An Illustrated Guide to Kappa Life

Guest blog post on the origins of kappa.

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An Illustrated Guide to Kappa Life

“. . . creepy water-dwellers that looked like scaly monkeys, with webbed hands itching to strangle unwitting waders in their ponds.” – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

This brief mention in Harry Potter was my first encounter with kappa. According to traditional Japanese folklore, kappa are a type of supernatural creature that lures and pulls people into water.

Recently, however, I encountered a different depiction of kappa.

Photo 1: The water-loving kappa. Literally, “river child” in Japanese.

An Illustrated Guide to Kappa (カッパの生活図鑑), by Kunihiko Hisa, portrays kappa as generally harmless and merely fun-loving creatures.

I couldn’t tell how much of Hisa’s Illustrated Guide was made-up by him, as opposed to drawn directly from folklore. Below, I paraphrase parts of his book, which you can contrast with Wikipedia’s traditional depiction of kappa.

Kappa Anatomy
Kappa can walk on land but will die if their bodies get too dry. So they are usually found around lake shores, riverbanks, dry river beds, wetlands, waterfalls, and ponds.

The “plate”: Their most distinctive feature is found on their heads. Functioning like a sponge, the plate’s moisture level tells kappa if they must hurry back to water. It also regulates body temperature through evaporation.

Photo 2: Hair around the “plate” protects the scalp and enables kappa to sense the flow of water and detect movement of fish nearby.

The shell: They have shells like turtles but webbed feet like frogs. You can tell male and females apart by the bottom of their shells: male shells have a pointed tip; female shells have a dent.

Photo 3: Kappa love napping on water, floating shell-up. The shell not only protects their bodies from attacks by predatory birds but also absorbs vitamin D from the sun! Another notable feature of kappa anatomy is the scent gland, located near the bum. If attacked, a kappa can release a gas of intense odor…

Built for underwater life: While swimming, their earlobes and noseholes shut to prevent water from entering. A “lid” also prevents water from entering the trachea. Meanwhile, their eyes have a protective transparent membrane. 

Photo 4: Kappa can spend any length of time underwater, if it isn't rigorous exercise. They don't actually breathe underwater, relying instead on stored-up oxygen in dedicated organs, absorbed through skin. Extreme skin dehydration is fatal. 

Kappa Diet and Tools

The omnivorous kappa eat fish, amphibians, small birds and eggs, small animals like mice, and insects like dragonflies. Contrary to legend, Hisa claims, they do not gang up to drag horses into water. They do fight with otters but don’t eat them.

It’s true, however, that they like cucumbers. Their plant diet includes the seeds of watermelons, gourds, and pumpkins, as well as human-cultivated produce.

Since kappa don’t use fire, they can’t make clay or metal tools. But they do have the obsidian knife. Its glass-like blade can cut as sharply as metal.

Photo 5: Fermenting fruits into alcohol and storing it in dried-out gourds, corked with a piece of wood. 

Kappa Society

Generally, kappa live in family units. The father and mother work together to raise children. Children later leave their parents to form temporary, gender-segregated groups of young mature kappa. They eventually they meet, marry, and start their own families. Kappa who do not marry tend to live alone.

Photo 6: Kappa also form a larger tribe with their “relatives” – those who live within the same region of river, lake, or wetland. Annually, the tribe gathers to exchange information and discuss conflicts with neighboring tribes.

Elderly kappa who no longer have families give up their homes to young couples sometimes. They then roam as young kappa do and visit many homes, teaching children how to make stone tools, hunt, and identify medicinal plants. 

Photo 7: Kappa can live where a body of water is present. For instance, in a hole dug by the riverbank, under a giant fallen tree in the wetlands, behind a waterfall, or even in limestone caves.  

Photo 8: Underground home with a spiked air vent (the spikes deter unwanted visitors).

Kappa at Work and Play

A kappa’s work consists of gathering food, making tools or medicine, and raising children. But they work only as little as they need to survive, never gathering extra resources to sell or barter.

Photo 9: Medicine making: Ingredients for treating cuts, blisters, and fever. Legend even says that a kappa’s severed limb can be glued back with this miraculous salve. 

They enjoy basking in the sun, water sledding, and catching dragonflies. Male kappa enjoy competitive games, especially wrestling. 

Photo 10: Wrestlers grip each other by the shell; grabbing hair isn’t allowed. Other competitive games including stone-skipping and balancing bamboo sticks. 

Raising Young

Kappa females generally lay 1 or 2 eggs. It takes 3 weeks for an egg to hatch and 3 months for a child to mature.

The baby knocks against the egg shell, indicating it’s time to hatch. The mother helps break the shell and pours water over the newborn. She feeds it with food the father has obtained, first chewing the food into small, soft bits that the baby can eat.

Photo 11: The baby cannot stand or swim on its own yet. The father first helps the baby learn to float and swim by holding it gently in his hands. 

Kappa Battles

Kappas seldom fight. But once in a while, kappas do meet in “battle.” 

