Left panel of the Pine Trees Screen (松林図 屏風, Shōrin-zu byōbu) by Hasegawa Tōhaku. The empty space in this piece is considered to be as important as the trees depicted.
Ma (間, lit. ’gap, space, pause’) is a Japanese reading of a Sino-Japanese character, which is often used to refer to what is claimed to be a specific Japanese concept of negative space.[1][2][3][4] In modern interpretations of traditional Japanese arts and culture, ma is taken to refer to an artistic interpretation of an empty space, often holding as much importance as the rest of an artwork and focusing the viewer on the intention of negative space in an art piece. The concept of space as a positive entity as opposed the absence of such a principle in a correlated ‘Japanese’ notion of space. Though commonly used to refer to literal, visible negative space, ma may also refer to the perception of a space, gap or interval, without necessarily requiring a physical compositional element. This results in the concept of ma being less reliant on the existence of a gap, and more closely related to the perception of a gap.[5] The existence of ma in an artwork has been interpreted as “an emptiness full of possibilities, like a promise yet to be fulfilled”, and has been described as “the silence between the notes which make the music”.[6]
Etymology
Among English loanwords of Japanese origin, both ma (interval, space) and ken (unit of architectural measurement) are written with the Chinese character 間 derived from the character 門 (“door”) and 日 (“sun”).
Originally, the character 間 was written with the radical for “moon” (月) instead of the character for “sun” (日), and, in this form (閒, xián), depicted, according to Bernhard Karlgren, “A door through the crevice of which the moonshine peeps in”.[7]
The character can be read differently when emphasis is put on the connection between things (awai), the distance between things (aida), or the distance between people (aidagara).[8]
Usage in Japan
Ma appears in many areas of Japanese arts and culture. For example, the tokonoma alcove in a traditional Japanese room is a space or a stage used to display important objects, such as a painting scroll, an important art object, or a flower arrangement. The concept is also associated with oku or the Japanese spatial concept of “inwardness”.[9]: 4
In ikebana, the space around the flowers is considered to be equally as important as the flowers and plants themselves, with harmony and balance between the two considered the ideal.[10][11]
In karate, ma refers to the distance between two fighters. Knowing the safe distance between oneself and an opponent based on their reach is considered “understanding ma“.
Usage in the West
In his 2001 book, The Art of Looking Sideways, graphic designer Alan Fletcher discussed the importance that perceived negative space could hold in art:
Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by “taking the fat off space“. Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses… Isaac Stern described music as “that little bit between each note – silences which give the form”… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission.
“Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true.“
Bodhi (played by Patrick Swayze) in the film Point Break
Patrick Wayne Swayze (August 18, 1952 – September 14, 2009) was an American actor, dancer, and singer known for playing distinctive lead roles, particularly romantic, tough, and comedic characters. He was also known for his media image and looks; People magazine named Swayze the “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1991. Wikipedia
FEBRUARY 7, 2023 AT 7:00 AM BY ROB BREZSNY (NewCity.com)
Photo: Omer Salom
ARIES (March 21-April 19): During my quest for advice that might be helpful to your love life, I plucked these words of wisdom from author Sam Kean: “Books about relationship talk about how to ‘get’ the love you need, how to ‘keep’ love, and so on. But the right question to ask is, ‘How do I become a more loving human being?’” In other words, Aries, here’s a prime way to enhance your love life: Be less focused on what others can give you and more focused on what you can give to others. Amazingly, that’s likely to bring you all the love you want.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): You have the potential to become even more skilled at the arts of kissing and cuddling and boinking than you already are. How? Here are some possibilities. 1. Explore fun experiments that will transcend your reliable old approaches to kissing and cuddling and boinking. 2. Read books to open your mind. I like Margot Anand’s “The New Art of Sexual Ecstasy.” 3. Ask your partner(s) to teach you everything about what turns them on. 4. Invite your subconscious mind to give you dreams at night that involve kissing and cuddling and boinking. 5. Ask your lover(s) to laugh and play and joke as you kiss and cuddle and boink.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): You are an Italian wolf searching for food in the Apennine Mountains. You’re a red-crowned crane nesting in a wetland in the Eastern Hokkaido region of Japan. You’re an olive tree thriving in a salt marsh in southern France, and you’re a painted turtle basking in a pool of sunlight on a beach adjoining Lake Michigan. And much, much more. What I’m trying to tell you, Gemini, is that your capacity to empathize is extra strong right now. Your smart heart should be so curious and open that you will naturally feel an instinctual bond with many life forms, including a wide array of interesting humans. If you’re brave, you will allow your mind to expand to experience telepathic powers. You will have an unprecedented knack for connecting with simpatico souls.