A shift toward slow?

Powelliphanta are slow to mature

La charité est une pure attention à l’existence d’autrui. - Louis Lavelle

The relationship between the conditions of our life and our perception of happiness isn't necessarily a simple and direct correlation. Which might be obvious to many people. While it might start off this way, particularly in regard to meeting our basic needs, at some point that relationship appears to invert. And the idea of 'post-traumatic growth' complicates this picture even further. It's analogous to the related concept of 'hormesis', which is a well known phenomena (and also the title of a subsection within McGilchrist's book The Matter with Things). These insights are important, because it doesn't appear that contemporary culture, and particularly the ruling ideology of market fundamentalism, has fully incorporated them. What prevails instead is the perverse logic of 'more is better', unmitigated by the subtle and paradoxical wisdom that 'less is sometimes more', which might be a better guide. Today the psychological phenomenon of 'hedonic adaptation', combined with blind instrumentalism, is feeding back into and exacerbating many of the dangerous trends we see today (including the LH capture of Western civilization and corresponding cultural decline). As described by Juna Gjata's friend, are we just making ourselves "rich and miserable"? 

The rat race. Is it possible to reduce the frenetic pace of modern life? We are daily bombarded with news about how modern lifestyles, with fast food, sleep deprivation, and lack of exercise, are making us ill and increasing the risk of early death. It is getting harder to imagine how paragons of longevity like James Lovelock were able to take daily walks! These systems lead to the ultimate irony, where people who love to stay healthy and enjoy outdoor activities like bike riding find they have no time to exercise (or even sleep) and instead spend the majority of their days in sedentary occupations, later dying due to complications of cardiovascular disease, the number one killer in many places. How did we get here? How do we get off the treadmill? 

The need for a slower pace of life is foremost associated with the Slow Movement, which originated nearly thirty years ago in Italy before quickly expanding internationally. I will refer to this body of thought frequently here, while making numerous connections with the thought of Iain McGilchrist, who has expressed his support for it due to its broad consilience with the Gestalt of the right hemisphere. His thesis is outlined in two books (The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things), and it "articulates a kind of metatheory, a theory about theories, and that you can see the signature of a certain hemisphere (Gestalt) in a theory or worldview, and that with that knowledge you can instantly see its limitations or integration". It further describes how these two very different Gestalten influence our 'way of being', whether as individuals or as entire cultures and civilizations. This 'big idea' also helped produce a radical shift in my own Gestalt. Or, maybe it merely returned my views to their earlier form, though in a renewed and deeper way. (The particular path by which that happened, of which there are certainly many, may be less important than that it happened at all.) How we attend changes what it is we see. Xunzi said that when the mind is in accord with the Dao it is "empty, unified, and still". As McGilchrist remarked "I think this may sound negative, but 'resistance', and 'the negative', and 'the contrary', and 'the opposite' are often very important ways to go when we're trying to achieve a goal. What I would say has been important for me is mainly the things I don't do. I create open spaces. I live somewhere where it's very silent. But in this silence you hear the life around you: the trees, the hills, the cliffs, the waterfalls, the sea. Life comes to us if we create the space for it." Perhaps, at such moments, we can learn to see how life enables the discovery and unfolding of values that ‘evoke a response’, ‘call us to some end’, and ‘give meaning to life’. We could live less in the "map” and more on the "terrain" (we are the terrain, after all). We could open up the space for attention, subsume ourselves in complete absorption, and surrender to love. Not always, and not in all situations, but sometimes, and perhaps more often than occurs now. Love is a relationship. It is the foundation of value. "Love is a pure attention to the existence of the other" said Louis Lavelle. And as McGilchrist reminds us, attention is a profoundly moral act. It is how our world comes into being. Sigal Samuel wrote “The idea of moral attention goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, where the Stoics wrote about the practice of attention (prosoché) as the cornerstone of a good spiritual life. Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” and believed that to be able to properly pay attention to someone else — to become fully receptive to their situation in all its complexity — you need to first get your own self out of the way. She called this process “decreation,” and explained: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty ... ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” Now digital tech is eroding our attention, which is eroding our moral attention, which is eroding our empathy. Tristan Harris calls this “human downgrading”. 

There is 1) the terrain itself, 2) the map of the terrain, and 3) our perspectives on these, perhaps we could call those "metamaps". McGilchrist’s work belongs to this third category. Firstly, he observes that how we attend (whether that is to terrain or map) changes what it is we see (either the terrain or representation of it) and secondly, that there is an important role for both ways of attending. Concerning metacognition, Feng Youlan in his book A Short History of Chinese Philosophy quoted Aristotle on "thinking on thinking", and noted further that "when one thinks about the universe, one is thinking reflectively" since "the thinking and the thinker must be included in the totality". McGilchrist is "attending to attending", informed by his observation that there are two distinctly different ways of attending (to the terrain or to the map). While Youlan utilized his metatheory to note the recursive nature of self reflection and how that process informed the development of the various "maps" of Chinese philosophy, McGilchrist uses his metatheory to note the phenomenologically different worlds that are thus revealed to us, and how shifts between them have shaped the development of Western culture for the last several thousand years. These shifts have been correlated with, and causally implicated in, changes in societal health as well. The implication is that an understanding of McGilchrist's metatheory of attention, which illuminates the role of apprehensive theory in relation to comprehensive experience (something largely missing in discourse today), could be key to creating a paradigm shift in society, and grounding a narrative that leads away from nihilism and brings us back into equilibrium with Gaia. 

Donella Meadows observed that problems that emerge at one level can only be meaningfully addressed by appealing to a higher integrative level, an idea she made famous in her “Leverage Points” paper. We can't easily solve a problem by working exclusively within the same domain within which it emerged. Nor can we solve it by switching to another domain that is nonetheless at the same level as that of the problem. To provide an example, we can’t solve problems in ethics by creating more ethical frameworks. And similarly, we can't fix problems in regard to power by simply proposing other power structures. What we need are grounds by which to adjudicate between ostensibly equivalent frameworks and structures. Without such grounds, while we might initiate the dynamics of some new metastable regime, in order for it to persist for any length of time or develop above a certain baseline, the support of negative feedbacks are necessary. Where does the impetus for all these balancing feedbacks, this hard work and fine tuning, come from? It comes from the phenomenology of the affected agents (that's us). Phenomenology is at a level above both power and ethics, as it provides the explanatory toolkit by which we can understand these and address problems within either domain. It provides the grounds by which to adjudicate between ostensibly equivalent frameworks and structures. It would be dangerous to rely on the bare fact of reciprocal accountability to avoid failure modes if we don’t understand the phenomenology of the agents involved [see earlier AI discussion]. If it is to be effective at all, we need some understanding of the features of this higher level above the simple facts of power dynamics. If we don't have any understanding of this higher phenomenological level, then we can't use it to effectively adjudicate differences at the lower levels. And this is where McGilchirst’s ‘metatheory of attention’ comes in. It provides a perspective on the phenomenology of the affected agents who are actually directing the evolution of the system, and evaluating how we might ‘fine tune’ it to avoid a failure mode. Why should anyone care about that? To prevent a failure mode you need to know what you are looking at. You need to see it coming from as far away as possible. You need as much leverage as you can get. You need to operate at the highest level. From here we can see how alternative frameworks and structures, in both ethics and power, are rooted in evolutionary biology, and why these have the societal consequences we observe. From this vantage we can adjudicate between frameworks as to which is the more veridical and trustworthy, and we can (all importantly) be in the best position possible to guide their development and persistence. So any answer to a problem at the ethical framework level or the power structure level must be couched in the terms and language of the level above that. In this case it is the phenomenological level. Reciprocal accountability alone is metastable with the live possibility of failure, so we need resources that might allow us to better understand and mitigate that risk. In a sense, the problem really isn't the frameworks, it is the phenomenology. And that explains McGilchrist's hesitancy to provide a list of "what to do" at the framework or engineering level, because it tends to presuppose the wrong level of engagement. Our "what to do" answers must invoke and be made entirely in reference to the phenomenology, which is the relevant criteria. 

John Ehrenfeld once asked the members of a discussion group on McGilchrist that both he and I were in, "How do we become more LH or RH? Why are we LH one day and RH the next?" To answer this question we should reflect that McGilchrist is trying to help us, his readers, first recognize when we become more LH in our thinking. Because if we can recognize when this happens, then we can reflect on whatever context it was that brought us to that point. And with this insight we can then better equilibrate ourselves before we 'fall into the abyss' of LH capture. Elsewhere, McGilchrist has made the general observation that whenever our prime value is that of control (as is the case when administering an empire) the voice of the RH becomes fainter. He tends to resist providing a list of "what to do", preferring instead to describe "how we attend". It is as if his assumption is that if can simply change how we attend, then what it is we are to do would, in some sense, become immediately obvious and no such list would be necessary to begin with (Chanism describes sudden enlightenment in this way). As he said recently, "If we understood the world in all its awe-inspiring complexity, then a lot of things would happen differently because so much of what's wrong is due to simple hubris." Feng Youlan also noted that "Zhuangzi solved the original problem of the early Taoists simply by abolishing it. This is really the philosophical way of solving problems. Philosophy gives no information about matters of fact, and so cannot solve any problem in a concrete and physical way. It cannot, for example, help man either to gain longevity or defy death, nor can it help him to gain riches and avoid poverty. What it can do, however, is to give man a point of view, from which he can see that life is no more than death and loss is equal to gain. From the 'practical' point of view, philosophy is useless, yet it can give us a point of view which is very useful. To use an expression of the Zhuangzi, this is the usefulness of the useless." But to the degree that McGilchrist has explicitly mentioned practical things we might do, these have involved (1) resisting the imposition of excessive control in all areas of life and (2) bringing back a love for the arts and humanities and the worlds they open up to us, something he considers essential to a healthy society. In any event, his advice always centers around fostering that broad and sustained form of RH attention that is capable of changing what it is we see, and hence what it is we do, which in turn influences what we see. Feedback processes are in play.

The very last of the 20 "headline differences" between the hemispheres that McGilchrist gives in the introduction to TMWT is "The LH is unreasonably optimistic, and it lacks insight into its limitations. The RH is more realistic, but tends towards the pessimistic." Contemporary culture, captured by the LH and infused with the rhetoric of positivity and optimism, has become rather psychologically toxic. And it is unreasonably biased against doubt and the vulnerability that is associated with a slightly more pessimistic or melancholic disposition. But there's something very cathartic, and indeed authentic, about a keen sensitivity to ephemerality in all things, and it's key to understanding Japanese aesthetics as well (for example, mononoaware). McGilchrist famously calls himself a "hopeful pessimist", a sentiment that is entirely consistent with what he's written. This concept of the "pessimistic right hemisphere" harkens back to the overcast, cloudy, concealed and hidden aspect of yin in the Taoist cosmology. Laozi wrote "the best (person) is like water." To which Wing Tsit-Chan in his Source Book in Chinese Philosophy commented "water, the female, and the infant are Laozi's famous symbols of Tao." Laozi is praising the yin aspects of the yin and yang, a prominent organizing principle in Chinese dialectical monism, just as McGilchrist praises the RH form of attention that is deployed by the brain. The comparison here is not coincidental. Do these ideas have a relevance to the development of the Slow Movement?

Creating a paradigm shift?