Photo 12: Kappa battles occurs when an area becomes overpopulated. Or when livable land shrinks in droughts.

But they rarely fight to the point of death. Rather, they gather in large numbers on opposite ends of a river, armed with bamboo poles as a show of force. A representative from each tribe comes forward to compete in a wrestling match. The victor wins the land for his tribe. 

Kappa Seasons

Winter:

Most kappa hibernate in winter. 

Photo 13: In the north, they sleep all winter. But in the south, kappa occasionally rouse from sleep and eat nuts, fruits, berries, fish, or salamanders they have stored up. 

Spring:

Young kappa look for a mate to establish their own families. Most families lay eggs in May, which hatch into babies in June. Babies begin walking on their own around end of June or early July, which is also the rainy season. Rainy season is the best time for walking practice, as children that venture far off are less likely to die of dehydration.

Summer:

Children will have learned to walk and swim on their own by summer. Summer is the most fun season of all, a time for play and learning.

Autumn:

When spring comes, children will leave their parents to live with other young kappa. 

Photo 14: Whence did kappa come? Theory I: Evolved from a primeval shell-bearing reptile. Theory II: Evolved from a proto-human with dinosaur origins. 

Author’s Postscript (excerpt)

Kappa sightings were reported up to the Meiji period, which is about 100 years ago. But now they are a thing of the past. 

Photo 15: They were good at surviving, given they could make tools, raise children, and make medicine. As they developed survival skills, they began to lay fewer eggs to avoid overpopulation, over-foraging, and destruction of nature.

Conflict between kappa and humans has been minimal. Of course there has been the occasional stealing of cucumbers and pumpkins from humans. But as the kappa diet consists largely of meat – especially fish – kappa have rarely caused destruction to crop fields. Rather, there have been more occasions for gratitude toward kappa, such as when kappa shared their medicine with humans.

But how has human life affected kappa life in return? Humans have caused floods and redirected water to their fields and man-made canals. These changes to the natural landscape have made life difficult for insects, fish, and birds, which in turn affects the kappa. 

During the Meiji period especially, riverbanks and shores were built up with concrete, riverbeds were excavated, and dams erected for all sorts of human purposes. To top it all, cities and factories have been dumping dirty water into rivers and lakes.

So, sadly, kappa have vanished. And it did not take very long to happen. (Kunihiko Hisa, 1 January 1993)

Learning from Bologna

The Bologna Process is a massive project that attempts to create a European Higher Education Area. Started in 1999, it involves 46 European countries, and affects 4000 institutions of higher learning. Named after the city that houses the oldest university (seal below) in Europe, Bologna attempts to provide common reference points allowing European institutions to “recognize” each other’s credentials and provide greater mobility for their students and subsequent skilled workforce. If successful (some might say when), Bologna could propel Europe to the forefront of competitiveness, creativity, innovation, and make the region an economic force to be reckoned with.

Why am I writing about Bologna? I’ve personally experienced education systems in several countries as a student. I’ve also worked as a professor and a higher education administrator on two different continents with markedly different systems. I regularly follow world higher education news, and I had been loosely following the Bologna process through news articles over the years. With the end of the semester, I now had time to delve into Clifford Adelman’s 220+ page report – The Bologna Process: Relearning Higher Education in the Age of Convergence. I’d previously read shorter pieces from Adelman on assessment. He writes clearly and provides supporting data and detailed analysis. I knew I would learn from his report.

In his report, Adelman goes into detail explaining how Qualification Frameworks work, with national-level examples from Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. He also provides examples of disciplinary or field-specific qualification frameworks (“Tuning” in the jargon), including chemistry! Adelman discusses the challenges of reaching consensus across very different national systems, each having their own language and terminology. Assessment is one of Adelman’s specialties; I’m not going to go into great detail other than saying that reading Adelman made me appreciate the arguments made for constructing learning outcomes and assessing them. Somehow when an administrator at my own institution talks about assessment, it just sounds like a pain-in-the-ass checkbox task for the purpose of ass-covering. Adelman takes the ass out of Assessment, if you’ll pardon my punny and colorful language. It’s still a lot of work but it sounds more worthwhile given his strong arguments for doing the work and doing it right.

Instead, I will highlight three things that the report made me think about. The first is the challenge of putting together the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). I’d recently worked on a revised credit hour policy at my home institution, where I made arguments supporting using credit-hours as a measurement of student workload (rather than faculty contact hours). Five years ago, while helping start a new international liberal arts college, I helped to translate and merge two different systems, again based on student workload arguments. I even wrote a white paper for this process, whimsically titled “Modular Credits and Teaching Loads and Workloads, Oh My!” (think Lions Tigers Bears in Wizard of Oz). I didn’t re-read my report but the boldfaced last line reads: “No system is perfectly equitable. Byzantine bean-counting should be AVOIDED!”

I hadn’t read Adelman’s 2009 report back then, although I should have. Here’s what he says in a section suggesting what the U.S. could learn from ECTS. These two paragraphs will also give you a sense of his sharp and clear writing!