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): My Cancerian friend Juma says, “We have two choices at all times: creation or destruction. Love creates and everything else destroys.” Do you agree? She’s not just talking about romantic love, but rather love in all forms, from the urge to help a friend, to the longing to seek justice for the dispossessed, to the compassion we feel for our descendants. During the next three weeks, your assignment is to explore every nuance of love as you experiment with the following hypothesis: To create the most interesting and creative life for yourself, put love at the heart of everything you do.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): I hope you get ample chances to enjoy deep soul kisses in the coming weeks. Not just perfunctory lip-to-lip smooches and pecks on the cheeks, but full-on intimate sensual exchanges. Why do I recommend this? How could the planetary positions be interpreted to encourage a specific expression of romantic feeling? I’ll tell you, Leo: The heavenly omens suggest you will benefit from exploring the frontiers of wild affection. You need the extra sweet, intensely personal communion that comes best from the uninhibited mouth-to-mouth form of tender sharing. Here’s what Leo poet Diane di Prima said: “There are as many kinds of kisses as there are people on earth, as there are permutations and combinations of those people. No two people kiss alike—no two people fuck alike—but somehow the kiss is more personal, more individualized than the fuck.”
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Borrowing the words of poet Oriah from her book “The Dance: Moving to the Deep Rhythms of Your Life,” I’ve prepared a love note for you to use as your own this Valentine season. Feel free to give these words to the person whose destiny needs to be woven more closely together with yours. Oriah writes, “Don’t tell me how wonderful things will be someday. Show me you can risk being at peace with the way things are right now. Show me how you follow your deepest desires, spiraling down into the ache within the ache. Take me to the places on the earth that teach you how to dance, the places where you can risk letting the world break your heart.”
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Libran author Walter Lippmann wrote, “The emotion of love is not self-sustaining; it endures only when lovers love many things together, and not merely each other.” That’s great advice for you during the coming months. I suggest that you and your allies—not just your romantic partners, but also your close companions—come up with collaborative projects that inspire you to love many things together. Have fun exploring and researching subjects that excite and awaken and enrich both of you.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Scorpio writer Paul Valéry wrote, “It would be impossible to love anyone or anything one knew completely. Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object.” My challenge to you, Scorpio, is to test this hypothesis. Do what you can to gain more in-depth knowledge of the people and animals and things you love. Uncover at least some of what’s hidden. All the while, monitor yourself to determine how your research affects your affection and care. Contrary to what Valéry said, I’m guessing this will enhance and exalt your love.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In his book “Unapologetically You,” motivational speaker Steve Maraboli writes, “I find the best way to love someone is not to change them, but instead, help them reveal the greatest version of themselves.” That’s always good advice, but I believe it should be your inspirational axiom in the coming weeks. More than ever, you now have the potential to forever transform your approach to relationships. You can shift away from wanting your allies to be different from what they are and make a strong push to love them just as they are.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): I analyzed the astrological omens. Then I scoured the internet, browsed through twenty-two books of love poetry, and summoned memories of my best experiences of intimacy. These exhaustive efforts inspired me to find the words of wisdom that are most important for you to hear right now. They are from poet Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell): “For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): To get the most out of upcoming opportunities for intimacy, intensify your attunement to and reverence for your emotions. Why? As quick and clever as your mind can be, sometimes it neglects to thoroughly check in with your heart. And I want your heart to be wildly available when you get ripe chances to open up and deepen your alliances. Study these words from psychologist Carl Jung: “We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.”
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): “In love there are no vacations. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.” Author and filmmaker Marguerite Duras made that observation, and now I convey it to you—just in time for a phase of your astrological cycle when boredom and apathy could and should evolve into renewed interest and revitalized passion. But there is a caveat: If you want the interest and passion to rise and surge, you will have to face the boredom and apathy; you must accept them as genuine aspects of your relationship; you will have to cultivate an amused tolerance of them. Only then will they burst in full glory into renewed interest and revitalized passion.