Broadly speaking, the Slow Movement could be thought of as one of many nascent, local manifestations of the more general paradigm shift that McGilchrist is trying to effect. How we might support such a paradigm shift? Here are a few quotes to start us off with as begin our examination of that question. McGilchrist: "How we attend changes what it is we see." William James: "Everything is process and change." 

Taking these as our guides, to create a paradigm shift we would need to learn how to see everything as playing some kind of active role in influencing how we attend. That is to say, our way of attending is enacted within our conscious choices, and it also extends into the physical environment. McGilchrist has noted how matter and consciousness can be thought of using the analogy of water and ice, a single unity with more than one 'aspect'. Similarly, C.S. Peirce said that matter "is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws". The social and cultural structures thus affected are therefore both organizational and material in nature. Regarding the organizational structure, McGilchrist described how evolution saw fit to divide the brain, instantiating opponent processing with its two very different ways of attending, to keep the organism alive and connected to its embedded context. John Vervaeke described why this dynamic is important: 

"You can make a good case for left and right hemispheres. The left is for well defined, the right is for ill-defined and they’re doing opponent processing. The point I want to make is you’ve got this complex dynamic of opponent processing systems that are pushing and pulling on each other. They are causally interpenetrating, interrelated. We don't do most of our problem solving as individuals, but as collectives. Democracy is a form of collective intelligence or distributed cognition. It is the style of governance that gives us opponent processing [aka reciprocal accountability]. You and I may have opposite biases, but we cooperate in the shared understanding that the best way I can correct myself is by looking through your eyes, and the best way you can correct yourself is by looking through my eyes. We don't come to a final agreement. Democracy is constantly evolving and self-correcting. Today we have abandoned opponent processing for adversarial processing, in which one side has determined that its bias should be absolutely triumphant and destroy the other side. I talk about an “ecology of practices” because there is no “panacea practice”. Every practice has strengths, but it also has complementary weaknesses. We should be offering the world opponent processing situated within a hermeneutics of beauty, building friendship and fellowship, rather than adversarial processing situated in a hermeneutics of suspicion that only increases tribalism."

Currently many of our institutional practices align with the LH way of attending. We need to incorporate more practices that reflect a RH way of attending. For a recent example, see Erica Thompson's approach to "plausible models". Our models embody different ways of thinking, and can enter into a positive feedback loop that affects how we think about the future. As she said "We don’t want to know that by making more models, and increasingly similar models, that we will get the same answer again and again. What we want to know is that no ‘plausible model’ could give a different answer." Greater engagement with her concept of plausible models would likely go a long way toward re-establishing a healthier LH/RH balance.

But in the physical world of "inveterate habits" around us, how can we recognize the dialectical tension of opponent processing, between dividing and uniting? “Vital materialism” reworks received notions of matter as a uniform, inert substance and instead foregrounds novel accounts of its agentic thrust, processual nature, formative impetus, and self-organizing capacities. Matter, as an active force, is co-productive in conditioning and enabling social worlds and human life and experience. 

The design of the built environment, our tools, those systems of frictions that we interact with and through daily, all embody a similar capacity for agency, and can recapitulate the same processes. Kevin Kelly: "The idea that we choose the valence of technology’s charge is very appealing to our egos, but technology comes with biases and autonomy." Marshall McLuhan: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Neil Postman: "We have not yet learned to think of technology as having ideology built into its very form.” Hassenzahl and Laschke said, "With an aesthetic of convenience, you will never instill change. What you need rather, is an aesthetic of friction." Like McGilchrist's Gestalt shift, Hassenzahl and Laschke are creating a figure-ground shift in emphasizing the value of friction over the blind pursuit of the frictionless. In his 2016 article, Tristan Harris wrote: "Instead of viewing the world in terms of availability of choices, we should view the world in terms of friction required to enact choices." Kevin Roose: "Friction is just another word for “effort,” and it’s what makes us capable of critical thought and self-reflection." McGilchrist again: "Without some degree of resistance, without some degree of opposition, nothing comes into being. You have to exclude, you have to limit, and that is the process of resistance. Things are not isolated by resistance, but actually strengthened by and come into being by resistance." 

Wendy Wood has noted that it is possible to decrease friction to build good habits, and increase friction to dismantle bad habits. As she said,  "Anything you can do to make something easier and reduce the friction will make it more likely that people do it. Anything that increases the friction will make it less likely. (Not impossible, but much less likely.) We need to make the consequences of behavior part of our experience in order to factor them into the economy." Today we are designing the world for greater alienation and disembodied experiences. But we could leverage 'positive friction' and 'enabling constraints' to help restore equilibrium, just as surely as the disruption of these has contributed to LH capture today. The architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander once said: “In any organized object, extreme compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are the first signs of coming destruction. In a society, dissociation is anarchy. In a person, dissociation is the mark of schizophrenia and impending suicide.” His concept of a "feel for the whole" captured how the act of designing the structure of our ecosystem also shapes the quality of social interactions and the mental health of society itself. Tanzil Shafique also noted that “the way we build and organize our cities can help or hinder social connection". The built environment can either enable or constrain potential interaction. Winston Churchill, echoing McLuhan above, observed that "we shape the buildings and then the buildings shape us". Architects and planners produce urban landscapes that influence our mental landscape. If these are contributing to an epidemic of loneliness, then design can be an important tool in response to it. 

There's a living ecology of frictions, both material and immaterial, running through our minds, our cultural institutions, and our built environment and artifacts. Artificial intelligence is increasing relevant in this context as well (see "artificial intelligence" section of this article.) If we learn how to view these processes in their essential 'oppositional complementarity', and understand the generative capacity inherent to such a relationship, maybe we could effect a paradigm shift. We could slow down and live a healthier, more enriching life, without compromising on the things we value most. We could avoid an ironic fate. System transformation can be a bottom up and piecemeal process of slowly accumulating changes until a critical threshold is reached, and at that point a ‘phase transition’ occurs: the paradigm shifts. If we can see that there's a fundamental Heraclitean tension everywhere, one that we can engage with (and leverage), then we might see many opportunities to take the small steps that could culminate in a flourishing world. To be sure, as Jonathan Rowson notes, "the left hemisphere is ultimately unable to re-present schematically what is fully present to experience" (asymmetry with RH), and that is why there are two ways of attending to begin with, or as he put it, this is "the recognition that reality is invariably either/or and both/and". This doesn’t mean we should give up 'schematizing' all together as a completely hopeless pursuit. Not at all. Rather, it means we must recognize the limitations inherent to this mode of thinking while still striving to make incremental improvements to our current representations. This is the proper role of the LH, wherein it fulfills its function in service to the RH as an 'emissary’. 

We can integrate the hemisphere hypothesis into the development of axiological design, where value and ethics are primary and engineering is secondary. This is the inverse of nihilistic design, per Zak Stein. Under a paradigm of nihilistic design, technology can all too easily enter into a positive feedback loop with the left hemisphere and its quest for control and manipulation. That has implications for our attention, and what we see (or what we fail to see). Design invariably both embodies and leverages a sort of tension that is capable of shifting our attention (attention and tension are related words; attention is from ad "to, toward" + tendere "stretch"). If we as individuals recognize the very real relationships between design, attention, and value, perhaps we can be in a better position to wake up as a society. Jim Rutt recently spoke with Forrest Landry about what he considers to be the catastrophic risk of accelerating AI development. His argument is very interesting, and I won’t pretend to understand it well enough to accurately summarize here, so listen to it (or read the transcript). I’ll reproduce the conclusion of their conversation. Below that I note the apparent agreement between Landry, Zak Stein, and Iain McGilchrist concerning why this risk exists and what we can do to address it: 

Forrest Landry: “I find myself ending up being an advocate of appropriate use of technology, neither too much, nor too little… The only way to basically prevent [an existential catastrophe] from happening is to not play the game to start with. It’s like that old movie (WarGames, 1983). How do you win thermonuclear war? You don’t play. How do we get there? I think we need a non-transactional way of making choices in the world. Take the incentives out. Make it so that the ways in which we’re thinking about how we make choices at the level of communities are not dominated just by business. We don’t have separation between business and governance the same way we do between church and state. The perverse incentives are part of the reason why we keep ending up with categories of existential risks like this. If we’re looking at creating a meaningful basis for life, that essentially goes beyond the perverse incentives and addresses these kinds of concerns, people need to understand what’s actually going on. So in the long term, I’d love to see that get looked at, and that’s part of the reason why I work at things like Ephemeral Group Process (EGP), governance models, community design, and so on and so forth. …Nature doesn’t compromise. None of this is negotiable.” 

Jim Rutt: “And this is Robin Hansen’s “great filter” answer to the Fermi paradox. There’s two answers to the Fermi paradox. One is the ‘past great filter’, which is that it’s really hard to have gotten as far as we’ve gotten. Was it DNA? The prokaryotic cell? Multicellularity? The neuron? It could have been a bunch of things which had to happen before we got here. And then the other side of it is well, maybe it’s not that hard to get to where we are, but it’s really hard to survive much longer. This is the ‘future great filter’. Robin is of the view that probably the math says it’s more likely the ‘future great filter’, not the ‘past great filter’.” 

Forrest Landry: “Regardless, if it’s the past great filter, then we’re undervaluing life. If it’s the future great filter, then we need to get our act together right now so that we can continue to value life. Whatever we think about the Fermi paradox, the necessity of our action is clear.” 

Recall that in October Iain McGilchrist addressed the AI Word Summit, saying “The problem with every step that increases the reach of human power is it will sooner or later be used for evil ends, and once a pernicious regime reaches a certain level it can effectively destroy any attempt to resist it. AI is there to make things happen, to give us control, but this is good only if we make progress in wisdom as fast as we make progress in technical know-how. I’m not talking here about an apocalyptic future. I’m talking about apocalypse now. We’re already calmly and quietly surrendering our liberty, our privacy, our dignity, our time, our values, and our talents to the machine. Machines will serve us well if they truly relieve us from drudgery, but we must leave human affairs to humans. If not, we sign our own death warrant.” In so many words, Landry effectively said in this podcast with Rutt the same message that McGilchrist delivered there. McGilchrist’s metatheoretical approach for balancing the narrow, ambitious instrumentalism of the left hemisphere, which is the form of AGI that Landry describes, with the values and restraint of the right hemisphere can be usefully applied to his work. Also recall that Zak Stein closed his article “Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design” with the sentence “The dangerous reign of nihilistic design must end if our civilization is not to.” Nihilistic design ends in nihilism. Axiological design, which is the appropriate technology Landry advocates, recognizes the existential importance of context sensitive limitations applied to technology and operating within culture. AI value alignment means programming biases into AI that will disrupt business as usual, because BAU is most definitely not aligned with human values. Having human values means being biased in making certain decisions - biased in ways that help people, and don’t hurt them, biased in ways that create healthy ecosystems, not degraded ecosystems. The talk of “removing bias” from AI is a codeword for nihilistic design that counteracts the need for value alignment. And that sort of talk will not disrupt business as usual, but only exacerbate existing problems. BAU has already been on an accelerating path to greater levels of extraction and exploitation. Amplifying that trend may be irrecoverable. 

