The Beatles did it. Others, too, like actor Steven Seagal and singer Ricky Martin. Many have gone in search of some mountain guru who can guide the confused toward wisdom and inner peace and quiet, someone who can send them back down the mountain a bit wiser with a bit more control over their inner turmoil, control that enables them deal with a world in constant turmoil and distracting noise. 
 
When the confused reach the top of the mountain and approach the man on the rock, do they learn some strangely trisyllabic two-letter OM to chant or hum on their way back down to a world of cacophony on the streets of the “rat race” below? Does that parana drown out the deafening noise with inner silence? 
 
Is the trip to Nepal necessary? Can one realize that the OM always lay within them just as it lies within them now? Does one need a guru to say a personal Atman is always connected to an impersonal Brahman, and that the Soul is always capable of dealing with the Brahman as it is, not as it wants it to be? 
 
Are trips up the mountain to visit some Wise One unnecessary? The Brahman is what it is, a Cosmos so encompassing that it is beyond control of that which it contains. Those who climb the mountain in search of wisdom and peace might visit instead the comedian Stephen Wright for insight. 
 
I don’t know Wright personally and have never attended his shows, but I’ve seen him on TV and YouTube standing on stages, higher than his audience, simplifying reality for them by revealing new perspectives, insightful pespectives on life. Like those seeking the Man on the Mountain Rock, the members of the audience look up during their momentary escape from the confusing cacophony of their daily lives, eager to hear what he utters. Wright, rarely disappointing, shares Zen-like visions of the world as he looks down on his audience. No doubt recognizing their confusion and seeming helplessness in negotiating their way through the cacophony of the “rat race” of life, he calmly and wisely says, “I couldn’t fix your brakes, so I made your horn louder.”
 
Maybe inner silence isn’t the only way to deal with a cacophonous world.  

Just about everyone knows that fanatical support of any ideology can lead to injustices, injuries, and deaths. That’s been seen in both Right and Left groups. And, as the saying goes, “History is replete with examples.” And now, I’m wondering whether or not we’ve just had a new example of such fanaticism in the way legitimate medical studies have been denigrated and their qualified authors ostracized and verbally attacked and threatened.  
 
Catching up: In case you’ve missed seeing all the people running around in masks or the incessant reporting on daily “cases” and deaths, I feel obligated to tell you there’s a pandemic. If you are tuned into American news stations and are aware of the disease and its effects, you are also aware that scapegoating has run rampant through much of the population. “It’s his fault.” And if you have listened to any of the political rhetoric, you know that ideologies have entered into the search for a cure and a prophylaxis.  
 
You might also be aware of the late December, 2020, and early January, 2021, pronouncements by some medical researchers that COVID-19 isn’t the viral juggernaut it is purported to be. There are both preventative measures and cures. There are millions of survivors, also, many of them having weathered the disease with nary an indication of its presence, those people we term asymptomatic. So, is there concern? Sure. But has there been some dissembling generated by politics? Definitely. And that dissembling costs lives.  
 
Now, the question for those of us who are not medical researchers and frontline medical workers is this: “Whom do we believe?” It’s an important question. Millions of people have lost their livelihoods under imposed shutdowns. Some have even been arrested and fined by a government-run-wild agencies just because they chose to open their businesses. Social media are on fire with condemnations. Major media outlets have even dismissed legitimate scientific studies as the work of snake oil merchants. And now we have reached the culmination of such thoughtless dismissals in the rejection for political reasons of 21 studies that show Ivermectin to be both a prophylaxis and a cure.
 
Fortunately, Operation Warp Speed has led to the fastest vaccine development in medical history. That’s great news. But is a vaccine the only solution to the pandemic? Aren’t there potentially repurposed medicines that can ward of the effects of the disease? We can all recall the fuss over Hydroxychloriquine. Whether or not that drug has some benefits is probably still an unresolved question since actual clinical trials are few in number and limited in scope. Maybe it has no effect on COVID. That’s certainly possible. It’s been used for decades without our hearing about its side effects, but because of politics, we now know that it can engender crazy dreams, and that in dosages beyond the recommended amount, it has no effect on COVID. But what of Ivermectin, a Nobel Prize winning medicine that has been used throughout Africa for decades? Could it be repurposed? And if it could be thus used and demonstrated to be effective, could it enter the medical world without condemnation by an agenda-driven Press and political fanatics?  
 