The U.S. credit currency, based principally on faculty contact hours (along with varying assumptions about student study-time per faculty contact hour), is a metric designed for funding and resource allocation, not as a proxy for learning. Its engine lies in the office of the Vice President for Finance, not the office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs. The student is incidental. Even in the matter of time, the same faculty load serves considerable differences in student work load. Something is wrong here. If we care about accountability for student learning, perhaps we need a redesign. Perhaps the Bologna experience might help us.

Before one redesigns a credit system, one needs some definitions, principles, and guidelines. The mechanical implementation of ECTS doesn’t really do it. Credit should define levels of student work (time volume and intellectual demand) that render courses in different disciplines comparable. In a way, the U.S. system tries to do that now by giving an extra credit for science labs or language labs or by heavier credit weighting of externships. But we do so in a rather arbitrary fashion, and wind up awarding the same number of credits for course work of widely varying intellectual demand. We give three credits for a course in Econometrics and three for Introduction to Sports, and brush such dissonances under the rug. This observation is not new.

The second thing I will highlight is Adelman’s suggestion that we pay attention to the rising importance of the Masters degree in Europe. A lot can be said about the evolution of different Masters degrees in different areas in different countries, but I’m not going to delve into the details. On previous occasions, I opposed expanding our department offerings beyond the undergraduate degree. (At my college, three departments with small Masters programs.) My argument, made with my department colleagues in unison, was that we should focus our energy and resources on undergraduates – and I think we do a fantastic job at it. Arguments I’ve heard from administration seemed to be more about how to increase revenue streams to the university. Being in chemistry, I think we’d be more expensive to run, not to mention we’d stretch ourselves more thinly. Adelman however makes a global mobility and expertise argument for Masters programs – it’s the first time I’ve felt open to the possibility.

The third interesting nugget from Adelman’s report is a proposal to formalize short-cycle degrees or certificates at an institution that normally offers bachelor’s (and higher) degrees. For example, a student could receive a minor (if they have taken the requisite courses) at a certain point in their education before they receive a major a year or more down the road. The U.S. split between community colleges offering associate degrees and four-year institutions offering bachelor degrees might not be a model that serves today’s students well in the long run. Short-cycle degree formalization might be the easiest thing to accomplish piecemeal, although piecemeal might not be the best idea. The different facets of Bologna are “tightly intertwined” and therefore challenging to treat piecemeal, according to Adelman.

Bologna is comprehensive in vision and scope, not just for institutions, but for the students they serve. That also makes it a difficult long-haul process. Adelman writes that “our European colleagues have sought to do right by the student by reinvigorating the most basic and common role of institutions of higher education in every society and economy on this globe: the distribution of knowledge and development of skills to apply that knowledge.” While some institutions may also be involved in generating new knowledge (e.g. through research/scholarship) and preserving knowledge (through archives), all are involved in knowledge distribution and application. This means, according to Adelman, that “content counts”. Knowledge is very important. You can’t teach generic ‘critical thinking’ skills, particularly the higher order ones on Bloom’s Taxonomy, without a good deal of content knowledge.

Where do we go from here? I don’t know. Adelman and others have argued that importing or even adapting Bologna shouldn’t necessarily be the goal. The U.S. should be paying attention and learning from our European colleagues. Other global blocs are doing this, for example, the African Union and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). Unlike the language of standardization used in Bologna (and standardization does not mean clone copies but rather common standards), Africa and Southeast Asia use the language of harmonization. The U.S. is a large country, long esteemed for being the top tertiary education destination in the world. But the world is changing. By being unattentive to globalization, or becoming increasingly isolationist, could lead to a continued erosion of U.S. eminence. Then again, it’s hard to predict the future.

Creating a Tasting Menu

This week I was introduced to the Netflix series Chef’s Table. I’ve now watched 9 of the 22 episodes, and at least one from each season. The personal story of each protagonist is fascinating; there are some commonalities to all, but they come from diverse backgrounds, cultures and nations. Each individual is intensely creative, very hardworking, and experiences significant moments of failure and disillusion. The food visuals are mouth-watering, and well-juxtaposed into the narrative. The creator of Chef’s Table is David Gelb, famous for the superb Jiro Dreams of Sushi; it permanently changed my view of sushi.

Watching each master-cook at their craft in Chef’s Table prompted me to consider similarities and differences to my own craft – teaching primarily, professoring generally. Long before reaching their creative acclaim, each of the featured chefs had early extensive training and practice in the standards or classics of a particular cuisine. Apparently, the strategy is to apprentice at the best possible restaurant that will take you. Is that the strategy that aspiring academics take in considering graduate schools? In early chef training, French and Italian cuisine play a large (historical) role, but other cuisines also come into play, and it is the mingling of different ideas that spark those creative mouth-watering dishes that also double up as eye-candy. It reminded me that to be creative, you must have a strong knowledge base, so that you have something to be creative with.