Shoshana Zuboff described the “blind by design” approach. Is it inevitable that a blind culture would design blindness into everything else? In her paper "Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?" (2022) she writes that while businesses “admit that blindness by design is incompatible with any reasonable construction of responsible stewardship… executives and allies defend blindness by design as the protection of free speech, another rhetorical sleight of hand that aims to distract lawmakers and the public from noticing the facts.” This sleight of hand is accomplished by erasing the nuance required to balance the benefits of freedom and the benefits of constraint against each other. Instead we are presented with a mutually exclusive choice. That’s the trap. And it works because the LH is divorced from reality, simply unable to see nuance, and its only value is that of power. It will fall for this false choice every time. An entire culture captured by the LH is thus prevented from imposing common sense rules and regulations to guard against abuse.

Addressing Multipolar traps

I’m going to make an extended commentary on something Daniel Schmachtenberger said in his recent conversation with Nate Hagens, and in doing so I will draw on the work of several other thinkers. Here’s the portion of the conversation I will address: 

“Human intelligence unbound by wisdom, and in the pursuit of narrow goals, it is fair to say, is the underlying generative dynamic of the growth imperative of the superorganism [Hagen’s term for what Schmachtenberger elsewhere called “Moloch”] and this metacrisis. The growth in consumption, waste, technology, and the promotion of the same, are all epiphenomena, a second order effect of that. It has created all the technologies: the industrial tech, the agricultural tech, the digital tech, the nuclear weapons, the energy harvesting… all of it. That intelligence has created all those things. What everyone is pursuing is not the growth of the whole system. They're just individually pursuing their own narrow goals. The pursuit of AGI to maximize recursive intelligence is partly the result of this competitive race, and partly the result of a set of biases. Those who are more focused on the opportunity than the risk end up being the ones who rush ahead. People who don't think AGI will kill everything try to build AGI because they think it will solve everything. It's a combination of 'naive progress optimism', all of the various sources of motivated reasoning, the legal obligation for profit maximization, the inherent externalization of liability and centralization of profit, and the avoidance of regulation because nations want economic growth to grow their militaries and strengthen geopolitical alliances. There are layers and layers of multipolar traps driving the optimization of near-term narrow interests.”

His use of the term “multipolar traps” (otherwise called the tragedy of the commons, a multi-player prisoner’s dilemma) refers to a basic coordination problem affecting global society. Because it is a coordination problem, any attempt that is initiated by one player to simply make business-as-usual (BAU) too politically or financially expensive is essentially too superficial of a solution to actually work. All players must act together at the same time. Multipolar traps help to explain why regulatory capture is so pervasive, and it is the reason why Pigouvian taxation tends to gain little to no actual traction. (Carbon taxes have attempted to avoid this coordination problem with “border adjustments”, but there are other contextual problems for that approach.) As Schmachtenberger noted “nations want economic growth to grow their militaries and strengthen geopolitical alliances”. So if any single nation makes BAU too expensive, then it will almost certainly be out-competed or dominated by the other players. And because this is a multiscalar phenomenon, we can see its operation not just in international affairs, but anywhere that competitive relationships play out. Conversely, where there is less competition, these dynamics exert less influence over decision making (thankfully). 

The notion of competition and competitive dynamics is central here. It requires a focused, narrow, predictive, model making capacity of intelligence in service of goal achievement. Schmachtenberger correctly associates this with McGilchrist’s left hemisphere way of attending, and he insightfully recognizes how this can lead to multipolar traps. Arran Gare drew another inference: “Unless they are checked… people with greater left hemisphere dominance are likely to be more successful than people with healthy brains. With their manipulative, instrumental thinking and calculating, exploitative attitudes, they become successful parasites on others and on public institutions. The most problematic and damaging are those who strive for power." On Gare's behalf, I must apologize to all the non-human parasites out there, who at least have a legitimate excuse for their behavior. 

Echoing Gare, Schmachtenberger said: “Intelligence unbound by wisdom, and in the pursuit of narrow goals, it is fair to say, is the underlying generative dynamic of the growth imperative”. The main characteristic of this way of thinking is that it is always done in reference to a narrowly conceived notion of self, and it is motivated by concerns in reference to that, such as ambition and fear. Schmachtenberger also said “those who are more focused on the opportunity than the risk end up being the ones who rush ahead”. We are now in a position where we can say something about this opportunity that they seek. It is the opportunity to exercise more power and control within a competitive arena, motivated primarily by their self interest. 

Gare was right, such people must be checked and held accountable, but efforts to do this haven’t succeeded due to multipolar traps that lead to a “race to the bottom”. And so now we must address these dynamics. Elinor Ostrom’s life work was attempting to understand how the coordination problem can be addressed. She found that multipolar traps exist wherever there are deficits in the balancing feedbacks of communication and reciprocity necessary for trust within a coherent, fully integrated system. I suspect that these deficits also lead to greater fear and suspicion, and allow those “parasites” to which Gare referred to seize control and shift overall system dynamics. We’ve seen this many times in the decline of empires and the rise of fascist leaders. The toxic combination of narrow ambition, fear, mistrust, and suspicion inevitably exacerbates a “left hemisphere insurrection”, or as Schmachtenberger calls it, the “emissary intelligence function”, and consequently the “master wisdom function” retreats further from view. Power and control becomes the dominant value of nations, and unaccountable surveillance increases. I could go on to describe the form and function of dystopian dynamics, but this is tangential to the main point, and besides others have done this better and at greater length elsewhere. 

So back to the main point, as McGilchrist described, this leads to a “left hemisphere insurrection” and the concomitant “unmaking of the world”. I described some of the deficits that produce it, so it should be clear that part of the solution will involve shifting the dominant value that drives international politics away from power and toward responsiveness, and that means more communication and trust. Elinor Ostrom’s work on design principles for collective self-governance addresses how these healthy dynamics can be established. Helena Norber-Hodge has done some related work. In short, Ostrom showed that where natural resources are jointly managed by their users, and where key management decisions are made as close to the scene of events and the actors involved as possible, outcomes for the system as a whole are much better. McGilchrist’s ‘metatheory of attention’ both immensely strengthens and places Ostrom’s principles on a firm foundation. It reinforces her insight concerning the importance of wise direct engagement within the world, as embodied partners in creation. The holistic system itself can also be seen to include many leverage points for the realization of healthy social and economic dynamics, a topic Donella Meadows described. 

As was mentioned earlier, no methodology will be sufficient. Everything must ultimately be in deference to the RH and its ability to presence to reality. The self-undermining methodology of Peirce’s pragmatism was intended to keep managers humble in the face of reality and skeptical of their own models, methods, and logic. Ostrom’s methodology is explicitly designed to enhance the capacity of individuals and groups to be responsive, to presence to the embodied systems that they manage, to stay “as close as possible”. And this is why the values of communication, trust, and responsiveness (values of the RH) are elevated above sheer power and control (values of the LH). Whenever power and control come to dominate system dynamics it can easily be viewed as the consequence of a breakdown of trust, communication, and responsiveness, the fragmentation of social systems, and the loss of connection and relatedness. Overall, that is an insurrection of the sort McGilchrist describes. 

[Side note: There is a common (and superficial) misreading that should be addressed. Some people read the words “left” and “right” and then get the initial impression that “McGilchrist insists that everything’s binary”. So if it helps at all, he’s Daoist. Think of Daoist philosophy. In Daoism, the binary concepts (Taiji) emerge from a deeper nonbinary reality (Wuji). Part of McGilchrist’s project can be seen as explaining that we all have access to the deeper nonbinary world, but we get confused with binary thinking. It should be clear that, in order to talk about binary thinking one must make reference to it, and there’s going to be a lot of discussion of paradox as well. At any rate, this also helps to explain why McGilchrist is a great foundation for Elinor Ostrom. She, like him, also eschewed the imposition of binary thinking, and strongly advocated for understanding our embodied reality.] 

In her Hayek Lecture at the Institute of Economic Affairs you can see Ostrom's focus is on really presencing to each unique situation and resisting the temptation to over-generalize: “What are some of the challenges that we face in order to sustain the health of diverse commons? The first is overcoming what I call the ‘panacea trap’: a very large number of policy makers and policy articles talk about the ‘best way’ of doing something. People used to think that if ‘the market’ wasn't the best way it meant that ‘the government’ was the best way. We need to get away from thinking in these very broad terms that don't give us the specific detail that is needed to really know what we're talking about.  We need to recognize that the systems that actually have worked in practice fit the diversity of ecological conditions and social systems that exist. People want to make me argue that community is always the best. I won't step into that trap! There are certainly very strong places where people can self-organize. But it's not the best. Just like government isn't the best. Just like the market is not the best. Not all resources should be privately owned or government owned. That was Garrett Hardin’s conclusion, and it’s repeated in many textbooks.”

Cross-cultural studies

How are McGilchrist's books and ideas received outside the Anglophone world? We have seen that, within at least some parts of Western cultures, there's a recognition of our self-inflicted social and environmental predicament. And for those familiar with McGilchrist, the proximal causes of this situation do appear to align with the left hemisphere way of thinking. Living in a nihilistic culture populated by people displaying schizotypal traits, we are constantly reminded of this state of affairs. But as we travel further from the epicenter of Western culture and into less assimilated cultures, the conditions may become markedly different, and so too might the reception and application of the hemisphere hypothesis. People who are not overly reductive and instrumental in their thinking, who recognize values and a sense of the sacred, and live in a culture that has retained its customs and traditions, may be less interested in a hypothesis that tries to explain at long length what they already intuitively understand. For example, in Japan Shinto beliefs are very animistic, even panpsychic, and there are many other features that place the culture more toward the RH when compared to Western civilization. But cultures do change, and knowledge, beliefs, and lifestyles with it. So the primary relevance of McGilchrist's thought might be in serving as a bulwark against colonialism (with regard to indigenous peoples), homogenization, and assimilation by the contemporary West. In short, in the context of a healthy culture, the hemisphere hypothesis can serve as an evidence-based defense for non-Western ways of being, an important part of any cultural "immune system". But it's hard to know how such ideas have been received internationally without actually being a part of these other cultures. Tentative search results for イアン・マクギルクリスト (Iain McGilchrist's name in Japanese katakana) on my Internet browser were not encouraging, though that may simply reflect my browser's regional settings. These are still the early days for this sort of research. Cross-cultural studies could help to identify local analogues of the hypothesis, as well as how those analogues might have influenced how people understand themselves, their place in the world, and their future.

Philosophical aspects of quietness

Iain McGilchrist: "I've discovered that silence is incredibly important for me. I can't do anything when I'm surrounded by conversation or any kind of stimulation. I spend most of my life in silence, and I love it. It's profoundly rich. It's impossible to describe. It's a very nourishing thing, like water to me, silence. And I know that that's also true of many people who have entered holy orders in a monastery and so forth. So I think it is profoundly creative. And one of the desperate things about our lives is people are terrified of silence. There's noise — background music, chatter — everywhere. Nobody is at peace with the idea of silence, which is the bed of creativity." 

What can be said about quietness? The Alaska Quiet Rights Coalition certainly isn’t the first to have directed its attention to this subject. We’ve all seen how the world is becoming increasingly full of distractions and disruptions. It feels harder and harder to just “get away from it all”. Speaking for myself, as someone who grew up watching Looney Tunes, I can still hear Mel Blanc’s voice echoing in my head “Quiet!” The irony isn't lost. This has been called the ‘Age of Accelerationism’ in contrast to the less energy intensive (and generally slower) patterns that defined life in the not-too-distant past. But acceleration toward what and why, I do not know. It's a schizophrenic existence, and escaping from the hustle and bustle can seem like a small act of rebellion.  