On December 8, 2020, before the Homeland Security Committee Meeting: Focus on Early Treatment of COVID-19, a doctor representing a group of medical researchers has confirmed evidence found in multiple studies that Ivermectin not only alleviates the suffering of COVID-19 victims, but it also hastens their recovery. And there’s more: Ivermectin apparently protects its uninfected recipients from contracting the disease. The researchers are confident in their findings, and their representative, Dr. Pierre Kory, speaking before the US Senate, said, 
 
     “And so, it is with great pride as well as significant optimism, that I am here to report that our group, led by Professor Paul E. Marik, has developed a highly effective protocol for preventing and early treatment of COVID-19. In the last 3-4 months, emerging publications provide conclusive [italics mine] data on the profound efficacy of the anti-parasite, anti-viral drug, antinflammatory agent called Ivermectin in all stages of the disease. Our protocol was created only recently, after we identified these data. Nearly all studies are demonstrating the therapeutic potency and safety of Ivermectin in preventing transmission and progression of illness in nearly all who take the drug.”*
 
Where does that political ideology stuff I mentioned up top come in to play here? Dr. Kory says, “We have not heard from: Any national news radio, newspaper, or television station; [or] any single member of any U.S. health care agency.” Kory also notes that only a very few, if any, of the people in charge of decisions regarding medical protocols for COVID-19 treatments, have actual experience with treating patients with the disease. His testimony also lists 21 clinical trials that have reported 100% positive results from Ivermectin use. GET THAT? ONE HUNDRED PERCENT! Those were 21 trials conducted prior to November, 2020. Others are in process and show the same encouraging results. 
 
Dr. Kory’s testimony reveals that Ivermectin demonstrably “inhibits SARS-CoV-2 replication, has potent anti-inflammatory properties…demonstrating profound inhibition of both cytokine production and transcription of nuclear factor-kB, diminishes viral load and protects against organ damage, and prevents transmission and development of COVID-19 disease in those exposed to infected patients.” I suppose most importantly, IVERMECTIN REDUCES FATALITIES in critically ill patients who have COVID-19.
 
Dr. Kory and his group of highly experienced researchers and frontline doctors have heard NOTHING FROM THE HEALTH CARE AGENCIES IN THE FEDERAL OR STATE GOVERNMENTS ON THOSE 21 STUDIES OR ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THIS EFFECTIVE PROTOCOL. And as might be expected in these times of agenda-driven news, they’ve not been contacted by the major news outlets? What’s going on? A demonstrably effective medicine and yet no one’s interested!  
 
But wait! I’m wrong. The New York Times called the Homeland Security Committee’s meeting on prophylaxis a product of “snake oil salesmen.” Why? The Committee’s hearing was a search for knowledge, a search for medical evidence, a search for a mechanism that might stop the pandemic. 
 
What was the point? Was ideology so important to a major news outlet that its editors were willing to prevent the dissemination of knowledge about a definitively effective prophylaxis? Was ideology more important than lives? Apparently. 
 
Ivermectin has been used safely for many years. Its use is widespread throughout Africa. Or, at least, its use was widespread. But, of course, if Ivermectin can do what 21 studies say it can do, what happens to the billions spent on vaccines? What happens to the investments of Big Pharma and government officials invested in their bureaucratic authority? Are those who will die when Ivermectin might have saved them the victims of ideology and possibly lobbying efforts by companies? Two quick notes: On the African continent Uganda is initiating an Ivermectin protocol, but South Africa, a country whose population has benefitted from the use of Ivermectin for years, has now banned the drug under penalty of law. If you import Ivermectin into South Africa, you will be prosecuted. To what end? For what purpose? Isn’t the medicine still effective against parasitic diseases that have ravaged the poor in that country? Again, I ask, “What’s going on here?” 
 
Remember hydroxychloroquine? Maybe it was not the repurposed drug people had hoped it would be. But Ivermectin has been shown to be effective in 21 clinical trials. Remember; it was one hundred percent effective in those trials. I’m not sure how sure one needs to be assured beyond, “Hey, it’s one hundred percent effective.” That miraculous vaccine hits only 95%. If I were a betting man…
 
Is it just me? Or are you concerned that some of those with power over us are willing to forego preventions and cures because of their ideologies? Are they choosing death for political or financial reasons? Are they killing by omission? Their silence is deafening. Their fanatical commitment to their ideology is even louder. 

