secrets.”

It’s been nearly two centuries since we realized that life is built from cells—and so much still swirls unknown. "Some of the most basic questions like “What controls an organ’s shape and size? What determines life span? How does development foster consciousness? — remain confined to the land of night science,” admits Stanger. Although the answers to these questions may elude us for some time, we can use what we have already learned to develop new therapies. “We have seen a sampling of these remedies — ​cell therapies for cancer and degenerative diseases, DNA editing to correct inborn genetic errors, novel reproductive technologies — ​but the biggest breakthroughs to come will probably be the ones we haven’t yet conceived of.”

The wild fractal factor

Picture a picture of someone taking a picture of someone taking a picture. The “fractal brain theory” proposes that the brain is elegantly organized in a fractal pattern, with each level of organization reflecting the one above it. And its influence is in the wild. Absolutely everywhere in nature. Think of a fern leaf, which is made out of smaller and smaller copies of itself, the branching patterns of trees, courses of rivers, or how lightning spreads into smaller and smaller branches. All are based on simple formulas that create infinite complexity.

Manmade structures also unintentionally organize themselves into fractal patterns—a map of all roads leading to Rome, for example, or a map of the Internet. And our bodies also show many fractal characteristics. The lungs absorb oxygen, which is then transported through your fractal bloodstream into the brain, in which the neurons are interconnected fractally. Each and every thought you think is a cascade of electric impulses traveling through the fractal network in your brain, and all of this complexity is based on simple feedback processes and on mathematical formulas.

As a matter of fractal…

These brain networks support complex thought. A recent study from Dartmouth College has found a new way to look at brain networks using the notion of fractals to convey communication patterns between different brain regions as people listened to a short story. The results were published in Nature Communications.

“To generate our thoughts, our brains create this amazing lightning storm of connection patterns,” said senior author Jeremy R. Manning, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences, and director of the Contextual Dynamics Lab at Dartmouth. “The patterns look beautiful, but they are also incredibly complicated. Our mathematical framework lets us quantify how those patterns relate at different scales, and how they change over time.”

We know that fractals are shapes that appear similar at different scales, and that within a fractal shapes and patterns are repeated in an infinite cascade. Dartmouth’s study shows that brain networks organize in a similar way: patterns of brain interactions are mirrored simultaneously at different scales. When people engage in complex thoughts, their networks seem to spontaneously organize into fractal-like patterns. When those thoughts are disrupted, the fractal patterns become scrambled and lose their integrity.

Remarkably, the fractal network patterns were surprisingly similar across people, and patterns from one group could be used to accurately estimate what part of the story another group was listening to. The researchers’ computational framework can also be applied to areas beyond neuroscience and the team has already begun using an analogous approach to explore interactions in stock prices and animal migration patterns.

The cellular storm

Elsewhere, a group of Stanford biologists drew inspiration from mathematics-heavy meteorology for the quantitative modeling of whole human cells. “Numerical weather prediction relies on collecting daily data from sea buoys to satellites in low-Earth orbit to model air and ocean circulation, and then using supercomputers to crunch equations and model weather fronts as they move forward into the future,” reports Proto.life. ‘Biologists could do the same thing with cells, which like Earth’s atmosphere are multiscale, complex, nonlinear systems, but they offer an even greater wealth of data: genomic sequences, tissue expression patterns, epigenetic post-translational modifications, clinical outcomes across human and animal disease states, etc. Holistically making sense of it all in computational models is still far off, but the lesson of weather prediction suggests it’s doable.”

Fractals and consciousness

If mere mathematics can create an entire universe, then could it be behind (and behind and behind) our consciousness? The body is its own electricity generator and produces all the electricity it needs for the brain to work properly. This electric current is what allows the brain to send bossy (but orderly) e-mails throughout the body. “Electrical signals coming from your heart and other organs influence how you perceive the world, the decisions you take, your sense of who you are and consciousness itself,” reports New Scientist.

“In humans, consciousness is closely linked to electrical signaling in the central nervous system,” notes the Fractal Institute. “Without electric activity within the brain you are unconscious or even dead. When consciousness arises there is an increase of entropy in brain-activity.” Fractals are highly entropic, and is one of the reasons several researchers have suggested that our consciousness is fractal. “Our central nervous system which governs the most functions of our body and mind has a lot of links with fractals. Firstly, the structure is fractally organized, and secondly the signaling of our central nervous system, is fractally organized.” Seeing the pattern here?

Temporal dimensions

“I think consciousness is a temporal fractal,” says philosopher Kerri Welch. “We’re taking in an infinite amount of data every moment. It’s a jump in scale every time we compress that data.” Welch says that perceived time is not a linear progression but a “layering,” reports the Fractal Institute. “This ‘fractal-ness’ changes as we do: Infants, for instance, live purely in the present, she says, not dividing time, surely not experiencing it the way we do now.” That’s why, for them, the delta-wave brain state—similar to what’s seen in adults in deep sleep—dominates, according to Welch. “And then, as we grow into childhood, we start seeing faster brain waves, theta brain waves … then alpha waves, and finally beta waves once we reach adolescence.” This layered understanding of time, she says, corresponds to how we increasingly divide time into smaller and smaller pieces. And with it, “it’s also our internal density increasing … as we get older, we switch, taking in the complexity that surrounds us and recreating it inside. Our internal fractal dimension—that internal density—is increasing.”