How did we get to this point? How have cultural perspectives on the role of quietness, of silence, shaped our culture and thought, and changed over time? As A.N. Whitehead noted, “the sort of ideas we attend to, and the sort of ideas which we push into the negligible background, govern our hopes, our fears, our control of behaviour. As we think, we live. This is why the assemblage of philosophic ideas is more than a specialist study. It moulds our type of civilization.” He also added, perhaps as a cautionary note, “the difficulty of philosophy is the expression of what is self-evident. Our understanding outruns the ordinary usage of words”. Wittgenstein concurred with the latter statement: “God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone’s eyes”. Given how self-evident the value of quietness is, we are perhaps doomed from the outset to provide an adequate description! But there’s a lot that has been said about quietness and its virtues already.

One may give a simple physical description of how acoustic waves propagate through a medium. And for many people the presence or absence of such features would suffice when defining the opposing qualities of quietness and noise. But this leaves out how different sounds are interpreted, how they affect us and other meaning-making members of the environment, and what we think when we hear different sounds. Such higher order effects are impacted by the sensual quality of a place, making its measurement a complex calculation. These acoustic–environmental relationships have been studied by people concerned with semiotics (specifically biosemiotics or ecosemiotics), which are processes that involve signs and the communication of meaning. Signs can be received by any of the senses, whether visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or taste. When we step outside, and listen to an environment that is not dominated by human made sounds (anthrophony), we enter a world rich with meaning to the other organisms with whom we share the planet. In his talk "Opening the Doors of Creativity" (1990) Terence McKenna underscored this point, saying "Nature is not mute; it is man who is deaf". This was a response to Sartre, who said "Nature is mute". 

According to cultural anthropologist and Indigenous rights activist Eduardo Kohn, author of "How Trees Think", what we share with nonhuman living creatures is not just our physical bodies (the evidence of common evolutionary descent) but also the fact that we all live with and through signs. Because we are not the only ones who think, human language is just one kind of sign system. This means that understanding other forms used by nonhuman living creatures (see Karen Bakker, author of The Sounds of Life) can open up an entire “semiosphere” of meaning where processes of combinatorial complexity form increasingly complex “semiotic webs” that are accessible to cognitive agents at the higher "integrative levels" (a term used by Stanley Salthe) typical of biological life. Kohn’s work with the Runa in Ecuador taught him that forests and the many beings that live in them –animals, plants, and perhaps even spirits– also think. (McKenna's statement clearly does not apply equally to people such as the Runa.) “Finding ways to allow the thoughts of the forest to think themselves through us changes our understanding and can open our thinking to that which lies beyond the human context.” Kohn believes it can “provide ethical guidance in these times of human-driven planetary ecological crisis, a crisis that can be characterized as an affliction of this larger ecology of mind.” But it’s not just the forest, it’s the tundra, the desert, the oceans, the planet. “We need to cultivate our attunement to the world." 

If sounds are part of a semiosphere, then it’s clear that disruption of this web of meaning, through noises that do not communicate meaningful information to others, or otherwise prevent normal interactions, can have broader impacts on ecologies. This suggests a dual-aspect definition of "quiet" (via negativa and via positiva). According to this approach, it is both the absence of most forms of technophony, and a necessary precondition for enabling the presence of biophony/geophony of the sort that characterizes ecosemiosis, or a healthy ecosemiotic web. Could this be why quietness has been held a virtue across cultures? Although apparent quietness is the outward manifestation, what is really being selected for is optimization of experiential quality and wider resonance with the environmental milieu. Filmmakers also try to achieve a synchronization between the film and the audience, and understand that a soundtrack cannot convey too much information, but should strive for just enough. As Iain McGilchrist writes in The Matter with Things: 

“The imagination thrives on the implicit, and is deadened by the explicit. The explicit is single: the implicit is a coming together of opposites, and requires the simultaneous presence and absence of whatever is being gestured towards. We may become more aware of something if it is partially eclipsed, while a pure manifestation would not have achieved its end. If you are making a film, and wish to evoke the stillness of a warm day in the country, do you leave the soundtrack completely blank? No, you introduce the faint and intermittent buzzing of a fly. In an interior scene of tranquillity, the faint, slow, deep tick-tock of a grandfather clock intensifies both the peace and, as may seem oddly, the sense that time has come to a standstill. When the top of a mountain is hidden in cloud we appreciate its full immensity better than when the whole is in view. Limitation can intensify the sense of infinity.”

The Japanese cultural aesthetic of 間 (ma), means 'betweenness', a gap, space, pause, or the perception of an interval in time or space where dissimilar things can freely co-exist. It is the opposite of empty, and more the place where a dynamic dance can occur. Isaac Stern described music as ‘that little bit between each note – silences which give the form’. It is the relations between things, the tension between sound and silence, that is of primary importance. The composer John Cage, who studied Zen Buddhism since the late 1940s, decided to visit an anechoic chamber. Though he expected to hear silence he could still hear the rush of his blood circulating through his body. His realization of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of 4′33″ three years later. This has been described as “four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence”, but what it really consists of are the sounds of the environment that the audience hears while it is performed. As Julius Lester would write much later, “Silence was not the absence of sound but was itself a sound that could be loud or soft, soothing or disturbing, complex or simple.” In his book, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, Fung Yulan wrote “the combination of Taoism and Buddhism resulted in Ch’anism [Zen], which I should like to call a philosophy of silence. If one understands and realizes the meaning and significance of silence, one gains something of the object of metaphysics.” There are other philosophical movements which have been called quietist, and avoided metaphysical speculation, but this was not what Yulan referred to: 

“There were Ch’an Masters who used silence to express the idea of Wu or the First Principle. It is said, for example, that when Hui-chung (died 775) was to debate with another monk, he simply mounted his chair and remained silent. The other monk then said: “Please propose your thesis so I can argue.” Hui-chung replied: “I have already proposed my thesis.” The monk asked: “What is it?” Hui-chung said: “I know it is beyond your understanding,” and with this left his chair. (Record of the Transmission of the Light, chüan 5.) The thesis Hui-chung proposed was that of silence. Since the First Principle or Wu is not something about which anything can be said, the best way to expound it is to remain silent.”

Chinese philosophical traditions refer to the “net of words.” And accordingly, the best statements do not “fall into the net of words.” Zhuangzi made this famous: “Nets are for catching fish; after one gets the fish, one forgets the net. Traps are for catching rabbits; after one gets the rabbit, one forgets the trap. Words are for getting meaning; after one gets the meaning, one forgets the words. Where can I find people who have forgotten words, and have a word with them?" Alan Watts, who decades ago provided many Westerners with their first introduction to Eastern philosophy, said “To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about.” There is an acute awareness of a tension that exists between what may be best described as opposites. Philosophical schools needed a solution to the paradox of describing the indescribable. Enough words to indirectly gesture toward their principles, while maintaining, as Wittgenstein later noted, that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Hegel held that antinomies appear in all conceptions, and that “every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations.” The title "Sandokai", one of the core texts of Zen, is translated as ‘the harmony of difference and sameness’. This unity of opposites was the cornerstone of philosophical Taoism, illustrated by the yin and yang of the taijitu symbol, and of central theme in Heraclitus’ thought, which he explained through the metaphor of the taunt strings on a lyre which are pulled in opposite directions. Other examples, such as hot and cold, light and dark, or sound and silence, are too numerous to list. As Alan Watts pointed out, we cannot “keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys”. Niels Bohr noted that contraria sunt complementa (contraries fulfil one another) described the fine structure of the cosmos. Iain McGilchrist explains the ‘Heraclitean tension’ between opposites:

For opposites to co-exist, they clearly cannot cancel or annul one another, but must rather give rise to something new: a form of harmoniē, as in Heraclitus’ lyre. But note that this harmony is not to be taken merely in the ordinary musical sense of concord, but in the sense of tonos, tautness, from which we get our word ‘tone’. If the opposing forces in lyre or bow simply annulled one another, the string would go slack – no tonus – and nothing, no flight of notes, no arrow’s flight – could come from either. This is also, by the way, what is intended by the Golden Mean: not a flabby compromise, but a position in which taut synergy produces a dynamic equipoise.

This insight has found expression in one form or another in most ancient cultures and may be described as a form of dual-aspect monism. Applied to the interactions within Eduardo Kohn’s semiosphere, it can serve as part of the foundation for a fully relational perspective, one that could eventually lead to a context sensitive attunement that supports ecological health and well-being. We’ve briefly looked at some physical, metaphysical, and phenomenal descriptions of quietness. We haven’t touched on the “Great Silence” however. This question has occupied anyone who has ever looked up at the night sky and wondered: “Are we alone?” Karl Schroeder provided one possible solution to the Fermi Paradox: advanced technology may simply be indistinguishable from Nature, and the corresponding alien civilizations would hence be indistinguishable from natural systems. He speculated “In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies… After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don't produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained." That's pure speculation. But one thing is certain: cultural values combined with contemporary levels of social stress and our desire for peace and quiet are all urging us to reconsider our relationship with excessive noise.  

Julian Huxley's 1914 paper "The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe" should alert us to yet another consideration regarding the impact of anthrophony upon the natural soundscape. Animals (and of course we are animals as well) have rituals, patterns of behavior that not only serve some ostensible purpose but also connect them to a deeper field of meaning, a field from which organic life springs forth. Not only does excessive anthrophony disrupt human rituals, but it also disrupts the variety of rituals we find in the cycles of nature and the living creatures that compose the body of Gaia. Perhaps it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to suggest that organizations that strive to elevate our collective conscious awareness concerning the importance of preserving natural quiet, and here we include "Alaska Quiet Rights Coalition" (AQRC), are also thereby preserving natural rites. Indeed, the homonymous name "Alaska Quiet Rites Coalition" may shed some light on the multi-faceted importance of this subject. Another perspective is simply the recognition that the landscape is a host to many, whether resident or guest. And AQRC strive to preserve the integrity of this relationship, reminds us of the responsibilities that come with it, and celebrates the soundscape which is a vital part of it, for the benefit of those who live and visit.

[See also "Ecology of Fear" subsection in this article.]

The large microbiome

"All disease begins in the gut." - Hippocrates

I'd like to introduce you to my friend John. John began his career working at organizations that generously provided their employees with large healthy meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). Eventually he took a new position where meals were not provided. As he wasn't in the habit of packing a lunch, this change of position subsequently led to a change in his dietary habits and an overall reduction in food consumed during the day. Eventually he found that he was experiencing occasional abdominal discomfort. But it wasn't a grumbling stomach, rather it was an aching gut. Because it wasn't his stomach that was telling him to eat, he didn't immediately trace the cause of the problem to his eating habits, after all he was getting enough food right? Instead he suspected something more sinister (appendicitis, cancer?). The wide range of advice he encountered, both online and offline, didn't help narrow down the issue, and instead only exacerbated his hypochondriac tendencies. Eventually he came across some information about gut dysbiosis, the importance of prebiotic foods, and the many "downstream" effects that can result from deviations from healthy eating patterns. Now he knows what his gut was trying to tell him. 