How can nonprofits accelerate their impact and move the needle on intractable problems? Looking to bring the urgency of a profit motive to every initiative, inclusive finance promoter Tolu Oyekan shows how scalable, data-driven solutions are expanding access to banking and financial services across Africa — and shares the mindset that can help any business meet its goals with speed and precision.Read transcript
This talk was presented at a TED Institute event given in partnership with BCG. TED’s editors chose to feature it for you.
Tolu Oyekan brings fresh thinking to how organizations can achieve their developmental goals in Africa and beyond.
Tolu Oyekan’s resource list
About TED Institute
Every year, TED works with a group of select companies and foundations to identify internal ideators, inventors, connectors, and creators. Drawing on the same rigorous regimen that has prepared speakers for the TED main stage, TED Institute works closely with each partner, overseeing curation and providing intensive one-on-one talk development to sharpen and fine tune ideas. The culmination is an event produced, recorded, and hosted by TED, generating a growing library of valuable TED Talks that can spur innovation and transform organizations.
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” the young Nietzsche wrote as he contemplated what it takes to find oneself. Somehow, this man of stark contradiction, cycling between nihilistic despondency and electric buoyancy along the rim of madness, has managed to inspire some of humanity’s most surefooted spirits — among them, the great German poet, novelist, painter, and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962), who drew from Nietzsche’s philosophy the most humanistic ideas, then magnified them with his own transcendent humanity.
You must unlearn the habit of being someone else or nothing at all, of imitating the voices of others and mistaking the faces of others for your own.
[…]
One thing is given to man which makes him into a god, which reminds him that he is a god: to know destiny.
[…]
When destiny comes to a man from outside, it lays him low, just as an arrow lays a deer low. When destiny comes to a man from within, from his innermost being, it makes him strong, it makes him into a god… A man who has recognized his destiny never tries to change it. The endeavor to change destiny is a childish pursuit that makes men quarrel and kill one another… All sorrow, poison, and death are alien, imposed destiny. But every true act, everything that is good and joyful and fruitful on earth, is lived destiny, destiny that has become self.
Might your bitter pain not be the voice of destiny, might that voice not become sweet once you understand it?
[…]
Action and suffering, which together make up our lives, are a whole; they are one. A child suffers its begetting, it suffers its birth, its weaning; it suffers here and suffers there until in the end it suffers death. But all the good in a man, for which he is praised or loved, is merely good suffering, the right kind, the living kind of suffering, a suffering to the full. The ability to suffer well is more than half of life — indeed, it is all life. Birth is suffering, growth is suffering, the seed suffers the earth, the root suffers the rain, the bud suffers its flowering.
In the same way, my friends, man suffers destiny. Destiny is earth, it is rain and growth. Destiny hurts.
Long before Simone Weil contemplated how to make use of our suffering, Hesse holds up hardship as “the forge of destiny” and adds:
It is hard to learn to suffer. Women succeed more often and more nobly than men. Learn from them! Learn to listen when the voice of life speaks! Learn to look when the sun of destiny plays with your shadows! Learn to respect life! Learn to respect yourselves! From suffering springs strength…
Writing fifteen years after he made his exquisite case for breaking the trance of busyness, Hesse returns to the sandbox of selfhood — solitude:
True action, good and radiant action, my friends, does not spring from activity, from busy bustling, it does not spring from industrious hammering. It grows in the solitude of the mountains, it grows on the summits where silence and danger dwell. It grows out of the suffering which you have not yet learned to suffer.
[…]
Solitude is the path over which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself. Solitude is the path that men most fear. A path fraught with terrors, where snakes and toads lie in wait… Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.
Photograph by Maria Popova
Learning to be nourished by solitude rather than defeated by it, Hesse argues, is a prerequisite for taking charge of our destiny:
Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.
[…]
A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny. It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity.
In a sentiment the poet May Sarton would echo in her stunning ode to solitude two decades later, Hesse adds:
Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.