Let’s take the oft-quoted 10,000 hours as a proxy for expert-hood corresponding to some level of mastery. In the chef apprenticeship model, aspiring chefs-to-be work really, really hard and very long hours. Let’s say 80 hours a week, or about 4,000 hours per year, so it would take two-and-a-half years to reach expert-hood. If I think about graduate school as preparation for an academic career, then 40 hours a week, or about 2,000 hours per year, means five years to reach expert-hood. (I likely worked between 45-50 hours per week in graduate school on research and teaching. I did more teaching than the typical graduate school because I enjoyed it!) Graduate school, at least in my day, did not train me for much of my job description as a professor in a liberal arts college. How does one actually get better at professoring and teaching? Well, you have to do it. Six years to tenure provides the opportunity to hit the 10,000-hour mark when that major evaluative stepping stone comes up.

Before opening up their own restaurants, these master-chefs slogged easily surpassed the 10,000-hour mark, some by multiples. But when they then struck out on their own, with their new creative ideas, it was hard. Very, very hard. For some, it took years to gain recognition, with many failures and frustrations along the way. I did not have that experience, probably because the analogous thing was if I set up my own independent school with an avant-garde yet unfamiliar teaching pedagogy. I’m more like the chef who stays at an established joint, working on established cuisine with steady tried-and-true recipes. (Actually I did help start up a new international liberal arts college some years back, but the curriculum was not unfamiliar, nor was the pedagogy way-out-there.) It is certainly the road-less-travelled. Who knows how many aspiring chefs out there did not ‘succeed’?

But maybe I should gain some inspiration from these creative chefs to strike out and try something new in a field that I care greatly about. I might even be able to do this from the comfort of my own perch. I was particularly intrigued by the concept of the tasting menu. The chef chooses and creates what you, the diner, will eat and experience; I have never experienced this as a diner (I’m too cheap). Now as a professor, I can decide what gets taught (to some extent) and how it gets taught, and how creative I would like to be. There are some agreed-upon limitations. All over the country, chemistry professors have general agreement over the main things that are taught in a year-long general chemistry (G-Chem) or physical chemistry (P-Chem) course. (These are the classes I teach the most often.) G-Chem is a pre-requisite for a host of other courses so there may be less room to maneuver, but upper division P-Chem doesn’t have many other classes that depend on it, at least at the undergraduate level. That being said, the P-Chem curriculum, however, is quite standard across colleges and universities in the U.S.

Could I break out of tradition without shortchanging my students? If a series of creative dishes come from mixing-and-matching new combinations from familiar ingredients, perhaps there is an analogy to new pedagogical approaches to a similar base curriculum. This approach is already being tried all over with varying degrees of offbeat-ness and varying degrees of ‘success’. I’ve attempted a few things, again with varying degree of success, but nothing too revolutionary. The general advice I’ve read from folks who overhaul their classes is to change a few things in a progression. Changing too many things too quickly is often a recipe for disaster, not to mention tons of prep work. I will have to weigh these considerations as I plan my upcoming fall classes – I’m teaching G-Chem and P-Chem as usual. Perhaps a special topics class best matches the tasting menu. I’m due to offer one soon according to my department’s rotation schedule. Not having a graduate program and running lean means that we can only offer one (sometimes two) electives outside the traditional chemistry per semester. I could call it “Great Tastes of Chemistry” although students would likely associate it with a food chemistry class.

A tasting menu is about enjoying an experience, albeit an expensive one. At top restaurants, these typically run in the $200-$300 range for a 2-3 hour gastronomic experience. At my private college, a typical (three credit hour) class costs $5,000. Let’s say this class meets three hours per week for 15 weeks, i.e., a little over $100 per hour, closely matching the per hour cost of a tasting menu dinner. I’d like to think learning chemistry is an enjoyable experience, but learning it takes a lot of hard work from the learner. As a diner, you don’t do any work (under than the enjoyable tasting than digesting), but the experience is fleeting. I hope that what my students learn in chemistry class sticks with them, at least the core concepts. Perhaps Chef’s Table has fewer touchstones than I thought. Maybe a better comparison would be Master Chef Junior (I’ve seen a couple of episodes) or Nailed It (which I haven’t watched but sounds interesting).

What was my favorite episode of Chef’s Table so far? Christina Tosi featured on Episode 1 of Season 4 – the Pastry season!

Life After Death: Medium Version

The medium is the message.

Or at least the medium acts as a conduit for messages that the disincarnate (a.k.a. dead) communicate to the living.

In the first chapter of Spook, the indefatigable Mary Roach examined the evidence for reincarnation (described in my previous blog post). In the middle third of Spook, she takes on communication with the dead. But some folks might be more ‘sensitive’ to crossing the veil between the living and the dead, or so they claim. For lack of a better word for such a mediator, we call them mediums.

Roach is looking for scientific evidence for the ability of mediums to communicate with the disincarnate. (I learned the word disincarnate from her book. I think its apt, because it distinguishes ‘dead’ from ‘dead as an incommunicado doornail’.) In the early twentieth century, the favored evidence was ectoplasm. Not the gooey ghostbusters kind. More like gauze. In fact, using gauze-like materials, enabled one to easily mimic historical photographs purporting to depict ectoplasm. There is even an ectoplasm sample (of dubious origin) at Cambridge University, the august institution having acquired the archives of the Society for Psychical Research. The sample had a foul odor, for reasons I won’t go into, but that Roach discusses in detail. (Ectoplasm has to emanate from somewhere in the body.)