The commonly used expression "empty calories", which suggests that it's possible to consume more than enough energy without the food sufficiently nourishing one's body, has many possible implications. Now we know that empty calories can also mean insufficient nourishment of the "large microbiome", which is perhaps a more appropriate name for the colon than the less informative sounding "large intestine". Sam Possemiers and coauthors wrote in a 2011 paper "For many years, it was believed that the main function of the large intestine was the resorption of water and salt and the facilitated disposal of waste materials... Nowadays it is clear that the complex microbial ecosystem in our intestines should be considered as a separate organ within the body, with a metabolic capacity which exceeds the liver by a factor of one hundred." I'll use the neologism "large microbiome" from here on. 

The obvious structural differences between the small intestine and large microbiome should make it apparent that there's a significant change occurring to the chyme (partially digested food) where it enters the caecum. (Over 99% of the bacteria in the gut are anaerobes, but in the caecum, aerobic bacteria reach high densities.) The small intestine does not have a large number of bacteria most of the time, and so when the chyme mixes with the microorganisms present there it undergoes a dramatic compositional change. Comparative anatomy shows these structures are mirrored across many different species, particularly those whose diets are composed of significant amounts of plant material. 

There's a synergy, a symbiosis, between the organ, the microbes, and the chyme. And it's healthy functioning begins with a concept that was first introduced in 1995 called "prebiotics". These are typically nondigestible fiber compounds that pass undigested through the upper part of the gastrointestinal tract and stimulate the growth or activity of beneficial microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi by acting as substrates for them. Fermentation is the main mechanism of action by which prebiotics are used. When the partially digested chyme containing prebiotics enters the large microbiome, the bacteria get to work and the organ is able to maintain healthy functioning. 

Preliminary research into prebiotics has demonstrated potential effects on calcium and other mineral absorption, immune system effectiveness, bowel acidity, reduction of colorectal cancer risk, inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis), hypertension and defecation frequency. These and other beneficial properties may be due to the increased production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) as nourishment for colonic walls, and mitigation of ulcerative colitis symptoms. Recent data have shown that the SCFA acetate, propionate, and butyrate [one of the most beneficial SCFAs and the primary fuel feeding the intestinal epithelium] function in the suppression of inflammation and cancer. In other words, the mechanistic explanation for the beneficial effects of dietary fiber may be largely attributed to fermentation by the microbiota: we feed our microbiome with fiber, and they turn around and feed us right back. When we don't eat enough whole plant foods we are in effect "starving our microbial self" (2014 paper title by Erica and Justin Sonnenburg). The relationship between modern Western lifestyles and the human microbiome is both damaged and causing damage. We should shift attention away from the plant/animal distinction (which dominates most discourse on diet fads) and toward the lifestyle-microbiome dynamic. This suggests some counterintuitive possibilities. Could it be that Western diets that include more meat are healthier because they complement the depleted Western microbiome composition better than plant based diets, which would require the more diverse microbiome more common in the Global South? Is a more diverse microbiome necessary for proper digestion and metabolic function? The Sonnenburgs wrote "the modern microbiota deviates substantially from ancestral states". What consequences might this have for human health?

One of the downstream effects of maintaining a healthy large microbiome is large, healthy bowel movements. The same paper by the Sonnenburgs notes "Denis Burkitt reported that rural Africans passed stool that was up to five times greater by mass, had intestinal transit times that were more than twice as fast, and ate three to seven times more dietary fiber (60 - 140g versus 20g) than their Western counterparts". The bigger our bowel movements, the healthier we may be. For every gram of fiber we eat, we can increase our stool by nearly two grams, due to the fiber fermentation process in our colon. By weight, the bulk of our stool is pure bacteria, trillions and trillions of bacteria. Fiber is what our good gut bacteria thrive on, their fuel source. When we eat whole plant foods, like fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains, we are telling our gut flora to be fruitful and multiply. The risk of low stool weight includes colon cancer, diverticular disease, appendicitis, anal diseases, etc. When stool weight gets down to around half a pound, colon cancer rates increase, at a quarter pound the incidence quadruples. The link between stool size and colon cancer is "transit time", the number of hours it takes for food to go from mouth to anus: the larger the stool the quicker the transit time and easier it is for our intestines to move things along. 

Most people may not realize you can have daily bowel movements and still be effectively constipated. So a diet high in fiber has many benefits. Not only can it prevent heartburn, GERD, and lower your risk of developing colorectal cancer by lowering fecal pH, but with enough fiber, one should be able to sit in any position and have a comfortable bowel movement. Colorectal cancer is extremely rare in native African populations (less than one per 100,000 compared with 65 per 100,000 for African Americans). Eating just five times more fiber with a prebiotic diet can result in about a 50 times less incidence of colon cancer, the third most common cause of cancer death in the world! This should probably be understood not as increasing overall quantity, but adjusting relative proportions of the same quantity. Given that food resources are highly variable, and eating opportunities are often unpredictable, creating a food schedule can be very difficult. However simple intermittent fasting combined with a diverse diet can result in a large and complete bowel movement every other day on average (without significantly altering exercise levels, fiber content, or other dietary supplements). Why fasting improves bowel function isn't completely clear. However it may affect the composition of the microbiome and improve intestinal health.

The standard American diet of highly processed food leaves nothing left for our gut flora; it's all absorbed in the small intestine before it makes it down to the colon. As another paper, "The Role of Short-Chain Fatty Acids in Health and Disease" notes, "The biggest issue presented by a Western diet typically high in fat and digestible saccharides is that nutrients are mostly absorbed in the duodenum, leaving very few substrates for the colonic bacteria. [This means a loss in microbial metabolites and the microbes themselves.] Consequently this results in dysbiosis, the impairment of microbiota composition [bad bacteria can take over] and increased susceptibility to inflammatory diseases such as inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) or colon cancer", metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. It's difficult to appreciate all the possible downstream effects. In their paper "Do microbiotas warm their hosts?", the authors write "We estimate that microbial metabolism in the human gut, for example, produces 61 kcal/h, which corresponds to approximately 70% of the total heat production of an average person at rest." But would an altered large microbiome function the same? 

The human gut microbiota is mostly composed by two dominant bacterial phyla, Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes that together represent more than 90% of the total community. The relative abundance of these phyla is highly variable between subjects from the same population, which is probably due to many lifestyle-associated factors, which include diet and physical activity, but also food additives, contaminants, and antibiotic consumption, among others that influence the composition of the microbiota in the gastrointestinal tract. Firmicutes make short chain fatty acids, which help to prevent toxins and inflammation. Inflammation decreases serotonin and dopamine levels, which is what we see in anxiety and depression. The ratio is influenced by factors like (1) diet composition and (2) physical activity levels. Activity levels influence intestinal motility (peristalsis) and the transit time of the chyme through the different segments of the gastrointestinal tract. And all this, in turn, affects the composition of the microbiota. So you can see how these synergistic, "chicken and egg" sort of feedback processes, all go on within a single human holobiont, and can make it hard to distinguish which is a cause and which is an effect. Behavior influences microbiota which influences serotonin which influences... behavior. The biomechanics of gut health is critical. As Robyn Chutkan noted, "If you’re not moving, neither are your bowels." That can mean bloating and gas pressure. Relieving that pressure with increased fluid intake and mobility is best, not by merely increasing abdominal pressure to try to "squeeze" out the gas. Observing that runners have better bowel movements, she added "Get sweaty as often as you can, at least three times a week." So not only is eating greens every day going to help, but so does vigorous movement. Running for bowel health isn't a very common reason, as most people run or jog to improve cardio-pulmonary health, but it makes sense. Recall that James Lovelock, who died at 103, would frequently take long walks at his "signature breakneck speed". Whether that was a conscious decision on his part to maintain a healthy large intestine or not, it is even more essential today given our increasingly sedentary lifestyles. It's so critical, that for some people this is the missing variable. Increasing 'hours spent moving' may do more to improve gut health than anything else. Office workers have even resorted to using "standing desks" and other hacks to reduce time spent sitting. But since running can result in joint damage, vigorous walking can be just as good. The point is simply regular and frequent movement, which is in part the reason for "radio calisthenics". (Perhaps there will come a day when OSHA measures these quality of life indicators such that every job must include X time/distance walking.) The biomechanics of waste elimination suggests that a squatting position promotes a more complete evacuation of bowels. On the toilet, elimination may be assisted by a "yoga posture" where one is leaning forward with a concavely arched back (enhanced with a head turned back, and even eyes rolled up) for optimal mechanical advantage. Combine this with intermittent fasting (feast/famine or dietary "punctuated equilibrium") on high calorie foods to prevent over proliferation of a microbiome monocultures. Having discussed the mechanics, let's return again to the psychological aspects of gut health. Numerous studies indicate gastrointestinal (GI) problems, including abdominal pain and chronic constipation, are unusually common among people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). I find this interesting in light of the rising prevalence of autistic features in contemporary Western culture, something which Iain McGilchrist finds particularly significant. How closely does this rise parallel the rise in GI problems?

The disappearance of beneficial commensals could be addressed by the administration of specific probiotics such as Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG, L. reuteri DSM 17938, L. plantarum DSM 9843, and Bifidobacterium lactis Bb-12. Lactobacillus rhamnosus and L. reuteri are often added to yogurts, cheeses, milk, and other dairy products. Lactobacillus plantarum and Bifidobacterium lactis Bb-12 are present in fermented saurkraut and dairy products. Most people can easily make cabbage saurkraut at home, and buy dairy foods with active cultures (yogurt, cheeses), in addition to eating a plant based diet.

Food security and physical activity are among the top concerns of public health advocates, along with access to basic services. Many people do not have a healthy diet that includes cooked whole grains, vegetables, herbs and spices (and raw fruits). Instead they are eating overly processed foods with high amounts of simple sugars, trans fatty acids, emulsifiers, and low amounts of complex phytochemicals and insoluble fiber. This has consequences for the health of the human microbiome, and the digestive and metabolic health of the holobiont. Much of what is sold as food, and that we store in our pantries and refrigerators, should not be called "food", but rather hyperpalatable "pseudofood", per David Kessler (The End of Overeating). These products are often more readily available, heavily advertised, nonperishable, involve very little preparation to make, and provide a quick hit of dopamine when they hit the tongue. In short, we've made eating pseudofood as frictionless as possible, and as a result (and in combination with other disruptive factors) Americans suffer from some of the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. How do we return to healthier food choices and consumption habits?

