In truth we
are scaling a mountain of ignorance guided by a map drawn on the back of a
napkin by strangers claiming visions.
Any one molecule on its own could revolutionize our understanding of
conscience and intelligence and we have a large number to isolate let alone
discovering what they do. It really
feels like a task for a thousand biologists and a thousand years to me.
At least with
most organs throughout the body, we have exact knowledge of function and nature
been conservative will minimize surplus tasking. Here we think that this is central to the
soul and to spirituality. Since almost
no one can agree to that we end up dead in the water.
Glands are
organic chemical factories that we simply fail to understand and badly need to
carefully map out in order to determine how many questions need answers. That also means that we do not take the first
one available. The pineal seems to be
more than even that but I am not sure on that as yet.
4 Things You Should Know About Your ‘Third Eye’
April 13, 2014
Scott Thill,
We still lack a complete understanding of the pineal gland — but
that doesn’t stop us from speculating.
Located in nearly the
direct center of the brain, the tiny pinecone-shaped pineal gland, which
habitually secretes the wondrous neurohormone melatonin while we
sleep at night, was once thought to be a vestigial leftover from a lower
evolutionary state.
Indeed, according to
recent research, we could be increasing our chances of contracting chronic
illnesses like cancer by unnecessarily bathing its evenings in artificial light, working night shifts or staying up too late. By disrupting the pineal gland and
melatonin’s chronobiological connection to Earth’s rotational 24-hour
light and dark cycle, known as its circadian rhythm, we’re possibly
opening the doors not to perception, but to disease and disorder. A recently
published study from Vanderbilt University has found associations between circadian disruption
and heart disease, diabetes and obesity.
By hacking what pinealophiles call our mind’s third eye with an always-on technoculture transmitting globally at
light-speed, we may have disadvantaged our genetic ability to ward off all
manner of complicated nightmares. No wonder the pineal gland is a
pop-culture staple for sci-fi, fantasy and horror fandom, as well as a mass
attractor of mystics and mentalists. Its powers to divide and merge our light
and dark lives only seems to grow the more we take it seriously.
We still lack a complete
understanding of the pineal gland,” University of Michigan professor of
physiology and neurology Jimo Borjigin, a pioneer in medical visualization of
the pineal gland’s melatonin secretion, told me. “Numerous molecules are
found in the pineal, many of which are uniquely found at night, and we do not
have a good idea of what their functions are. The only function that is
established beyond doubt is the melatonin synthesis and secretion at night,
which is controlled by the central clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus and modulated by
light. All else is speculative.”
[ again
I presume these molecules are unique to the pineal gland – arclein ]
Discerning between the
science and speculation of the pineal gland hasn’t been easy since long before
Rene Descartes called it the “principal seat of the soul” after studying it at
length nearly four centuries ago. (Although “no evidence exists to support this,”
clarified Borjigin.) So here’s a handy shortlist of things you should know
about the pineal gland.
1. Third Eyes and
Theosophistry
The current scientific
understanding is that the pineal gland probably started out as an eye, and it receives signals from light and our retinas. Whether it
was our only eye which shrunk into the brain once its perceptive tasks were
taken care of by our two newer eyes, or whether it was a third eye with a
spiritual and physical connection to previous spiritual and evolutionary
states, or both, has galvanized science and speculation for centuries.
[ this
attempted explanation is a really bad idea.
It is better a gland that is central to operations of the brain and
always has been – arclein ]
Earth’s ancient cultural
histories are filled with folklore featuring both one-eyed and three-eyed
beings of great power, from Shiva and Cyclops to that amiable fellow in The Twilight Zone‘s classic episode, “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” and beyond. (From
Beyond even: See below.) Associations can be found in Hinduism,
whose seventh primary chakra Sahasara is a multilayered lotus that
looks like the pineal gland’s pinecone, and whose primary function is to
perceive universal oneness, scientifically and spiritually speaking. Theosophists,
who have been studying what they perceive as hidden knowledge since the Greeks
and Romans ruled philosophical and scientific inquiry, have more recently
claimed that the pineal gland is the spiritual engine of our evolution into “embryo gods, beings of consciousness
and matter.”
That description seems
apt, given the astronomical power we have achieved in a few million years of
evolution. While Homo sapiens‘
third eyes likely transformed into pineal glands along the way, today we can
still find animals with photoreceptive third eyes, now called parietal
eyes, like New Zealand’s endangered tuatara. Fossils from other
ancient creatures feature similar sockets in their skulls, making our pineal
gland a candidate for an ex-eye.
2. What Was Once Hidden
Is Now Hi-Res
Michigan University
professor Borjigin and his team are hard at work on how the pineal gland and
melatonin regulate our lives.
“The central circadian clock controls timing of almost all aspects of our life, including physiology
and behavior, and melatonin is the best marker to decode the fingerprints of
circadian timing in both humans and animals,” he told me. “In the past, it was
very difficult to study circadian properties of melatonin in animals due to
technical limitations. My lab invented long-term pineal microdialysis, which permits
automated, computer-controlled and high-resolution analysis of melatonin
secretion from rodent pineal gland from four to 10 weeks in the same animal.”