But Roach isn’t satisfied with looking through dusty archives, she is determined to experience the real thing. Under scientific conditions of course! What better place to do this then at the Human Energy Systems Laboratory at the University of Arizona where professor Gary Schwartz takes on the famous medium Allison DuBois. I assume DuBois is famous because she is the real-life inspiration for the popular television series Medium. (Not having personally watched the popular series, I was previously unaware of this claim to fame.)

The experiment is called the Asking Questions Study. (Who comes up with these research project names anyway?) A list of 32 questions are posed to several mediums about two disincarnates. Questions include “Do you eat?”, “What type of ‘body’ do you have?”, “Is there music?”, and “Do you engage in sexual behavior?” If you’re curious about some of the answers, I recommend reading chapter 6 of Spook. Let’s get to the results. After a series of studies and controls, Schwartz reported “no evidence of anomalous information transfer” after the statistics are appropriately crunched. There are, in the lingo, dazzle-shots – where a medium seems eerily on target. But there are also many, many misses.

And yet, after all this, belief in medium efficacy still persists. Why? There’s the possibility, according to Schwartz, that “multiple disincarnates come through when a medium opens up the channels.” This is apparently called crosstalk in the lingo. Roach thinks it should be called fudge factor, and I’m inclined to agree with her. Roach has her own personal sitting with DuBois. She’s less impressed with DuBois’ ability (while Schwartz the official scientist seems open), even though she experiences the dazzle-shot moment. In any case, Roach wonders if she might be more receptive if she learned more about what transpires in the mind of the medium. And so she signs up for a three-day “Fundamentals of Mediumship” course at Arthur Findlay College in England. Here’s the paragraph where she describes her experience.

I’ve been very curious to find out how someone teaches a skill as ineffable and seemingly unteachable as spirit communication. Out tutor speaks to us for about fifteen minutes, but actual take-home instructions are thus far few. They amount more or less to this: Expand your energy. “Push out your energy, fill the room with your power.” It seems to be soething you just try to do. I try, I really do, but I have no idea where my energy is located or how to control its size or direction. I notice I’m moving my ears.

After a while, the class divides up into pairs for individual practice. Sounds like Divination class at Hogwarts. Her practice partner doesn’t seem to get anything from her aura, so it is Roach’s turn. She guesses a boat, because her partner looks like a sailor friend of hers. No connection. Then she imagines “brown green striped wallpaper and a big homey sofa” because that’s her image of what the home of a working-class Englishman might look like. No on the wallpaper but the sofa is a dazzle-shot for her partner. He’s impressed, but she’s not. In a Herminone-ish approach, Roach analyzes her own behavior; she thinks that she’s taking visual cues from her partner (something Sherlock Holmes might do) and making guesses. But there’s also a desire to ‘succeed’ in the process. Here’s her analysis.

We’re learning, but what are we learning? Our tutor never said to us: Stick with the everyday. Try to be general because there’s a better likelihood you’ll be right. But we’re picking it up anyway, or I am, at least. You want to get things right, because it’s no fun not to do so. So you find yourself gravitating toward common, nonspecific attributes, things that apply to most folks… No one is getting, say, the word “trilobite” or Jefferson Monument on a winter day, or the name Xavier P. Pennypacker. Because that would be a terrific long shot, and no one wants to set oneself up to be wrong. It’s exciting to be right. Maybe you’re psychic, you find yourself thinking, maybe you’ve made contact in spite of yourself. The little successes are their own reward.

Roach concludes from her experience that some (perhaps many) mediums are not trying to deceive, but honestly think they are engaging in paranormal communication. (There are likely other mediums who are trying to make more than a buck off you.) In addition, those who visit mediums tend to be open to suggestion, and happily eat up anything that is relevant to the dearly departed, discounting the misses. After all, there’s crosstalk, isn’t there?

But what if you’re not a medium, you’re just a regular person, you’re not thinking of the dearly departed, and you hear voices! Welcome to the phenomenon that is EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena). While many of these are garbled whispers, some are clearly articulated words. Not one to miss out, Roach books herself on a tour with International Ghost Hunters Society (IGHS). Thanks to Ghostbusters and its reboot, these tours are likely to continue in popularity. The idea is to catch EVP on a recording device (tape or digital). Roach also contacts bona fide scientists who’ve looked into EVP. Electronic broadcasting could be a culprit. Roach learns that “sometimes a gap between two pieces of metal, or a piece of metal and the ground, can set up a sparking that serves to demodulate a radio signal”. For your own personal experience, “wander up to the metal fencing around the facility [Voice of America] after dark… lean in close and you may hear the [glimmering] sparks singing or talking, depending on what’s being broadcast.”