One could plan for a “high fiber, high exercise, sleep hygiene” plan. The sleep hygiene '3,2,1 formula' means no food three hours, no drink two hours, and no computer use one hour before bed. That promotes the intermittent fasting time allowing the gut to periodically rest. High exercise means incorporating Dr. Paul Cotter's research on the connection between microbial diversity and exercise. And high fiber means incorporating the Sonnenburg's research. In The Good Gut they write "The tubers that the Hadza eat are so fibrous that after a period of chewing diners spit out a cud of the toughest fibers... they consume between 100 to 150 grams of fiber per day." (17) They also write "Perhaps the lack of dirt in the diet of people living in the hygienic industrialized world is problematic. There is some evidence that the consumption of soil bacteria can ameliorate symptoms associated with IBS." (106) They note that Dr. Denis Burkett said "If you pass small stools, you have to have large hospitals." (119) Relatedly, foods with a high glycemic index should be avoided. And "Once you reach an optimal level of fiber, it is important to continue to maintain homeostasis." (223) Decreased fiber consumption and less exercise can, over time, tilt the immune system toward the chronic pro-inflammatory side that feeds ‘inflammaging’. (194) There may be a sort of circadian optimization in play here, where several pairs of opposites (syzygies) are brought together physically and/or psychologically for maximum benefit: Processed (cooked or fermented)/raw, fast/feast, fiber/fat, exercise/rest, relax/contract (anismus), flow/stasis, acid (vinegar)/base... Hot cooked food improves digestion while cool nights improve sleep. High fiber foods improve stool bulk and intestinal transit while low fiber fats provide high energy. Physical exertion and activity during the day contrasts with still, quiet, restful nights. Cooking food makes it more digestible, and (as with ectotherms) a higher body temperature enables us to digest better. Temperature varies according to circadian and reproductive cycles, age, sex, activity levels, and what we eat or drink. These cycles also influence the composition and regulation of the large microbiome. 

Add to this that "mindset" is also a causal mechanism in eliciting physiological changes, in some cases as significant as genetic propensity. Both placebo and nocebo effects are presumably psychogenic, which implies that psychological rather than a physiological factors can play a key causal role. Tibetan monks are famously known to practice a sort of meditation call "tummo" in which they can raise their body temperature, especially that of hands and feet, to the point where they can stay outside in the cold, even drying wet sheets draped over their bodies. (Wim Hof gained worldwide attention for his exceptional endurance in extreme cold using similar methods.) The science may not yet be entirely clear, but controlling physiological states through greater awareness and conscious regulation of the affective quality of expectations and beliefs has been demonstrated. In his book, Suggestible You, Erik Vance talked to scientists around the world who investigate placebos, internal pharmacies, hypnosis, and the power of belief on the body and mind. One of his favorite quotes came from Alia Crum, a psychologist at Stanford. “I don’t think the power of mind is limitless,” she said. “But I do think we don’t yet know where those limits are.” Applying psychogenic methods to enhance the effects of the above strategies to improve digestive health is an interesting proposition to consider. 

The Three Vinegar Tasters

Prebiotics and dual inheritance theory

A speculative note on human evolution, diet, exercise, and diseases of affluence. Samin Nosrat wrote a book titled "Salt Fat Acid Heat", a name that reflects what she considers the four elements of successful cooking. It’s very insightful, particularly in regard to 'heat'. Many debates have emerged over identifying the source of the main diseases of affluence. For example, proponents of diets based on animal products have noted that "plants are trying to kill you". And taken at face value, they are not wrong! Most of the plant foods we eat today are substantially indigestible or even toxic when raw, this includes many tubers and legumes, which are staple foods. They must be cooked. So either humans were not 'meant' to eat plants, or we co-evolved with cooking technology to the extent that, over a million years ago (two million by some estimates), we decided (though at the time we couldn’t have known the long term consequences) to choose an evolutionary path where, today, we are indeed 'meant' to cook or in some way process most of our foods to receive the most nutritional benefit from them. Cooking technology made a wide range of difficult to digest plants more easily digestible, liberating more energy for brain growth and development. Changes in diet in turn produced changes in our intestinal microbiota, which became adapted to a diverse diet of cooked, though still high fiber plant products, and a wide range of supplemental animal products (though the relative amounts of these necessarily fluctuate widely, depending on availability).

Contrast this with the extremely narrow range of animals in Western (and particularly American) diets and the over processed plant products that tend to define it. It has been noted that "When humans have vanished from the planet, one of the most enduring marks of our impact on Earth will be the sudden appearance in the fossil record of copious chicken bones." Aside from the ethical questions that this raises, it is interesting to view this in light of our evolutionary trajectory thus far. As noted, over a million years ago we became dependent upon our cooking technologies for optimal nutrition, and our very biology adapted to these processes, becoming virtually inseparable and dependent upon them. In all this time, we cooked and ate many different foods, transforming indigestible raw materials into more digestible materials. But we didn’t, and likely couldn’t, completely eliminate the indigestible portions, and these characteristics (whether called dietary fiber or 'prebiotics') influenced the evolution of our intestinal microbiota as they symbiotically adapted to our new cooked, though still fiber rich, diets. Fast forward to the twentieth century. Now we have succeeded in not only making food highly digestible (liquid sugar is cheap and plentiful) but we have also eliminated most fiber. Given another million years of human evolution, perhaps the human digestive system will shrink further in size as we become increasingly dependent on these newer food processing technologies. Sedentary behavior patterns that revolve around visual information, accessed on various screen interfaces, are also replacing more physically engaged and active lifestyles. 

Nothing is a foregone conclusion. But what this should tell us is that, as many have noted, culture and cultural technologies are often capable of evolving faster than biology. Our bodies have not yet caught up to the new highly processed (and often nutritionally deficient) diets we have created. This results in a misaligned (or disharmonious) relationship, and we can clearly see it in the prevalence of diseases of affluence today. Our current response appears to be one of trying to accelerate our cultural and biological evolution to adapt to a more sedentary lifestyle and highly processed diet, often with the aid of pharmacological and/or surgical interventions. The less invasive option is to simply increase mobility and reduce the proportion of these refined foods, and recognize the complex dynamics that evolved between our use of heat, which expanded the selection of edible foods, and the changes that occurred within our larger 'holobiont' as a result. In The Good Gut, Justin and Erica Sonnenburg make it clear just how much remains to be learned about intestinal microbial diversity and (to a lesser extent) how technologies of cooking, fermentation, and food storage influence this as well. Even where dietary fiber is absent and therefore unavailable for fermentation by intestinal microbiota, external fermentation (used for food storage) could have served in a surrogate capacity. 

Since much of the above focuses on how cooking did not fully eliminate the indigestible portions of food, a further note should be made about the 'carnivore diet' which comes much nearer to that, and apparently provides relief for some chronic problems. Cooking technologies didn't just make it easier to digest plants, but animals too. But the resurgence in popularity today for a 'meat only' diet may be primarily because sometimes, even well cooked plants are still not tolerated. According to Sten Ekberg, "the 'carnivore diet' is essentially the 'ultimate elimination diet'. You cut out everything until you just have one food remaining. Along the way you eliminate various different things, starting with the really bad stuff like sugar. Then you fine tune and tweak it until you don't even have the leafy greens anymore. You just eat one food, and what meat has going for it is that it's basically the most 'neutral' food. The lowest number of allergies to any food is probably meat. Most of the problems that are caused by food are not due to the substance itself, but rather your body's reaction to it. When your body responds to food as an enemy, it creates inflammation. It’s that inflammation which causes all the problems. Meat being the most neutral food means that it is least likely to cause inflammation." The carnivore diet can be a somewhat misleading name however. Most people associate meat with protein, but protein can’t be the sole source of energy for humans. Loren Cordain, a professor of evolutionary nutrition, noted that "Anyone eating a meaty diet that is low in carbohydrates must have fat as well." Perhaps the majority of the energy in a carnivore diet actually comes from fats, and not all fats are equal. Many of the fats in the contemporary American or Western diet are not of the healthy kind. So the type of fat we eat matters a lot. While the 'ultimate elimination diet' can provide welcome relief to people experiencing chronic inflammation and other digestion problems, it still requires care to be done right. 

Richard Wrangham (author of Catching Fire) and Amber O'Hearn both looked at the development of cooking technology and its effects on human evolution, coming to somewhat different conclusions. O'Hearn is convinced by the importance of a carnivore diet for ketosis, which she believes is essential for adequate nutrition (this occurs when fasting as well). She also suggests that early humans were scavengers and may have eaten a lot of fermented foods: "Our digestive system in some ways seems to be even more like scavengers than carnivores. Because we lost our cecum, we kind of had to outsource fermentation if we wanted to have that digestive process, which in other animals is taking place on the inside. So you could think of fermentation technologies as having an 'exterior gut', letting some of the nutrients get fermented out that we otherwise wouldn't have done, and then you can just have the product of that." Perhaps we are opportunistic scavengers who lost our cecum while eating leftovers, and later we invented cooking and other ways to process energy dense foods. O'Hearn also writes, "The assumption is that starch was the evolutionary reason for our brains. The only way we would could have eaten starch was by cooking, and since our brains changed around two million years ago, Wrangham infers that we must have had the use of fire at that time." In fact, recent evidence is backing him up on this point, that 'obligate cooking' was a point of origin in hominin phylogeny. Indeed, eating food 'while it's hot' may be much more than just a cultural preference. Michael Pollan captured some of the best nutrition advice when he wrote in his 2008 book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But in light of the evidence, I think the first sentence should’ve been “Eat hot food.” No matter what we eat, and we eat a bewildering array of foods, as a general rule heat is important. (In Pollan's defense, his later book was titled Cooked.) Of course there will always be those who would claim the opposite, that cold raw food is preferable, and sometimes it is, but it’s arguable that these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Coincidentally, for those advocating for a carnivore (exclusion) diet, cooking may be even more important. And in many forms of traditional Chinese medicine and Indian Ayurveda, heat has long been the key to good eating, which has been called “digestive fire”. For poor digestion, the higher the temperature the better. However there are limits; scalding hot food and drink (temperatures above 60°C or 140°F) can cause thermal injuries and lead to chronic inflammation and the formation of cancer cells in the lining of the throat or esophagus. Hot is good, but not too hot.

Taking a systemic perspective, Ekberg concludes "I don't think that [the carnivore diet] is necessarily the best thing forever. There is something to be said for variety. I think your microflora tends to be more varied (I believe that is a good thing) if you eat more varied food." Essentially, these are all different routes toward the same destination, which is to provide nutrition while both avoiding pseudofoods with a high glycemic index and, most importantly, preventing inflammation and feedbacks that could sustain or exacerbate an inflammation response to toxins. While one route primarily focuses on reducing the ingestion of toxins, another focuses on increasing defenses against toxins from unprocessed or processed foods. The carnivore (elimination) diet takes the first and most direct path by avoiding the consumption of toxins in the first place, which are largely absent from meat (in any form). Logically, if they aren't there, you cannot absorb them. Defensive methods include various food processing methods, primarily cooking food (which breaks down toxins), or fermenting food, both of which essentially 'predigest' it making it easier to assimilate. Other defensive mechanisms include staying physically active and well rested. This advice can be used by anyone regardless of food preferences. Another defensive mechanism that may not be utilized depending on dietary restrictions is increasing fiber intake. Like exercise, this also reduces intestinal transit time, but unlike exercise, it uniquely increases stool volume, and thereby moves material through the body faster, reducing exposure to toxic compounds and metabolic byproducts, which are quickly passed. Individual sensitivity to fiber and fiber containing foods will decide if this defensive strategy is appropriate or not. For many people it is, but for some it may not be.