Blessed be he who has found his solitude, not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry, but his own, unique, predestined solitude. Blessed be he who knows how to suffer! Blessed be he who bears the magic stone in his heart. To him comes destiny, from him comes authentic action.
You were made to be yourselves. You were made to enrich the world with a sound, a tone, a shadow.
[…]
In each one of you there is a hidden being, still in the deep sleep of childhood. Bring it to life! In each one of you there is a call, a will, an impulse of nature, an impulse toward the future, the new, the higher. Let it mature, let it resound, nurture it! Your future is not this or that; it is not money or power, it is not wisdom or success at your trade — your future, your hard dangerous path is this: to mature and to find God in yourselves.
The Lord of Gain is one of the cards which usually receives a hearty welcome when it comes up in a reading. At the mundane level it indicates the financial rewards which come from working diligently and dedicatedly on an important project, so it will often mark a stage of completion. In the workplace it will show that hard work is rewarded both by appreciation and an increase of salary. Sometimes it can indicate promotion (though rarely a total change of workplace) earned as a result of loyalty and attention to detail.
As you’ll remember, Disks not only deal with our financial area, but also with day-to-day security in the family environment. So sometimes the Lord of Gain can come up to indicate consolidation and achievement at home. Perhaps an emotional conflict has finally been resolved, or a long-standing problem finally dealt with.
At the spiritual level, this card talks a lot about the principle that what we give to life is what we get back. And here we have confirmation that we have lived as much as we are able in the moment, appreciating the things that come our way, and celebrating the bounty we have. As a result, more abundance flows in.
The card rarely indicates windfalls, or unexpected sources of income. Here we have worked hard to create something rewarding, and the Lord of Gain indicates the results of our efforts.
Studying interoception can help us understand the link between mind, brain and body. Photograph: LvNL/Getty Images/iStockphoto
There’s growing evidence that signals sent from our internal organs to the brain play a major role in regulating emotions and fending off anxiety and depression
If you’re sitting in a safe and comfortable position, close your eyes and try to feel your heart beating in your chest. Can you, without moving your hands to take your pulse, feel each movement and count its rhythm? Or do you struggle to detect anything at all? This simple test is just one way to assess your “interoception” – your brain’s perception of your body’s state, transmitted from receptors on all your internal organs.
Interoception may be less well known than the “outward facing” senses such as sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell, but it has enormous consequences for your wellbeing. Scientists have shown that our sensitivity to interoceptive signals can determine our capacity to regulate our emotions, and our subsequent susceptibility to mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.
It is now one of the fastest moving areas in neuroscience and psychology, with academic conferences devoted to the subject and a wealth of new papers emerging every month. “We are seeing an exponential growth in interoceptive research,” says Prof Manos Tsakiris, a psychologist at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Importantly, these findings include promising new ways for you to “tune in” to the body and alter your perception of its interoceptive signals – techniques that may help treat a host of mental health problems. It is only by listening to the heart, it seems, that we can take better care of the mind.
The origin of emotion
First, some definitions. Interoception includes all the signals from your internal organs, including your cardiovascular system, your lungs, your gut, your bladder and your kidneys. “There’s a constant communication dialogue between the brain and the viscera,” says Tsakiris.
Much of the processing of these signals takes place below conscious awareness: you won’t be aware of the automatic feedback between brain and body that helps to keep your blood pressure level, for instance, or the signals that help to stabilise your blood sugar levels. But many of these sensations – such as tension in your muscles, the clenching of your stomach, or the beating of your heart – should be available to the conscious mind, at least some of the time. And the ways you read and interpret those feelings will have important consequences for your wellbeing.
‘There’s a constant dialogue between the brain and the viscera’: Manos Tsakiris. Photograph: The NOMIS Foundation/YouTube
“Researchers and clinicians are recognising interoception as a key mechanism to mental and physical health, where understanding our body’s signals helps us understand and regulate emotional and physical states,” says Dr Helen Weng at the University of California San Francisco.
This idea stems from the pioneering work of Prof Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California in the 1990s. He proposed that emotional events begin with non-conscious changes in bodily states, called “somatic markers”: when you see an angry dog, for instance, and your muscles tense or your heart begins to race. This physiological reaction occurs before you are even aware of the emotion, and it is only when the brain detects the alteration to the body’s internal state, through interoception, that we actually experience the feeling and allow it to shape our behaviour. Without the back-and-forth between the brain and the body, the feelings of happiness, sadness or excitement wouldn’t exist.