For some reason, present day ghostbusters think that the disincarnate communicate “via the far extremes of the visual and auditory spectrums: light waves we can’t see and sound waves we can’t hear.” How inconvenient. Or perhaps convenient for purveyors of devices that can detect ultraviolet/infrared or infrasound. Bat detectors are apparently popular, and in Roach’s IGHS tour, “nearly everyone in our group has brought along an ELF [extremely low frequency] meter or an EMF (for measuring electromagnetic fields).” But could the modern ghost hunter be standing on the shoulders of scientific giants? Edison, Tesla, and the telephone duo of Bell and Watson. Roach writes that “the inventors viewed the etheric and the electric with the same set of awe-fogged eyes.” In Chapter 8 (“Can You Hear Me Now?”), Roach captures this key insight.

What you need to know is that the heyday of spiritualism – with its séances and spirit communications zinging through the ether – coincided with the dawn of the electric age. The generation that so readily embraced spiritualism was the same generation that had been asked to accept such seeming witchery as electricity, telegraphy, radio waves, and telephonic communications – disembodied voices mysteriously traveling through space and emerging from a “receiver” hundreds of miles distant… Viewed in this context, the one unfathomable phenomenon must have seemed no more unbelievable than the other.

Perhaps my suggestion that electromagnetic (EM) impulses might be a conduit for magic in Harry Potter’s world is not too different from present-day speculations that EM provides the conduit to the spirit world. But maybe it’s all just in our head? Sure enough, Roach proceeds to test this on herself at the Consciousness Research Lab, Laurentian University, Ontario, Canada. The theory is that EM impulses of a certain complexity can potentially induce hallucinations and other seemingly paranormal hankerings. After being tested, while hooked up to an EEG, Roach learns that the temporal lobes of her brain structure aren’t wired for susceptibility. At least statistically speaking. Neither is she any good at picking up infrasound at 19 Hz. Tigers, whales and elephants on the other hand do. Roach speculates that perhaps the small fraction of the population that can sense infrasound indicate a vestigial evolutionary ability to detect a crouching, hidden tiger. Interestingly, organ music is a great source of infrasound. Could this be why the presence of God can be particularly felt in churches with organs?

After all this research, there remains one nagging problem. Roach wants to know: “Is it possible that – rather than prompting hallucinations – certain EM [impulse] patterns enhance people’s ability to sense some sort of genuine paranormal impulse or entity?” There’s no good way to tease out the difference. You have an observation. You make an inference. That’s the way science proceeds. How do you distinguish between competing inferences? Possibly by setting up another experiment. But the (philosophical) observation-inference gap will always remain. And spookiness will always remain alive in the hearts and minds of the believers. Spookiness is in the eye of the beholder.

Can we test the spookiness of an out-of-body near-death-experience in the operating theater? You’ll have to read the final chapter in Mary Roach’s humorous book to find out. I’ll just say that the experimental setup is clever.

For my previous review of Roach’s book, here are Gulp and Stiff.

Life After Death: You Again Version

“You Again.”

A phrase you might utter to a persistent unwelcome presence, in the hands of writer Mary Roach, becomes the apt title for the subject of reincarnation. The book’s title is Spook, its subtitle Science Tackles the Afterlife, and the title to chapter 1, “You Again”.

Roach doesn’t just make armchair speculations about reincarnation. Yes, she’s read whatever research she can find, both academic and speculative. But most of these are second or third-hand accounts. For the first-hand experience, Roach travels all the way to India to meet one Dr. Kirti Rawat, a philosopher-scientist, who tracks down and investigates reincarnation claims. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, claims of reincarnation are more common in India than other countries, and more common in the rural areas.

Researching these cases requires being more of a police detective than the stereotypical scientist. Roach writes: “It’s an exhausting, exacting search for independent verifiable facts. Researchers contact the parents of the child and then travel to the village or town. They ask the parents to recall exactly what happened… The strongest cases are those in which the parents have written down the child’s statements when he or she first began talking about a past life – before they’ve met any family or friends from that life. (These are rare)… Without a written record, researchers must work from [memories of family members]… This makes for wobbly evidence – not because villagers are dishonest, but because human memory is deeply fallible.”

Roach is traveling with Rawat to investigate a recent case. The newly departed and his allegedly reincarnated soul are both from poor village families, marking it as a potentially stronger case. (When a poor family claims their son or daughter is reincarnated from a rich family, this might be wishful targeting of wealth.) The first village Roach and Rawat will visit, home of the reincarnated child, is three hours outside of Delhi. The family of the deceased is several villages away from the first. But first Roach and Raway must get out of Delhi traffic. I can’t resist showcasing a paragraph of fantastic Roach prose. If you have lived in, or visited, overcrowded cities in ‘developing’ countries, she captures the situation perfectly.