Returning again to the topic of human co-evolution with the development of new food processing technologies, it’s interesting to note that there are now many people, including environmentalist George Monbiot, who are proponents of technologies variously termed ‘cellular agriculture’, ‘precision fermentation’, and ‘lab-grown meat’. Attention will need to be given to the nutrient profile of these novel food products, the form of fats that they contain, and their interactions with our microbiota, if they are not to be just another overly processed and hyperpalatable 'pseudofood' (a term David Kessler uses). The potential for creating foods that are tailored to an individual's personal dietary needs and microbiome, with sufficient levels of micronutrients, fiber, fat, and protein, has its attraction. And while it wouldn't be needed by the majority of people, it could find niche applications for people experiencing compromised health. The job of tailoring our diets to our individual needs remains for the time being a process of trial and error, and one that is both enabled and limited by our understanding of the systemic components of health. 

FODMAPs

Both Hossenfelder and Mason seem to be in broad agreement on FODMAPs. Mason is focusing on all of them, while Hossenfelder is only looking at the Polyols (sugar alcohols). So which of those four (oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, polyols) is the problem? All of them? Or are some more than others? I think Hossenfelder is just trying to eliminate the fewest foods as possible from her diet. Would she feel even better if she eliminated all FODMAPs? It may be that many of these are associated with each other such that by focusing on just one the others are reduced as well. Anecdotally, following the bowel prep for a colonoscopy the microbiome is dramatically changed and bowel symptoms often disappear for a time. If a low FODMAP diet is maintained afterwards, it might be possible to eliminate symptoms altogether. However merely changing dietary habits may be sufficient, per Mason. 

Fermentation technology as a driver of human brain expansion

Digestion is the result of a complex interaction between numerous variables. Several of these include: the amount of fluid and food consumed (separately), the time and frequency of eating it, the length of residence within the large intestine, amount of sleep and exercise, inflammation, body temperature, and the fraction of this food that has been externally fermented. Katherine Bryant and Erin Hecht's 'External Fermentation Hypothesis' argues that the offloading of gut fermentation into an external cultural practice could have provided the caloric boost that allowed our brains to expand. They write:

"The emergence of meat-eating, tuber-harvesting, and cooking have all been proposed to account for human brain expansion; why should our just-so story be given any additional credence? ...Unlike other proposed dietary modifications, a transition to eating fermented foods does not require great leaps in cognitive ability. It does not require advanced planning, as hunting, particularly hunting in groups, would. It does not require the acquisition of a difficult technology, as in fire for cooking. It can more directly explain, than tubers, meat, or cooking, how colon fermentation could be replaced through dietary changes. Fermentation accounts for all the benefits that cooked food offers... the ingestion of externally fermented foods provides four critical components to digestion and absorption. First, it increases the digestibility of foods; second, it increases the bioavailability of micronutrients; third, it supports gut fermentation by contributing to host microfloral diversity; and lastly, it supports immune function and resistance to disruption of the gut microbiome. These benefits would have been adaptive advantages for our early ancestors and could have played a key role in human brain evolution... These benefits have led public health scholars to recommend increasing the consumption of fermented foods...

"Humans deliberately ferment foods of nearly every kind, including fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, animals (muscle meat, organs, fat and bones), dairy, fish, and shellfish. Fermentation is practiced successfully in a diversity of climatic contexts, from tropical humid conditions to arctic environments. It is accomplished with a wide variety of microorganisms, including bacteria, filamentous fungi, and yeasts. Moreover, fermentation works on a range of timescales from hours to years, effectively acting as a short-term flavor enhancer or a long-term storage technique. ...Notably, many fermented foods such as fish sauce, soy sauce, and vinegar, are condiments—i.e., substances added to other food items mainly for the purpose of improving palatability... preferences for sour or acidic foods are relatively rare in the animal kingdom."

"Fermentation technology as a driver of human brain expansion" as featured in "Fermentation, fire, and our big brains"   

Coda: Jeff Krasno's approach to diet and health

In an interview with Sonja Manning, Jeff Krasno said:

"Over decades I had built up insulin resistance through stress, alcohol, diet, overworking, and poor sleep hygiene. To become more insulin sensitive and 'reconfigure' my cells such that they were more welcoming to macronutrients (whether that would be glucose, ketones, or free fatty acids for the production of energy) I needed to down regulate the production of insulin from my pancreas. What's the way to do that? I adopted three protocols conjoined that really kind of set me on my way to a more optimal health: ketotarian diet, intermittent fasting, and cold exposure. The low glycemic, high fiber, 'ketotarian' (plant focused keto) diet allows me to achieve low glycemic states. I also adopted a '16-8 intermittent fasting' protocol in which I consolidated my eating window into eight hours. I'm not neurotic or fundamentalist about it, but generally try to use those goal posts to demarcate my feeding window and try to delineate between a biological need for food to create energy versus a psychological desire for comfort or pleasure with food. The result of this is in some ways the same as the ketotarian diet. Essentially after 16 hours of not consuming food your blood glucose levels go way down and you start to burn fat for energy. The last protocol is cold water therapy, or hydrotherapy, to lower my body temperature. Right before breaking my fast I take a cold shower. (Sometimes I would take a sauna on the front end of that to make it a little easier for me, but oftentimes not.) I just take a 60-second cold shower and then let myself shiver without drying off right away. After my body temperature is lowered my cells need to raise it back up. Most of life is really just about burning energy to stay warm. Our mitochondria need to create that heat, but since I've adopted a low glycemic diet and I'm in a fasted state, they don't have any glucose to burn. They can only burn stored fat. 

I'm currently in the experience of metabolic flexibility, which allows me to switch relatively seamlessly between burning fat and burning carbohydrates (or glucose) for energy. I can then cheat a little bit around the edges and be okay. But there are things I do to keep myself on some form of protocol, including getting some form of exercise after eating, which is an amazing way to control glucose spikes. One other thing is developing some kind of mindful practice before eating. In contemporary culture we are extremely rushed, but you are what your body can absorb. If you are consuming food while you're in a distracted state, where you might be in your sympathetic nervous system, then your energy is being diverted from your gut and immune system to your extremities and muscles. Your heart rate and your respiratory rate are going up, your pupils are dilating, and essentially all of the energy allocation is moving away from digestion and metabolism. So what you really want to do before you eat and consume food is to move yourself out of that sympathetic nervous system, out of that cortisol infused, amygdala hijacked state of being into your parasympathetic 'rest and digest' state. Then you are in a better place to digest and absorb as much nutrients as possible from your food. 

One of the best measures of self-reported well-being or happiness is one's ability to align thoughts with actions. Yoking your intention and what you're thinking about to what you're actually doing. If there is a gap or separation between your intention and your thoughts and your actions, that creates quite a lot of frustration and dissatisfaction. 'A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.' We have every opportunity in the attention economy to be distracted. It's very easy. Everyone and everything is vying for your conscious attention at every possible moment. So one of the targets of meditation is to align yourself with what you are actually doing in the present moment. Thoughts will of course come in and out of consciousness, but that's a good thing. Happiness is not just the ability to hold focus, but the ability to leave and then come back. To always come back, observing phenomena arising and subsiding in consciousness moment to moment without fixating or identifying with anything. To the degree that meditation has a goal, it might be the relief of anxiety by bringing us back to the present."

Here's another way in which I might describe some of this: There are relationships and feedbacks between gut microbiota, transit time, and stress. Healthy microbiota ecologies create large stools. However chronic stress can lead to diarrhea like symptoms with more frequent bowel movements. If this occurs over a long enough time, it can irritate the colon and perturb the microbiota sufficiently that it shifts into an "alternative stable state", with symptoms of irritability and smaller, more frequent stools. There are several ways to return to the former healthier microbial ecologies. And this can perhaps best be explained through using the example of fermentation, as when making sauerkraut. The bacteria goes through several shifts as the culture ages, each dominated by different species and strains of bacteria. The same occurs in the gut. To return to the healthier ecology, bowel elimination frequency needs to be intentionally reduced (as was the former condition) so that these other bacterial species can return to play their important roles. Their added diversity leads to larger and more well formed bowel movements. A very effective way to promote this is through time restricted eating, otherwise called intermittent fasting. This gives the gut time to rest and digest between eating periods and diversifies the gut microbiota. The stool consistency and bowel movements change, and symptoms of irritability reduce as well. Toilet habits change. When the urge arrives, one merely relaxes the lower abdomen, breathes deeply, visualization exercises might help. This is progressive muscle relaxation. Minor positional adjustments can support and enhance the action of peristalsis in the colon. How to achieve this psychological state? McGilchrist recounts one possible meditation practice, "focus your attention very narrowly, and at the same time broaden it as broad as you can. Both hold the focus and be aware of the periphery. It’s a very good exercise." The mind balks at the incomprehensibility of such a task. It sounds like a paradoxical koan, like simultaneously relaxing and contracting one’s muscles. But this is precisely what peristalsis is. A large and clean bowel movement should result. Rise and finish. No Valsalva maneuver is necessary, nor should one try to forcefully eliminate any more material than is quickly and automatically passed at this time. ...I should note that the key isn't a reduction in transit time, but a reduction in bowel movement frequency. In fact, transit time may paradoxically increase due to larger, more complete elimination. (Constipation is often characterized by frequent movements.) Why do larger more infrequent bowel movements promote a healthier microbiome? It's speculation, but perhaps it may have something to do with the "culture" aging all at once together and completely, in a full rhythmic cycle without interruption (continuous snacking, providing an ever present stream of nutrients at all hours, might prevent this succession of bacterial species from occuring). When fermenting vegetables, they should not be disturbed until the moment that they are done. 

There’s a need to understand distal causes of digestive problems, and without this understanding we get apparent paradoxes. If you eat a bunch, you feel bloated, gassy, unable to sleep, and the need to have more frequent bowel movements for these reasons. That in turn leads to greater use of the Valsalva maneuver to urge things along. But intentionally raising our abdominal pressure in this way can cause many other problems, and it doesn’t address the root of the problem: stress eating. Of course, if you eat less you, most of the problems are resolved, and instead of using the Valsalva maneuver one can just relax the pelvic floor muscles and let “the bottom of the tub fall out” (as the Buddhists say). And better than Valsalva is to completely exhale all the air in your lungs, thereby constricting abdominal muscles and yielding a better result for elimination. 

Retain a habit of time restricted eating and the diversity of the microbiome culture should retain the healthful characteristics described here. One may encounter some problems if this process isn't well understood. During initial stages of this condition the microbial ecology may autonomously try to return to the healthier state, however the individual fights the system and prevents this from occurring. When this happens usually the individual has become habituated to more frequent bowel movements and now imagines longer duration between movements is unhealthy or constipated. Ironically, instead of reducing intake of food and water, they may instead increase intake (binge eating) in order to increase the necessity of bowel movements. When this doesn't produced the desired results, such individuals tend to strain with defecation more often. This highlights the importance of time restricted eating. In short, managing stress, food consumption amount and frequency (though this must be correlated to age and activity levels), and understanding the role of the large microbiome are all critical to health. 

Coda part II: It's about time.