Interoception lies behind our sense of intuition – when something feels “right” or “wrong” without an explanation
As evidence, Damasio described the decision making of patients suffering damage to areas such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which disrupted the creation of those unconscious bodily reactions. If they saw a photo of a horrific car crash, for example, they did not have the slightest physiological response – and this was accompanied by a lack of any emotional feeling either. They reported knowing that they should feel shocked or disgusted, but they didn’t actually experience the feelings. Importantly, the impaired interoception and emotional awareness also disrupted their decision making, meaning that they struggled to cope with the simplest choices, such as what meal to pick on a dinner menu. This suggests that our interoception lies behind our sense of intuition, when something just feels “right” or “wrong” without us being able to explain why.
We now know that many other people – without any kind of brain damage – struggle to tune in to their interoceptive signals, and this can be measured through various exercises. You can ask subjects to count their heartbeat over a minute, for example, and then compare that with the actual reading. Or you can play recordings of a regular beat, and ask the participants to say whether it is in sync with their own heart or not. You can also measure interoceptive awareness with questionnaires that ask people how often they notice their body’s signals.
In each case, individuals show a spectrum of responses, which seem to be related to their ability to recognise and regulate their emotions. It makes sense: if you are more adept at accurately detecting your bodily signals, you will be able to form more nuanced interpretations of your feelings about a situation, and this in turn should help you to make wiser choices about the best ways to respond.
People with anxiety, in contrast, do report being attentive to their interoceptive signals – but they don’t necessarily read them accurately. They may misinterpret a small change in heart rate as being much bigger than it really is, for example, which can lead them to “catastrophise” their feelings and amplify their sense of panic.
Prof Hugo Critchley at Brighton and Sussex Medical School points out that poor interoceptive awareness can also lead to the sense of “depersonalisation” and dissociation, which are early symptoms of psychosis and may be a precursor of their delusions. Interoception helps us to form our most basic sense of self, he says – and it seems to be askew in these patients.
New therapies
Therapies that aim to address these problems are still in their infancy, but the early signs are promising. Critchley recently worked with 121 autistic adults – a group known to be at high risk of anxiety disorders – to see if improved interoception could reduce their feelings of stress. Over a course of six sessions, half the participants were given repeated attempts at the heartbeat detection tasks followed by detailed feedback on their performance. Those in the control condition, meanwhile, took part in voice recognition training, which was designed to help them detect the emotional overtones of people’s speech – a task that could well be useful in their lives, but which did not specifically target their interoceptive awareness.
Reporting their results in the Lancet earlier this month, the team found that the interoceptive training group showed markedly lower incidence of anxiety at a three-month follow-up, with 31% completely recovering from their anxiety disorder, compared with just 16% in the control group. “It improved people’s ability to recognise and ‘de-catastrophise’ their physiological experiences,” Critchley says. He tells me that his group has seen similar benefits in a more diverse student population, though that research has yet to be published.
Scientists have been investigating the potential use of mindfulness and breathing techniques to improve interoceptive abilities. Photograph: Anna Frank/Getty Images
Other teams have been investigating the potential use of mindfulness to improve people’s interoceptive awareness. There are many kinds of mindfulness, of course – some of which may place more focus on the mental experience and the appearance of thoughts. But Prof Cynthia Price at the University of Washington in Seattle has tested a training programme that specifically encourages participants to focus on the internal sensations within sequential body areas.
Her participants were people with substance use problems. The condition is often accompanied by poor emotional regulation, which can make it harder to avoid relapse – and, crucially, many people report a sense of disembodiment that might contribute to their problems.
Price’s results so far suggest that the therapy successfully reduces symptoms of depression and cravings, and in one year-long study, it significantly increased abstinence, compared with those undergoing the standard treatments. She hopes the practice could be beneficial for many other people. “These skills should be helpful for anyone, regardless of whether they have a health condition.”