These visualizations
could go a long way toward understanding how to hack melatonin, which the
pineal gland secretes when we sleep and helps the brain repair and sync our
bodies to Earth’s rotation. Melatonin is a stunning compound, found naturally
in plants, animals and microbes. A powerful antioxidant, its list of its
medicinal uses only seems to grow each year, as we learn more about its ability
to help with immune disorders, chronic illnesses, and neurodegeneration.
“Pineal microdialysis
allows us to monitor melatonin secretion closely under various conditions to
simulate jet lag, shiftwork, light pollution, diet manipulation and more to
define the fingerprints of circadian response to environment, he added. “It
also allows us to discover animals with extreme chronotypes, like early-birds
or night-owls, to understand how individuals with different chronotype respond
to circadian challenges differently. These are still ongoing studies, but
hopefully some of the works will be published this year.”
3. Artificial Light =
Dark Future
What has been recently published
about melatonin is already pretty significant, especially for those looking to
combat breast and prostate cancer. Harvard University School of Public Health
researcher Itai Kloog and his group published a series of studies in the last
few years explaining how our “modern urbanized sleeping habitat” (PDF) is a massive
hormone-based cancer risk. “We have blotted out the night sky” with artificial light, wrote Earth Island Journal‘s Holly Hayworth,” citing Kloog’s research
and noting that half that light is wasted anyway.
“We’ve proven beyond a
doubt that it’s a risk factor,” Kloog told me. “Light at night has been proven
on many levels, by our group and many others, to definitely contribute to
higher risk of developing hormonal cancer.”
Kloog’s team published
five studies altogether, including analyses at local and global levels, and all
of them found firm correlations between circadian and melatonin disruption and
higher risks of cancer. Analyzing NASA’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program archive (to illuminate Earth’s light-at-night coverage)
and data from the World Health Organization, Kloog’s group “found clearly that
as women were more exposed to light at nighttime, their rates of breast cancer
went up. Our Israel study found that going from minimum exposure to average
exposure to light at night resulted in a 36 percent higher standard rate of
breast cancer, and going from average to maximum was another 26 percent
increase.”
Using kernel smoothing to
create density maps showing light exposure and cancer rates, Kloog’s team found
that another of its studies, which sourced more than 20,000 light sources by
height and intensity, showed a clear association. For their two worldwide
studies, they developed an algorithm to assign population weight average light
exposure for every person in every city across the world, using WHO data, and
again they found a clear association between cancer and light at night.
“For average light
exposure per person, if you take an underdeveloped country like Nepal, we’re
talking about 0.02 nanowatts per centimeter squared,” Kloog explained. “Compare
that to the United States, where the average light exposure of a person is
57.5. Up until around 120 years ago, humans were basically exposed to 12 hours
of sunlight and 12 hours of darkness on average, seasons and latitudes
permitting of course. But since the invention of the lightbulb, we’ve
artificially stretched the day. We go to sleep late at night, we have lights on
while we sleep, we have a shorter sleep duration. We have a lot of factors stretching
out our days, relative to the light period we experienced during millions of
years of previous evolution.”
“It’s something that’s
easy to take out of the equation,” Kloog told me. “Go to sleep in a dark
room. Use less light. Close the shutters. Circadian disruption is carcinogenic
to humans.”
4. Occult Classic
This is not to say that
late-night viewing itself isn’t good for the mind, especially when it comes to
pineal glands and third eyes. Because pineal glands and third eyes remain
singular components of an otherwise binary brain with an extraordinary past,
they have stimulated some stranger explorations of their spiritual and
supernatural possibility. The pineal gland’s circadian dualism has achieved
particular resonance with influential occultists like horror
influential H.P. Lovecraft. Who, in turn, have spawned new generations of
speculative talents that have used it as a quite flexible receptacle for
expansive meaning.
“My first exposure to the
pineal gland came from Stuart Gordon’s movie adaptation of Lovecraft’s From Beyond,” Javier Grillo-Marxuach,
creator of the cult sci-fi television classic The Middleman, told AlterNet. “In
truth, everything I know about that particular endocrine body probably derives
from that seminal experience, which explains why I am a television writer and
not a brain surgeon.”
In From Beyond, a supernaturally
activated pineal gland turns mad scientists into brain-eating zombies. The
recently reissued 1957 exploitation film She Devil features a “female monster” whose hyperstimulated pineal
gland turns her into ”a demon, a devil, a creature with a warped soul!” In
both films, and many other third-eye head-trips, functions as a sexualized organ, rather than a circadian
regulator. Today, some use melatonin supplements, available since the ’90s, to
aid with sexual dysfunction. But the pineal gland’s expansive mythic and
scientific history has much broader applications when it comes to folklore and
entertainment.
“In The Middleman, we quickly
discovered that because this most mysterious of glands is so misunderstood,
even though its very name connotes a certain frisson of scientific accuracy and
technical understanding, it was a fantastic shorthand for whatever
otherworldly qualities we needed to justify,” Grillo-Marxuach added. [ if this is not a clear
warning to us for evermore then what is? ]“Over
the course of 12 episodes, the pineal gland became the source of psychic
ability, communication between parallel dimensions, the magical influence of
succubi and incubi over the libidos of ordinary mortals and, finally, the power
source for our main supervillain’s armageddon device. Since Stuart Gordon and
H.P. Lovecraft gave me such a gift in my teenage years by providing me with so
fanciful an understanding of cerebral anatomy, I figured I’d pay the favor
forward as many times as possible.”
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