Good digestive habits include several features. First, a regular routine of large meals for enough food intake, but little snacking between meals, and no snacking and little drink between dinner and breakfast the next morning. This fasting period is critical for a healthier microbiome composition because when only harder to breakdown materials remain in the colon (as all the easily digested material has been used up), and the need for liquid reabsorption has declined, the bacteria profile changes and the gut can restore a healthy mucus layer. While in college I followed this pattern and only ate in the cafeteria at three daily mealtimes, and my health in this regard was rarely better, either before or since. But avoiding snacks and emotional eating can be hard, especially if you are sad or anxious. So having a healthy philosophical outlook on life is important. I have found the "Margulis-McGilchrist Paradigm" helpful for understanding why sticking to a routine is difficult, but there is virtue in persisting through difficulty. Second, avoiding anxiety around bowel health and functioning is important. Don't worry about frequency. Larger and less frequent bowel movements are fine, your body knows when it's time even if you think it should be more often. This anxiety seems to increase particularly around performance related sports or activities. But it's more harmful to force something that will happen when it is ready, on its own schedule, not yours. So be comfortable with uncertainty. The counterintuitive truth is that it isn't so much what you eat or drink as it is when and how often and how much, and permit enough time for bowel movements to happen when your body is ready, not when you want it to happen. In short, our desire for eating whenever we want and evacuating whenever we want must be addressed, though we live in a society where instant gratification tends to be the default, and that's not good for us.

Some common recommendations evaluated in light of prebiotics:

Hydration - large bulky indigestible material helps moderate and store water in the body. 
Heat - My proposed suite of practices to improve digestion, exercise, increase body temperature, take deeper breaths, tummo (Tibetan: གཏུམ་མོ), increase oxygenation, increase the gastrocolic reflex with coffee, and eat yogurt with apples (or fruit) to aid healthy microbiota, take sauna, and dress warm. This may require one to be more mentally and physically flexible and less autistic and rigid. Heat improves blood flow and digestion. Athletes have a different digestive microbiome, potentially due to changes in these variables. Exercise can help counteract age related changes in both thermoregulation and circulation. 
Chew your food - proper mastication promotes digestion. And remember that satiety is delayed, so stopping before feeling full can prevent bloating later. 
Sleep/exercise - Circadian routines of sleep and exercise influence the composition and regulation of the large microbiome. Michael Pollan famously said "eat food, not too much, mostly plants". To this I would add "not at night, and walk". We know that during fermentation a succession of microbial species will rise and fall in dominance. Does this occur in the large microbiome as well? The GI tract digests food during the morning and afternoon when needed most, and completes a circadian bacterial cycle through the evening and night. Moderate exercise facilitates the process. Strengthen the core with crunches, reverse crunches, and planks.
Vegetarianism - Maybe the carnivore/ herbivore/ omnivore framing relegates the microbiome to the position of “second fiddle” when it might really play a much larger role in health. Maybe plant/animal isn’t the relevant distinction. Maybe we just need to pay more attention to having a balanced microbiome. Clearly food source and quality is a part of that balance, but so might be consumption patterns, sleep, exercise, stress, and other interactions. What is the dietary effect of prebiotic food on the large microbiome? Evaluate diets from the perspective of prebiotic content rather than the fractional contribution from animal or plant products. That's the real common denominator for dietary health. As individuals develop from youth to old age (and their large microbiome develops with them), relative dietary contribution from either animals or plants may also change. 
Leaky gut -  A hypothetical, medically unrecognized condition (that may confuse correlation for causation) which does however describe very real symptoms. Advice to address these symptoms may include: deep breathing, moderate exercise (walking 4-5 miles), periodically allow the GI tract to rest from the burden of digestion (occasional fasting), and reduced use of certain drugs while increasing various micronutrients. 
Intermittent fasting - There's no need to set specific times for eating and fasting, simply refrain from "snacking", maximize the length of time between meals, and moderate consumption during meals. You may not want to undertake the "acute stress" of fasting if you are already operating under the condition of "chronic stress" from a poor diet. Address the chronic stress first. Hormesis doesn't work well with sick people. This is an area with few clear outcomes. OTOH, caloric restriction may lead to "starvation" of the large microbiome, especially if one already has a typical Western diet (as described above), exacerbating the potential for gut dysbiosis symptoms (constipation, inflammation, etc.). But on the other hand, "letting the gut rest" and take a break from accessing easily metabolized food could improve the microbiome, reduce inflammation, etc. See also Michael Mosley, Jeff Krasno, and reference to fasting (above). Paradoxically, sometimes eating increases appetite rather than satisfying it. 
Fiber content - Increasing raw fiber content alone has mixed results as a treatment if dysbiosis is pre-existing. "Fiber content" is low resolution information. What should be measured is "prebiotic content". We know that leguminous, cruciferous, or alliaceous vegetables, whole grains and resistant starch, and fresh fruits all have many more qualities than just "raw fiber" that contribute to their qualities as prebiotic foods. For another example, prunes were found to be more effective than fiber supplements in increasing spontaneous bowel movements. There's a qualitative difference between fiber additives and fresh food. (A "raw food" diet is more diverse and healthier than just upping your psyllium fiber supplements.) Worried you'll fart more? Maybe you will, but that's both healthy and normal. Eating just half a can of chickpeas a day has "the potential to modulate the intestinal microbial composition to promote intestinal health by increasing potentially good bacteria and decreasing pathogenic and putrefactive bacteria". 

Probiotics - It should be noted that the colonization of the large microbiome by bacteria is relatively easy. Unless one lives in a sterilized (or sterilizing) environment they will have frequent opportunities to contact many probiotic organisms. Fermented food is very healthy, but probiotics are strictly speaking not necessary dietary additions in most cases. Rather it is the prebiotic foods that feed the large microbiome and help it to maintain a healthy population which tends to be lacking.
Gut-brain axis (enteric nervous system, ENS) - "The gut and the psyche have close connexions. Anxiety, depression, and other disorders have characteristic expressions in gut behaviour – and the associations work both ways: diseases of the gut affect mind and mood... most of the neural traffic is from the gut to the brain, not the other way round." (Iain McGilchrist) Poor sleep can impact gut health. Just as the brain requires a healthy sleep/wake cycle, so too does the enteric nervous system. 
Meditation: Meditation and other practices that work on the gut-mind connection have been shown to be effective at reducing IBS symptoms, by assisting in regulation of neurotransmitters and stress, it may help to decrease inflammation and improving the gut microbiome.
Reactance - This may be useful for understanding various functional problems like anismus, the result of a dysfunction between the opposites of contraction and relaxation. That may be usefully addressed by positional changes, but also it's useful to understand how psychologically, in order to relax, one perhaps must understand the opposite action. In Chinese philosophy this is the logic behind "wu wei", that in order to effectively act one must paradoxically know when not to act, and even how moving in the opposite direction can bring us closer to the desired outcome. This has also been popularly referred to as "reverse psychology" and in various ways has been used to elicit a desired response for oneself or others, irrespective of the behavioral domain. It's that familiar aphorism: Tell someone not to do something (eat/act/desire), and what's the first thing they will want to do?
In conclusion - Feed the large microbiome enough prebiotics (fresh fruits and vegetables, etc.) to keep it healthy, get enough exercise and sleep, and if you are able, grow lots of prebiotics in your garden. Cooking vegetables makes them easier to digest, so the large microbiome may benefit more from uncooked plant material. In general, the more fresh your food is, the higher the prebiotic value to your large microbiome. 

Keywords: probiotics, prebiotics, synbiotics, zymurgy, fermentation, helminth therapy (addressed separately)

The majority of the information contained in this post was taken from Michael Greger's "Nutrition Facts" website (social media):
Gut Dysbiosis: Starving Our Microbial Self
Stool Size Matters

Additional Resources:
• Steven Gundry. Unlocking the Keto Code. (2022) Role of ketones in "mitochondrial uncoupling".
• Will Cole. Ketotarian. (2018)
• Justin & Erica Sonnenburg. The Good Gut. (2016) The human is a "bacteria filled tube".
• Robyn Chutkan. The Microbiome Solution. (2015) "You are what your gut bacteria eat." Resistant starches (green bananas, green peas, lentils, uncooked rolled oats, white beans).
• Robyn Chutkan. Gutbliss. (2013) Very comprehensive book. Reviews numerous symptoms, including dysbiosis, diverticulosis, thickening in the sigmoid colon, and anismus (inability to relax pelvic floor muscles for bowel movement) which can respond to using a squatting position during bowel movements. Recommends at least 30g fiber per day. "If you’re not moving, neither are your bowels." Runners have better bowel movements. "Get sweaty as often as you can, at least three times a week." Eat greens every day.
• Michael Mosley. The Clever Gut Diet (2017) Mosley is known for his books and TV shows on intermittent fasting which, with high fiber intake, "gives your gut a rest from having to constantly digest food allows the lining to regenerate... [but] for optimal health you also need some high intensity training (HIT)." Dr. Paul Cotter's research has shown that exceptional athletes have a "hugely diverse microbiota only comparable to people living in the Amazon rainforest or hunter-gatherers like the Hadza". Inulin is one of the best prebiotics and found in dandelion leaves, Jerusalem artichoke, barley, oats, flaxseed, apples, and seaweed.
• Scott Anderson. The Psychobiotic Revolution. (2017) A list of common foods with most to least inulin: artichokes, chicory/ endive, lentils, asparagus, beans (especially lentils, but not canned since cans may contain BPA), onions, garlic, leeks, bananas, beets, broccoli, fennel root.
• David Perlmutter. Brain Maker. (2015) “The effects of dietary fiber on the growth of healthy bacteria in the gut may well be fiber’s most important aspect… It has been estimated that the typical hunter-gatherer in our distant past consumed as much as 135g of inulin each day (found in yams too). Raw foods contain more.”
• Kristina Campbell. The Well-Fed Microbiome Cookbook (2016) Lots of great food advice.
• Moises Velasquez-Manoff. How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution. (2015) The Sonnenburgs think fiber is so important that they’ve given it a new designation: microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, or MACs. Sonnenburg discovered that when MAC-loving microbes go hungry they start eating mucus. “This is the stage where you say, Oh my God. They’re eating me.” Sonnenburg said. “You can see it. We need that mucus."
• Gina Kolata. You’re Missing Microbes. But Is ‘Rewilding’ the Way to Get Them Back? (2021) "Trying to manipulate the microbiome to improve human health is premature."
• Julia Belluz. Processed foods are a much bigger health problem than we thought. (2020) "Antagonizing the microbiota by highly processed diets — starving it by removing fiber and attacking it with emulsifiers — promotes inflammation. Inflammation interferes with the hormone leptin, which quells hunger.
• Yasemin Saplakoglu. 70,000 never-before-seen viruses found in the human gut. (2021) "Although the microbiome includes a variety of microorganisms — including bacteria and viruses — previous studies have focused mainly on gut bacteria because they are easier to detect."
• Nova. Edible Insects. (2021) "It’s unclear if humans can digest chitin fiber. But when ingested, chitin appears to stimulate the growth of good gut bacteria in a way that other dietary fiber may not. In our past, chitin from insects was probably part of the basic human diet that was used to keep a healthy and balanced digestive system with abundant and variable populations of bacteria. Chitin may be a missing ingredient."
• Lina Zeldovich. The Man Who Drank Cholera and Launched the Yogurt Craze. (2015)
• Rahul Sachitanand. Eight countries that have declared war on junk food. (2016)
• Popkin et al. Towards unified and impactful policies to reduce ultra-processed food consumption and promote healthier eating. (2021) Suggests developing effective package labelling, marketing controls, and creating a "mutually reinforcing set of policies".
• BBC. The world’s most nutritious foods. (2018) After analysing more than 1,000 raw foods, researchers ranked the ingredients that provide the best balance of your daily nutritional requirements.
• Bristol stool chart. A very helpful guide.