If you’re deconditioned from a lack of exercise, you’re more likely to experience symptoms associated with anxiety
Prof Hugo Critchley
With time, it is possible that new technologies could ease this process. Tsakiris, for example, has investigated a small non-invasive device that clips to the ear and delivers a mild electric current, through the skin, to the vagus nerve, which acts as a pathway between the gut, the heart and the brain. In one experiment, Tsakiris found that the gentle stimulation increased people’s accuracy on one of the heartbeat detection tasks. “It seemed to strengthen the communication between the brain and the body; it opens up the bandwidth a little bit,” he says.
These are early findings, he emphasises, but if further research confirms the benefits, it could be used during mindfulness exercises to train people’s interoception, he suggests.
Inner strength
Perhaps most intriguingly, the new awareness of interoception can help us to understand why certain physical exercises can be so good for our mental health. For one thing, regular workouts may change the nature of the signals that your brain receives. “If you’re deconditioned from a lack of exercise, you’re more likely to experience symptoms that you might associate with anxiety,” says Critchley. “Your heart will race more when you experience challenges – be it physical or emotional.” As you get fitter, however, and organs such as the heart become more adept at dealing with strain, your body will show a more resilient response to changing circumstances – changes that could spill over into your emotional wellbeing.
Equally importantly, the practice of exercise should lead you to be more attentive to those signals, so that you are also more accurate in reading and interpreting the changes that you detect. “This doesn’t mean that all athletes have very high emotion regulation capacities,” Tsakiris warns. “But they do have an advantage, precisely because their interoceptive system is better attuned.”
Strength training has been shown to reduce anxiety, possibly because it alters the interoceptive signals our brains receive. Photograph: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images
It’s not just aerobic exercise that will help; increasing evidence suggests that strength training can particularly effectively reduce feelings of anxiety. You might expect this to arise from the aesthetic improvements and the ego-boost that comes from looking more toned – but the effects remain even if you control for visible changes in muscle size. One potential explanation is that the training somehow alters the interoceptive signals we’re receiving from the muscles. By engaging with our muscles, we feel physically sturdier and more capable to deal with threats – and this bolsters our sense of self-esteem and mental resilience, too.
“Interoceptive feedback from the muscles can tell you something, unconsciously, about what you can achieve in the world,” explains science writer Caroline Williams, whose recent book Move! (Profile, 2021) explores the many ways that physical exercise can benefit the mind. “After strength training, your body feels that it can cope, and so, on some level, you feel a bit more in control of life.”
Interoception, it seems, is one of our most important senses. And by paying a little bit more attention to the signals it sends you, you may be healthier in body and mind.
David Robson is the author of The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Some jellyfish species may be ‘biologically immortal’. Pictured here is a moon jellyfish, Aurelia aurita. Image adapted from: Alexander Vasenin; CC BY-SA 3.0
(Science.org)
Is it possible to escape the slow and steady progression of ageing?
The animals that can live forever
No one likes the thought of growing old. Despite our many human endeavours to escape or delay the process of ageing, it seems to be an inevitable part of life.
But … why? Why do living things gradually fall apart when they grow older?
There is a word for it: senescence. No, it’s not the rock band who sang ‘Bring Me to Life’; senescence is the state of gradual deterioration of normal functioning. At the cellular level, it means cells stop dividing and they eventually die. It can also apply to an entire organism (where a living thing can no longer respond adequately to outside stressors), or to specific organs or tissues (like leaves dying and falling from trees in autumn).
While there are ways we can slow down (or speed up) the rate at which senescence occurs, it is still going to happen one way or another. However, a few species can escape the ageing process completely.
The ‘immortal’ jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii
To date, there’s only one species that has been called ‘biologically immortal’: the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii. These small, transparent animals hang out in oceans around the world and can turn back time by reverting to an earlier stage of their life cycle.
The life cycle of Turritopsis dohrnii. Image adapted from: Australian Academy of Science
A new jellyfish life begins with a fertilised egg, which grows into a larval stage called a planula. After a quick swim, the planula latches onto a surface (like a rock, or the ocean floor, or a boat’s hull), where it develops into a polyp: a tube-shaped structure with a mouth at one end and a kind of ‘foot’ at the other. It remains stuck in place for some time, growing into a little colony of polyps that share feeding tubes with each other.