*​https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-iba-syn&hsimp=yhs-syn&hspart=iba&p=Dr+kory#id=3&vid=dbd462fc6d76257ee026c0cac31d42c7&action=click      Accessed January 5, 2021. The full statement is available online.

Let me start by asking you if you are interested enough in micropaleontology to pursue a college degree in the subject. What about animal cognition? Both studies have practical uses. Petroleum geologists use micropaleontology to find fossil fuels, and neuroscientists use animal cognition studies to reveal brain mechanisms related to behavior. So, would you enroll today to study either subject? 
 
Are you more articulate when you explain why you like what you like than why you don’t like what you don’t like? Do you have “likes” that you can’t fully explain? Interests, also? Before you answer at length, consider briefly how you came to like or dislike or became interested, disinterested, or indifferent. What roles did your environment, family, friends, teachers, and experiences play? And what role did your talents play in shaping your interests and pursuits?
 
Too much to consider all at once, right? Everyone’s been influenced, and everyone settles into some set of likes and dislikes. I’m reminded here of a commercial I saw for Southern New Hampshire University in which the university’s president, appearing before a graduating class says, “Stand up if you are a first generation college student. Stand up if you are a mother; if you are actively deployed, a veteram, or in a military family....” I think his list is longer, covering just about every possible category of human. The pitch makes sense; he’s making a recruiting video. But then he says, “The world in which we live equally distributes talents, but it doesn’t always distribute opportunity.” What? Equal distribution of talent? 
 
Am I missing something in recognizing that teams have first string players and second string players? That Usain Bolt ran faster than his competitors or that Pele outscored his? Is everyone in the Hall of Fame? Am I missing something in recognizing that audiences aren’t the people onstage performing? Or that the president is the only one standing behind the podium on graduation day? 
 
Look, the guy is himself talented. According to the blurbs, he turned a sleepy little university of under 3,000 enrollees into one with over 100,000 online students. I know I probably could not accomplish that. But I still have to ask, “In what world did this Southern New Hampshire University guy grow up?” Does he really believe that “equal distribution of talent” stuff?
 
Our finite lives limit all we can develop and achieve. Even polymaths have their limitations.    
Extraordinarily talented and accomplished people, polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci reveal that the world is one of unevenness in ability and interest. Da Vinci was painter, inventor, amateur geologist, anatomist, and engineer. Da Vinci was THE Renaissance Man. He’s the one type of person that the president of SNHU doesn’t mention. “Stand if you are a polymath, an extraordinary person with extraordinarily wide interests and accomplishments.” Leonardo would be the only one standing in that large group of graduating seniors. 
 
In thinking about polymaths like Leonardo, I wonder where I went wrong. Could it be a matter of interests? I’ve tried, Lord, I’ve tried to be interested in everything. I just spent time reading through some papers published in Animal Cognition, hoping to pique my interest beyond a layman’s perspective. It was barely productive time. Not my cup of tea. I came away unenthused though I will still occasionally read through the journal. I’m not going to enroll in animal cognition studies at Southern New Hampshire University.* No, this isn’t some denigration of animal cognition scientists and their work. They’re adding to our picture of the world by telling us what animals are capable of doing, like using tools, and that gives us a broader picture of brains and behavior. So, though I am not interested in animal cognition, I see the benefit of its study. It reminds me that from Homo habilis on, we humans have deemed ourselves a bit better than the other Earth inhabitants, that in comparison with a pigeon, all of us are polymathic. “Look, Ugg, if you take stone and bang stone, you get sharp stone. Good for fileting. Pigeon can’t do that.” 
 
What was I saying? Oh! Yes, animal cognition. In not being able to get interested in such a discipline, I realize my limitations are both attitudinal and intellectual and that there are literally hundreds of academic and scientific journals with information too complex, too specialized, or too, dare I reveal my ignorance by saying, boring for my tastes and talents. If I was bored when I read some of the articles on animal cognition, the ennui lay not with the articles’ authors as much as with me. Even if I could convince myself that animal cognition is important to my life, I probably lack the talent to pursue the field. I’m definitely not some Jane Goodall capable of patiently sitting and observing. I don’t even own a pet though Fluffy the Turtle, Fluffy the Snake, and Fluffy the Groundhog freely roam on my property. I have obsersed animals, of course, such as the cardinals who spend much of their spring attacking their own images reflected by the large windows in my house. But as for specializing in animal cognition, I just can’t continue to read about pigeons making choices or crows constructing tools. They make for a nice YouTube video, but if I’ve seen one such video, I’ve seen my fill.   
 
