Anesthesia & Consciousness, Keeping our Humanity, and A 'Lost Tribe' from Brazil - Dinner Table Digest № 66

The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!

Nov 14, 2023

While we know very little about how and why anesthesia works despite it being one of the most important medical advances over the last two centuries, new research featured here sheds light on how consciousness is affected by anesthesia. Also included is a first-hand perspective from a Palestinian man directly affected by the Israeli invasion of Gaza, along with a New York Times piece on the efforts to preserve the Pirikpura tribe, two of the last three members of which continue to call the rainforest home, despite efforts to log and farm the land.

Sections: How Anesthesia Blocks Consciousness / No Human Being Can Exist / Random Tunnel Excavation / Preserving a Brazilian Indigenous People Group

How Anesthesia Blocks Consciousness - Neuroscience News

I learned recently that while neuroscientists, surgeons, and their colleagues in related fields know that anesthesia works (that is, they know that certain chemicals act on the body to suspend consciousness and prevent pain signals from being registered), they still don't know precisely how anesthesia works (that is, the mechanism of action in the brain/brain stem), let alone why it works (that is, the relevant casual factors that result in sustained loss of both consciousness and sensory perception). The history of the development of anesthesia, itself a fascinating story stretching from antiquity, is really still in its infancy.

Enter this animal study, which purports to show, at the very least, which brain sections were affected by propofol anesthesia, the tested brain locations having been selected for known indicators of sensory perception and general consciousness. Part of the reason we know so little about the mechanism of action or relevant casual factors is because anesthesia is an inherently dangerous and risky procedure; while it is considered safe to be used for regular surgical interventions when administered by a trained professional, the risks inherent in the procedure make it an ethically complex space for human-based studies.

In the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers report clear evidence that in anesthetized animals, sounds and tactile sensations still produced neural activity in an area of the cortex that receives incoming sensory information.
But just as clearly, measurements of neural spiking and broader oscillatory activity showed that those signals failed to propagate to three other cortical regions with higher-level processing and cognitive responsibilities, as seen during normal wakefulness. “What this study shows is that the cortex isn’t getting on the same page,” said study corresponding author Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor in the The Picower Institute and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

No Human Being Can Exist - N+1 - Saree Makdisi

The more I read about the State of Israel's occupation and domination of Palestine, the harder it is for me to have much sympathy for their claim of self-defense. Indeed, if you know something of the Biblical history of the Israelites, you know that they spent long periods of their existence as slaves and subjects of other great powers. They also used genocidal methods of their own to 'cleanse' the Promised Land of the Caananites, who were the original inhabitants of "The Land of Milk and Honey."

Just as the ancient Israelites both suffered and caused suffering, the current state of Israel has both suffered, and has caused suffering. The idea, only a couple of centuries old, that the actions of the state of Israel are without consequence because assigning responsibility would be an instance of anti-Semitism was unfortunately strengthened in the aftermath of the Holocaust, in which more than 6 million Jews dies horrible deaths.

However it is a fallacy to think that some group's suffering - however horrible it may be - somehow gives impunity to that same group of people to cause suffering to others. The suffering they cause is still a moral evil, and it should be treated as such. In other words, it is not anti-Semitic nor is it anti-Jewish to suggest that the State of Israel is an on-going primary contributing factor to the continued humanitarian suffering of the Palestinian people. The same is to be said for the Chinese government's ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang - it is not racist against Chinese people to ask for their government to be accountable for their actions.

Here is a Palestinian man, writing his truth:

"What we are not allowed to say, in other words, is that if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it. You must stop the hideous system of racial segregation, dispossession, occupation, and apartheid that has disfigured and tormented Palestine since 1948, consequent upon the violent project to transform a land that has always been home to many cultures, faiths, and languages into a state with a monolithic identity that requires the marginalization or outright removal of anyone who doesn’t fit. And that while what’s happening in Gaza today is a consequence of decades of settler-colonial violence and must be placed in the broader history of that violence to be understood, it has taken us to places to which the entire history of colonialism has never taken us before. ...
With morgues full to capacity and cemeteries running out of space, health authorities in Gaza have started storing bodies in ice cream trucks, with blood dripping slowly from doors emblazoned with the bright childish colors of ice cream brands. In alleys, courtyards, and makeshift mosques, those who are able gather in silent tears and prayers over arrays of bodies, large and often pitifully small, wrapped in blood-soaked shrouds in preparation for burial. Relatives sob over each bundle, give a bobbing forehead one last kiss as it is taken away for the last time, leaving only weeping mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins in each other’s arms, their own turn in their shrouds surely not far away. Sometimes there are no relatives; they’re all gone, too. The scale of the death and destruction is so massive, so unrelenting, there’s often no time to mourn, and every day, every hour, the Israelis shower more death on Gaza. One hospital has begun burying the anonymous dead in mass graves for lack of any other option.
In the first week of the round-the-clock bombardment, the Israelis said they had dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza, a number equivalent to about a month of bombing at the peak of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—countries many, many times larger than the Gaza Strip.9 (Iraq is over a thousand times the size of Gaza.) They also claimed to have dropped over a thousand tons of high explosives; by the end of week one, we were, in other words, already into the kiloton measurements of nuclear weapons, and weeks two and three are upon us.10 In the first week of bombing, 1,700 entire buildings in Gaza were destroyed. Many times that number were damaged, often beyond repair. Each building includes seven, eight, nine, or more separate apartments, each one the former home of some family now either homeless once more or dead. As ever, the Israelis claim that they are targeting “the terror infrastructure.” As ever, the bodies (or body parts) actually pulled from the rubble or picked up from the neighboring streets are mostly of women and children, unlikely constituents of the phantom “terror infrastructure” from which the occupying power—with the blessing and benediction of its superpower patron—claims to be defending itself."

Excavating a Random Tunnel, For No Reason

I don’t know why this woman is excavating a tunnel out of rock underneath her house, but that’s what she’s doing. I’m not sure whether to be weirded out or strangely impressed!

@engineer.everything Should I go deeper? #engineering #minecraft #secrettunnel #construction #mining #diy

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Brazil Found the Last Survivors of an Amazon Tribe. Now What? - New York Times

This story gets at some of the complex issues arising from the conflict between Indigenous people groups on the verge of extinction and corporate interests looking to capitalize on the raw commodity that is the untouched rainforest.

How the Piripkura went from a village to three people is unclear. Anthropologists have pieced together history largely based on stories from the third survivor, Rita, believed to be Pakyi’s sister. She said her family told her things changed when white people arrived.
In the 1940s, the government was handing out land in the Amazon for cheap. “More rubber for victory!” declared a 1943 Brazilian government poster, calling on men to become rubber tappers to aid the Allied war effort.
Many settlers slaughtered Indigenous people. The Brazilian government has acknowledged that during the country’s military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, at least 8,300 Indigenous people were killed.
In one massacre, a Piripkura village was decimated, relatives told Rita, who is in her 60s. Men dismembered bodies, mutilated genitals and left victims impaled on tree trunks, Rita told government officials.
When Rita and Pakyi were children, their group had just 10 to 15 members left. As one of the few women, Rita was highly coveted. She had two children with a man from another tribe, and when he died from infection, Pakyi and her father propositioned her. “Are you crazy?” she said in an interview. “Marry my father?”
Then came the moment that broke the family apart: Pakyi killed her two children.

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