Eventually, depending on the jellyfish species, one of these polyps will form an outgrowth called a ‘bud’, or it may produce separate segments stacked on top of one another, that can then break away from the rest of the colony. This process is responsible for the next stages of the jellyfish life cycle: the ephyra (a small jellyfish) and the medusa, which is the fully-formed adult stage capable of sexual reproduction.
For most other jellyfish, this stage is the end of the line. But Turritopsis dohrnii (and possibly some other jellyfish species too) has a neat party trick: when it faces some kind of environmental stress, like starvation or injury, it can revert back to being a tiny blob of tissue, which then changes back into the sexually immature polyp phase of life. It is a bit like a butterfly turning back into a caterpillar, or a frog becoming a tadpole again.
Of course, Turritopsis dohrnii isn’t truly ‘immortal’. They can still be consumed by predators or killed by other means. However, their ability to switch back and forth between life stages in response to stress means that, in theory, they could live forever.
Hydra
Hydra look a bit similar to the polyp stage of a jellyfish (which makes some sense, given that jellyfish and Hydra are grouped together in the phylum Cnidaria): a tubular body with a tentacle-ringed mouth at one end and an adhesive foot at the other. They’re very simple animals that spend their days mostly staying in one place in freshwater ponds or rivers and using their stinging tentacles to grab any prey that happens to swim past.
Their claim to immortality? It seems as though they don’t go through senescence at all. Instead of gradually deteriorating over time, a Hydra’s stem cells have the capacity for infinite self-renewal. This seems to be thanks to a particular set of genes called FoxO genes, which are found in animals from worms to humans and play a role in regulating how long cells will live for.
In the case of Hydra’s stem cells, there seems to be an overabundance of FoxO gene expression. When researchers prevented FoxO genes from functioning, they found that Hydra’s cells began to show signs of ageing and would no longer regenerate as they did before. We still don’t know exactly how it all works, but we do know that these genes clearly play an important role in maintaining Hydra’s endless youthfulness.
Not-quite-immortal lobsters
Lobsters also do not experience senescence. Unlike Hydra’s reliance on particular genes, however, their longevity is thanks to them being able to endlessly repair their DNA.
Normally, during the process of DNA copying and cell division, the protective end-caps on chromosomes, called telomeres, slowly get shorter and shorter, and when they are too short, a cell enters senescence and can no longer keep dividing.
Lobsters don’t have this problem thanks to a never-ending supply of an enzyme called telomerase, which works to keep regenerating telomeres. They produce lots of this enzyme in all of their cells throughout their adult lives, allowing them to maintain youthful DNA indefinitely.
Telomerase is not unique to lobsters. It is present in most other animals, including humans, but after passing the embryonic life stage, levels of telomerase in most other cells decline and are not sufficient for constantly re-building telomeres.
Unfortunately for lobsters though, there’s a catch: they literally grow too big for their own shells. Lobsters continually grow larger and larger, but their shells can’t change size, meaning a lifetime of ditching too-small shells and growing a brand-new exoskeleton each time. That takes a fair amount of energy. Eventually, the amount of energy required to moult a shell and grow another new one is simply too much. The lobster succumbs to exhaustion, disease, predation or shell collapse.
Forever young?
There are many other animal (and non-animal!) species that offer tantalising glimpses into an ageless existence: the risk of dying for naked mole rats appears to not increase as they get older; the world’s oldest known non-colonial animal, a remarkably stress-resistant ocean-dwelling quahog clam named Ming, only died (accidentally) after a good 500 years when researchers dredged it up out of the ocean and wanted to find out how old it was; incredibly ancient bristlecone pines seem to function just as smoothly as much younger trees do; a particular colony of quaking aspens is considered to be about 80,000 years old … and there are plenty of other unusually long-lived species that seem to defy the passing of time.
Do they hold the key to eternal youthfulness for humans, too? We know that ageing in humans is thanks to a multitude of factors, many of which we still don’t entirely understand. Perhaps these examples from other species can shed some more light on those processes.
This article was written by Emma Berthold, Content Producer, Australian Academy of Science and has been reviewed by the following expert: Associate Professor Alistair G.B. Poore School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW Sydney
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