“The traffic jam has dissolved, leaving our driver free to proceed in the manner he enjoys. This entails driving as fast as possible until the rear end of the car in front is practically in his mouth, then laying on the horn until the car pulls into the other lane. If the other car won’t move over, he veers into the path of oncoming traffic – for sheer drama, an approaching semi truck is best – and then back, at the last possible instant. Livestock and crater-sized potholes materialize out of nowhere, prompting sudden James-Bond-style swervings and brakings. It’s like living inside a video game.”

At their respective destinations, Rawat interviews family and friends. Some members of the two families have already met; word travels fast from village to village. Rawat tries his best as he interrupts his interviewees to ensure they are giving him first-hand direct experience preferably with no embellishments, but it’s a challenging task. Some family members are completely convinced that the reincarnation is a match. Others demure. But the families seem overall happy for a new connection – an excuse for a social gathering or a celebration. Is this a strong candidate case for reincarnation? I’ll leave you hanging so you can read Roach’s account in full. She also insightfully muses about why the doctrine of reincarnation is prominent in India, but not in other places. Instead I will switch gears and muse, perhaps less insightfully, on one of my research interests.

Reading about reincarnation, life and death, inevitably made me think about chemistry and origin-of-life research. Let’s start with the basics. A chemical reaction involves molecules transforming into other molecules by breaking and making chemical bonds. The fate of all chemical reactions, according to thermodynamics, is the equilibrium state. At some point, if you wait long enough, the reaction will reach dynamic equilibrium. The rate of the forward reaction is equal to the rate of the reverse reaction. The system is at its lowest free energy possible. This is death by equilibrium. Chemists are very good at predicting the future – at least in a closed thermodynamic system.

Life, however, involves keeping the system from reaching thermodynamic equilibrium. A constant influx of energy is required, which is why chemical evolution requires increasingly superior energy transduction. Life does involve a kind of stability, but it is dynamic, and not thermodynamic. Around ten years ago, the scientist Addy Pross coined the phrase ‘dynamic kinetic stability’ to describe this phenomena. I’ve read most of his papers on this topic, but somehow missed his HuffPost article. For the chemist, here’s an article in C&E News reviewing a Pross book. (I haven’t read the book, since I’ve read the primary literature articles.) For chemists, predicting the future is much more difficult in these systems. Figuring out the past is as much of a challenge. An outstanding question in the origin-of-life is how a collection of molecules can reach a state of dynamic kinetic stability where previously there was none.

A metabolic cycle is a good example of dynamic kinetic stability. You’ve seen such a cycle if you’ve had a high school biology class, most likely the Krebs/TCA Cycle (shown above from Wikipedia). In the cycle, molecules are transformed into other molecules, but the original molecules are eventually reincarnated as the cycle turns. There is always some persisting concentration of any one substance at any one time, but the persistence is dynamic, rather than static. Substances persist not because they are thermodynamically stable, but because ‘new’ molecules are constantly reincarnated from other molecules. A Maxwell Demon observer trying to keep track of who, where, what, is likely to mutter under his breath. “You Again.”

What happens after Reincarnation the chapter? I zipped through the first four chapters this weekend, so here are the other highlights so far. In her previous book Stiff, Roach broached the experiments of one Dr. Duncan Macdougall attempting to weigh the soul as life departs from the body. (I highlighted this aspect when I reviewed Stiff.) In Spook, she follows this rabbit-hole wider and deeper. The protagonist, or perhaps antagonist, is one Dr. Gerry Nahum, at the time a professor at the medical school in Duke University. Nahum had been unsuccessfully trying to get funding for a detector-system much more sophisticated than Macdougall’s crude attempts. It’s an attempt to construct a thermodynamic closed system, with any changes in energy measured by a sophisticated array of electromagnetic (EM) energy detectors. (Detecting magic anyone?) A change in energy means a change in mass, according to Einstein’s E = mc². If the soul and consciousness contains information, Nahum has quantified the energy at 3 x 10^-21 Joules per bit. We don’t know how many bits of information the soul might have, but if it’s a large enough number, then it’s possible a detector could register the energy change.

Roach, playing devil’s advocate, asks Nahum “what if the soul – the residual energy/information that doesn’t register on our EM detectors – doesn’t go somewhere else, but just, you know, snuffs out?” Nahum disagrees. “Standing in the way is the First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It has to go somewhere.” As Nahum pontificates and then asks “Where does it go?” Roach stays silent, but the thoughts in her head are hilarious.

“We sit quietly for a minute, allowing the guest [Roach] to absorb this rather dense helping of quantum theory. In a corner of the ceiling, a fluorescent light flickers and goes out. Applying the First Law of Thermodynamics, we know that elsewhere in the universe, an unattractive though cost-efficient glow has just appeared.”

After her visit with Nahum though, Roach continues her investigative persistence. I truly admire her gumption! She checks in with another Stanford scientist who thinks that even if some blip of energy was measured, “Decay heat is not ordered information… energy that was your personality may indeed continue to exist after you die, but not in the form of your personality.” That’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in case you, dear reader, were keeping count. (My students who are reading this, I hope these statements sound familiar!)

