one-not-seven

  THE BASE OF MASLOW'S PYRAMID  Maslow, after an earnest research, postulated the hierarchy of needs, with a simple bottom, and a sophisticated top. But what if the bottom of the pyramid is actually an anarchy of needs, messy and fussy with real and imagined survival factors? Why then even after having met our basic needs we always fail to reach the top? Why do we remain a worm all our lives and only at the fag end realise the butterfly that we could have been? Why do we keep biting, slighting, fighting everything and everybody but are not sighting and alighting and righting ourselves? So, is the base of the pyramid really basic? I think it needs a re-visit. And for that we need to re-visit the brain. And guess what! The brain doesn’t know we are no more in a jungle, albeit a concrete jungle. Every second it is processing incoming sensory information and is deciding whether there is a reward or a threat. It has to be either a flower or a fruit or a snake or a wolf. If it's a r...

There are two parts of the brain which we use to see “people” and “things”. These are  respectively the “fusiform gyrus” and the “inferior temporal gyrus”. With the aid of a brain scan  called FMRI (or Functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery) we can see the flow of blood in the  brain and, thereby, the areas of activity as the subject sees things and faces. But while the  fusiform gyrus is sophisticated, the other is not so evolved. Thus, while we are able to recognise  the face of an old friend after a long gap of, say, 20 years, we struggle to locate our bag in the  airport carousel. This is what happens in autistic people - the fusiform gyrus in their brain is impaired. Therefore they see people - using their inferior temporal gyrus - as “things”. They can’t  read others’ body language or facial expressions. In other words, they are mind-blind. You may  pick your nose or furrow your eyebrows - they won’t judge you. How do we see things when we ar...

FACS stands for Facial Action Coding System and is a 500 page book containing graphically  detailed facial expressions. It is written by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen. There is an  interesting story behind the making of the book. And profound revelations. The traditional view of facial expressions till the 1960s was that they were socially conditioned.  Paul Ekman learnt from his mentor Silvan Tomkins that expressions on the face are connected  to nerves and even genes. Tomkins was capable of mind reading men as well as horses. When shown the video clips of two tribes “South Fore” and “Kukukuku”, Tomkins was able to  accurately tell their traits. Tomkins taught him that there are 43 muscle movements on the face  called Action Units, or AUs. And thousands of combinations of two or more muscles. However,  3000 of them are meaningful combinations. Let's describe a few common expressions. Smile or happiness involves AU 6 (raising the cheek  by pullin...

Goldman Algorithm for Chest Pain The history of cardiac care had it's turning point in 2001 when the Goldman's Algorithm was first adopted by a hospital called Cook County in Chicago. What happened that led to this breakthrough? The churning began a few years earlier in 1995 . Cook County was the city’s principal public hospital and famous for harbouring the world’s first blood bank. Also for being the place where cobalt-beam therapy had been pioneered. Of late, however, the hospital was in a mess. With cavernous wards with no air conditioning, no private room, telephone or cafeteria, with bells ringing all the while due to understaffed nurses, with noisy private TVs and radios of overcrowded patients, it was a crazy place desperately in need of a haul up. There was another problem. There were 2.5 lakh emergency patients complaining of chest pain in a year. But only 10% of the patients admitted into the cardiac care were true cases. In the summer of 1995 , the hospital g...