Temporary Homes, Domestic Horses in North America, Oral History as Science, and Surgically-Induced Spontaneous Orgasm - Dinner Table Digest № 48
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This Digest contains two scientific studies, one on the dispersal of domestic horses in North America and the other on how direct electrical brain stimulation resulted in a spontaneous orgasm in a 49 year old female with epilepsy. Complementing the domestic horse piece is a polemic on the scientific value of oral histories. Kicking off the Digest is a reflective piece of creative writing on what it was like to move around a lot as a kid in Singapore.
Sections:
Temporary Homes / Early Dispersal of Domestic Horses in North America / Oral History is Science / Direct Electrical Stimulation of the Hippocampus induces a Spontaneous Orgasm
My Decade of Temporary Homes - Rachel Heng - Esquire
This bit of creative writing tells the story of the author's complicated relationships with each of the different places she lived, entertwined as they were with her father's fatal flaw.
It is a lesson many of us learn eventually, I suppose—that a seemingly solid life can disappear in an instant. Misfortune, sickness, the death of a loved one all come sooner or later; no one is immune. Still, I mourn having learned this lesson so young. To be homeless and fatherless in a flash, bankrupt, adrift—still, my brain interjects at this point, there was no war, no violence or abuse, my mother remained, we had lost our home but we were not without shelter when we were taken in by relatives, et cetera et cetera. Not that bad. So goes the mantra of survival. Our minds can bend reality, if only we try hard enough.
Early Dispersal of Domestic Horses into the Great Plains and Northern Rockies - William Taylor et al. - Science
This study, conducted with the support of the Lakota Nation, examines the anthropological and biological records tying the domestic horse in America to European colonizers, finding instead significant evidence to show that horses had been domesticated by Indigenous Nations on Turtle Island prior to the European expansion in the west.
Our archaeological analyses show the dispersal of domestic horses from Spanish settlements in the American Southwest to the northern Rockies and central Great Plains by the first half of the 17th century CE at the latest. They provide evidence of local raising and veterinary care of horses, likely foddering with domestic maize, and use of horses in transport by Indigenous peoples by this time. A directly dated radiocarbon specimen from Paa’ko Pueblo in northern New Mexico shows that horses reached the region via Indigenous groups before Spanish colonization of the American Southwest, as previously hypothesized. Moreover, our new temporal framework shows that horses were present across the plains long before any documented European presence in the Rockies or the central plains. Despite their Iberian genetic makeup and earlier arguments attributing one of these horses to Spanish exploration, strontium, carbon, and oxygen isotope results suggest that these animals were raised and died locally.
Enslaved - Live at The Opera House, Toronto, April 8, 2023
The stories of oral societies aren’t myths, they’re records - Patrick Nunn - Aeon Essays
In this piece Patrick Nunn makes the case that oral histories as recounted by Indigenous cultures the world over are not, in fact, myths, but are instead actual historical accounts worthy of including in the modern scientific record.
Many literate people today believe this kind of thing is impossible or, at best, an anomaly, because they evaluate the abilities of oral (or ‘pre-literate’) societies by the yardsticks of literate ones, where information seems far more readily accessible to anyone who seeks it. And, in doing so, they undervalue the ability of these oral societies to store, organise and communicate equivalent amounts of information. I have called this ‘the tyranny of literacy’: the idea that literacy encourages its exponents to subordinate the understandings of others who appear less ‘fortunate’. But accounts like Steel’s are beginning to help break apart this idea: oral traditions, rather than being subordinate, are capable of transmitting just as much useful information as the technologies of reading and writing. …
These tales of rising oceans are not mere stories. Despite occasional embellishment, their empirical skeletons are easy to recognise. Is it likely that our ancestors across the world sat around inventing stories about times when two landmasses were joined, and insisted on communicating these improbable fictions downstream along the river of history? Or is it more probable that these stories were passed along because people remembered an event so foundational to local history that it was considered hugely important to communicate to each new generation?
Of course, in contexts where there has been considerable mixing of cultures, some of these stories have become mythologised – populated by supernatural beings capable of feats no human could match. Take the example of the giants who feature in myths and legends in every part of the world. Imagine you are trying to tell your ancestral story about how Ireland was once connected to Scotland and Wales, or how Tasmania was formerly contiguous with mainland Australia. Your audience looks sceptical, so you rationalise your tale, stating that in the old days people were giants, which is how they were able to stride across the expanses of water that people could see. Your audience is satisfied and interest in your story has been recharged, ensuring it will be retold. But your story has also been transformed, from narrative to myth, ensuring that it will be regarded as a fanciful or puerile invention dismissed, millennia later by literate people, as having any value beyond entertainment.
These ‘myths’ are not fiction. Most of the ancient myths of long-established cultures have an empirical core. They are not inventions but observations, filtered through worldviews from potentially thousands of years ago and clothed with layers of narrative embellishment before they reach us today. Framed within the science of their day, they represent knowledge often from times far earlier than those in the world’s oldest books.
Bilateral cortical representation of orgasmic ecstasy localized by depth electrodes (2013) - Werner Surbeck et al - Epilepsy and Behaviour Reports (Journal)
I can across a random throwaway sentence in a Wikipedia article on electro-cranial stimulation that led me to this fascinating 2013 case report in a journal that focuses on epilepsy research. In a diagnostic effort to determine where the (49F) patient’s seizures were coming from, the health team performed Direct Electrical Stimulation (DES) in a part of the brain. Throughout the course of the procedure, during contact with the left hippocampus, however, the patient experienced a spontaneous orgasm (which seems to be known in the literature as isolated orgasmic ecstasy, or OE), followed by a short afterdischarge, a common neuronal reactions to electrical stimulation. While some epilepsy patients experience what are known as Sexual Auras, which are feelings of sexual arousal and orgasmic feeling that can occur throughout the middle stage of a seizure, this patient had never experienced that before. After repeating stimulation of the left hippocampus, which elicited another isolated OE followed by another short afterdischarge, they tried stimulating the exact same place on the right hippocampus.
Stimulation of the right hippocampus at 1 mA generated the same orgasmic sensation while triggering a 45-second seizure discharge over the right hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, temporal pole, and anterior insula.
In the discussion of the case, the authors note that while sexual hallucinations had been reported previously during DES, and an OE had occurred in a patient implanted with a device, this was the first time an isolated OE had been experienced in the lab. The authors note,
Our case report provides further insight into the generation of OE. For one, such a response can be evoked bilaterally. Second, activation of a larger network appears to be necessary in order to generate such sensations. On the left side, OE was only reported by the patient when stimulation of the hippocampus was accompanied by afterdischarges over the hippocampus, the parahippocampal gyrus, and the anterior-inferior insula of the same side. Stimulation of the right hippocampus generated the same orgasmic sensation by triggering a seizure discharge over the ipsilateral right hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, temporal pole, and anterior insula. These observations indicate bilateral representation of OE within the region of the hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, temporal pole, and anterior insula.
While I’m not the right person to draw any scientific conclusions from this study, I can tell you that the fact that one human can spontaneously bring another human to orgasm through direct electrical stimulation of the brain brings a whole new meaning to the classic sexual line, “Hey baby, how do you want me to get you off? 🤣🤷🏼♂️🤣
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