Getting “aesthetic chills” just reading this?

… Psychogenic shivers 

Something else we can’t quite put our finger on: “ the distinctive shivery feelings (often paired with piloerection – the bristling of hairs - or goose bumps) that many people experience at moments of sudden high emotion,” writes Andy Clark, Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex, in The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. Or what is known as psychogenic shivers.

We shiver when we feel scared, sick or cold. Our skeletal muscles tremor to produce heat, which allows the body to maintain its core temperature. That’s a reaction to what’s going on in the brain (such as stress or anxiety), due to a surge of adrenaline in the body. But certain social situations conjure up shivers too.

“Aesthetic chills occur in many contexts, including as a response to art, film, poetry, scientific insight, social ritual, or even when watching a skilled sports performance,” continues Clark. “According to what has become known as the ‘salience detection hypothesis,’ these chills occur when we encounter something that our brain identifies as critical new information that resolves important uncertainties.” This makes it a kind of physiological echo of the “aha” moments when things suddenly fall into place. Or you get that intense knowing of a great idea. Clark explains that “Aesthetic chills thus provide further evidence (as if any was needed) of the deep two-way influence binding bodily and emotional response.”

Social chill

“A few years ago, I proposed that the feeling of cold in one’s spine, while for example watching a film or listening to music, corresponds to an event when our vital need for cognition is satisfied,” writes Félix Schoeller, a research fellow at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris, France, for Aeon. He has shown that chills are not solely related to music or film, but also to the practice of science (mainly physics and mathematics) and to the social logic of religious rituals. “I believe that chills and aesthetic emotions in general can teach us something that we do not know yet. They can help us to understand what truly matters to the mind and to the society of minds.”

Humans are particularly prone to shivering when a group does or thinks the same thing at the same time. “When a crowd is sharing a common goal. When they listen to a national anthem or witness self-sacrifice. When they die for their ideas. When collective thought becomes more important than individual life. But humans also shiver from situations that are not social in nature,” Schoeller explains.

Cells sense, like us

Cells have chemosensory receptors for temperature, light, electricity, and mechanical forces—and can even taste and smell. Recently discovered OR2AT4 olfactory receptor is gaining interest for its regulation of human hair growth at the follicle level, triggered by a synthetic sandalwood odorant (Sandalore^®). Ralf Paus, MD, research professor of Dermatology and Cutaneous Surgery at Miller School of Medicine, Miami University, looks at hair follicles and skin to study not only smell, but the other chemosensory powers of our cells: taste receptors (like bitter), sight such as photoreceptors and touch, particularly mechanosensory receptors of Piezo2 found in Merkel cells—the cells in our skin that together with neurons together mediate different aspects of touch responses.

Perhaps we will one day understand that the fractal, networking, wilding, sensing and cosmic origins of every cell throughout our body may just be the eudemonic key to what makes us human.

What else we are wandering…

📘 Time warp
”Embryonic development has the effect of changing your perception of time,” writes Ben Stanger, in One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine. In our day-​to-​day (postnatal) lives, change comes slowly. But during development, things happen quickly. Dramatic changes can occur in the span of hours. “In less than a day, a sheet of cells may roll itself into a tube, or an organ may ‘bud’ like a seedling erupting from the ground. And yet, the embryo also embodies a greatly protracted timescale, as it reflects ‘designs’ worked out over hundreds of millions of years. Observing an embryo mature is like viewing two sets of overlapping time-​lapse images at once — ​one developmental and one evolutionary — ​intersecting in the present. It is a backstage peek at nature’s grandest production.”

💡 High drama
Our organisms can dramatically adapt to an environment in different ways. In Tibet, for example, biological adaptation is witnessed in the bodies of people living at high altitudes. “Tibetans thrive at altitudes where oxygen levels are up to 40 percent lower than at sea level,” reports National Geographic. “Breathing air that thin would cause most people to get sick, but Tibetans’ bodies have evolved changes in their body chemistry. Most people can survive at high altitudes for a short time because their bodies raise their levels of hemoglobin, a protein that transports oxygen in the blood. However, continuously high levels of hemoglobin are dangerous, so increased hemoglobin levels are not a good solution to high-altitude survival in the long term. Tibetans seemed to have evolved genetic mutations that allow them to use oxygen far more efficiently without the need for extra hemoglobin.”

🧠 This time, it’s personal
Twenty years ago, people saw the first draft of the human genome, our genetic instruction book, and now researchers have unlocked the next level. The “human pangenome” was published in Nature, May 2023, and researchers describe how the pangenome was built and some of the new biology scientists are learning from it. Importantly it covers new ground. The new pangenome draft is from actual people and contains almost complete DNA from 47 anonymous individuals from different parts of the world. That diversity is important “because it helps us to understand ourselves as a single human species, as a single human race,” says human geneticist Timothy O’Connor of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore who was not involved in either project.

“As human beings, we tend to focus on our differences, which too easily blind us to our far-​more-​abundant similarities,” concludes Stanger. “That we all began unpretentiously, as a single cell, should be a source of solidarity, a reminder of our deep and irrevocable connections. Viewed from this vantage point, and embracing our shared origin, it is much easier to celebrate, rather than disparage, our differences.”

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