Roach goes back to Nahum with this idea via e-mail, reminding him: “… in replying to me, pretend you’re talking to seventh grader.” But somehow the scientist in Nahum can’t seem to do this. He must not have read Houston, We Have a Narrative. Roach writes: “His reply ran to a thousand words and would have been understandable to any seventh-grader familiar with Kant, Locke, negentropy as the measure of nonrandomness, and the Enigma encryption machine.”

And yet, Roach, who certainly had not read Houston when Spook was written, has already imbibed all the lessons of engaging narrative. Regardless of whether or not you are a scientist, she makes thermodynamics understandable to the reader, not to mention all the other weird science-y stuff of afterlife research. I’m looking forward to chapter 5 of Spook. Ectoplasm is up next!

And, But, Then: The Science of Story

Three simple words are all you need to tell a good story. And science needs good storytellers. Why? We want to tell you all the minutiae that we lose the forest for the tiny stomata of the leaves.

Scientist-turned-moviemaker-and-author Randy Olson is preaching his solution. The ABT template has three simple words: And, But, Then. These words undergird Olson’s new book, Houston, We Have a Narrative. After an early career as a marine biology professor in New Hampshire, Olson quit his job and moved cross-country to Los Angeles, home of the famed USC film school, and Hollywood, of course! Why did he do this? You’ll have to read his book to find out.

Olson would be the first to say that there’s nothing sacred about the three words. But they capture the essence of how to tell a good story. And allows you to set up the story with the necessary scaffolding facts. But is the pivot that introduces tension to the story. Therefore moves the story forward to its next step, or to its conclusion. Olson provides plenty of good examples, both historical and modern-day practical. (James Watson’s The Double Helix and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address are two.) But Olson also provides two templates for bad narrative. The AAA template (And, And, And) is boring, and we scientists do it all the time as we tell you fact after fact after fact. The DHY template (Despite, However, Why) just creates confusion. Since I had trouble remembering what DHY stood for, I’ve recast it as BBB: But #1, But #2, But #3, and the buts are disconnected.

With the help of Hollywood, Olson outlines a theoretical framework to classify different approaches to narrative. This is McKee’s Triangle, and it has three categories: Archplot, Miniplot and Antiplot. The classic Archplot is the tried-and-true approach to connect to the largest audience – the masses. Olson lists five key elements of Archplot movies.

·      Linear Timeline

·      Causality – things happen for logical reasons, not randomly.

·      Single Protagonist (or one main character that the audience follows)

·      Active Protagonist (the main character actually does stuff)

·      Closed Ending (story is resolved)

According to Olson, Miniplot movies “typically play in art houses, are cherished by movie critics, and often win Academy awards… These types of films garner critical praise but tend to play to smaller audiences.” Antiplot, on the other hand, rebel against “all the constraints of structure and tradition… not caring much about the outcome or how many people the y connect with. Of the examples Olson provides, I had only watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

As a scientist who has experience with environmental concerns, Olson takes the time to analyze two different movies: The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth. One does a hatchet job with the science but connects to its viewers, the other just threw fact after fact after fact at the audience, and was both alarmist and boring, if that were possible. Olson appreciates the challenge of science communication involving a complicated topic, that doesn’t lend itself well to Archplot. Global warming has (1) no clear sequence to build a linear timeline, (2) no one simple cause, (3) no single or active protagonist, (4) no closed ending. Not to mention, people keep confusing the difference between weather and climate.

Given the challenge that scientists have in communicating their research to the public, what can be done? No, the one-day science communication workshop is not enough, it might even be problematic, according to Olson who has run many a one-day workshop. Learning narrative intuition takes time and work. Like building up muscle. I have to be honest that just thinking of the challenge makes me feel lazier and less willing to do the work. But thanks to Olson’s book, while working on a research paper yesterday, I rewrote the abstract to follow the ABT template. I was happy with the end-result, but it took a lot more time than I would usually spend crafting the narrative. The problem is that I hardly spend time crafting at all.

Two years ago, I actually heard about ABT from Randy Olson himself. He visited my institution and gave a fantastic seminar about the importance of science communication, and how we should take up the challenge. I think it made me work a bit more on my blog posts, at least for a short period while the inspiration lasted. Then I got lazy, and my writing has gotten sloppier. I’d like to tell you that this post was crafted and recrafted to follow the ABT template, but I’d be lying. “Houston, we have a problem” – it’s laziness. Present tense. Hollywood made the tense change when Tom Hanks delivers the iconic line. Apparently, the original spoken words were “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

I close this post with another reason that we scientists struggle with narrative. Quoting Olson on Hollywood’s changing the text in Apollo 13. “But this sort of text manipulation worries scientists. They want people to know how things are in the real world, and they dream of simply being able to ‘see it, say it’. They want to tell you the truth, exactly as they see it, without having to rearrange anything, because the rearranging process can be dangerous. Rearranging things comes with risks – at the mildest just getting it wrong, at worst deceiving people.”

But we scientists so easily forget, that in writing our papers we are editing the scientific story of our discovery, streamlining it for the journal we hope to publish in, and often eschewing communication to the general public. We need to do better.