Although polymaths have great intelligence, they also have great attitude. They don’t need to convince themselves that multiple topics are worth pursuing. They pursue as they come across something to pursue. Da Vinci, for example, realized that the fossil sea shells he saw high in the mountains meant that the mountains had been raised from the sea and not that Noah’s flood had emplaced them. Darwin drew a similar conclusion in the Andes. Polymaths are not only capable, they are also curious. How many people before Da Vinci and later Darwin, saw shells in the rocks and stopped to ponder and conclude? How many visitors to the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida, stop to look at the tiny shells in the blocks of coquina that make up its walls and then surmise the stones’ origin? Polymaths look. Polymaths wonder and ponder. Polymaths pursue relentlessly to find an answer. 
 
So, the lesson I learned from my perusal of articles in Animal Cognition is that I have, in spite of being interested in sundry topics, a rather limiting attitude that accompanies my limited talent. Sure, I picked up a few facts from the journal, but not much more than that which would make people flee from me during a party. “Geez. He just goes on and on about some Australian rat figuring out how to get food or about some social learning in gerbils.” See. Would you stick around for those tidbits of info? You would? Then you have more polymathic tendencies than I. You might be the next Da Vinci. 

Southern New Hampshire University probably has multiple programs for you. Wave from the audience of graduating seniors as you stand during the next commercial shoot so I know who you are among the mothers, first generation college students, army personnel, veterans, first responders, seamstresses, poets, construction workers, and other sundry members of our species. 

​Now go back to answer those questions I posed at the beginning of this little essay. 
 
 
*Let me say by way of footnote: You can picture me standing in the audience of Southern New Hampshire University’s graduation class as the president says, “Stand up if you are a retired professor who still hasn’t decided what to be when he grows up, but who is currently pursuing studies in animal cognition.” 

Try this with a friend: While you sit side-by-side in a theater, auditorium, or church, stare at the head of someone seated in front of you. Just stare and concentrate on the words “turn around.” Make no audible sound (possibly impossible, since breathing and squiggling often go unnoticed by either breather or squiggler, yet are observed by others). What will you observe? Walla! The person seated in front of you will turn his head, not necessarily all the way, but sufficiently noticeably so. Why? Do you think telepathy plays a role? Do eyes exude a force? Or is the turning just a response to the noise of barely perceptible breathing and squiggling? 
 
I wish I knew the answer. As teens, my friends and I used to try such staring on occasion, always with success, sometimes with a complete head turnaround. Was the Force with us? Were we budding Jedi? If so, such Jedi status took no special training other than sitting still and concentrating a bit (that, in itself, is remarkable for normally fidgety teenagers). Was there a power in our eyes, something like Superman’s X-ray vision? (Don’t worry, no head ever burst into flames spontaneously while we stared—in fact, no human was hurt during the course of these experiments, as the disclaimer goes)  
 
Consider this title: “Scientists Demonstrate Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans.”* Were my teenage friends and I way ahead of the neuroscience curve? Should we have published? Alas, it was a game to us though we recognized its experimental nature. Who knew there was fame and fortune awaiting? Shoot! Another missed opportunity. (Another? Is my life the Sum over Missed Opportunities? Pay attention, Donald. Your mind is wandering in wondering about a road not taken, and you are losing your connection to your reader)
 
Okay. I’m back. Connecting minds just by gazing seems to be nothing unusual in light of flirting with or threatening another person. What’s that typical response of the angry street thug in the movies? “Hey, you lookin’ at me? What are you starin’ at.” Such “lookin” is eye-to-eye communication. Staring at the back of someone’s head is a different matter. It’s done without gesture or voice, scribbles or art, with not even a smoke signal from a distant mountain or the staccato of Morse Code. Yet, communicating without the normally associated physical actions or objects still seems possible to me in light of my own teenage experiences. I think my friends and I somehow linked to another brain. Or, should I say another “mind”? And we did so without eye contact or language. Is language the eye that simultaneously projects mind and serves as connector? Certainly, it exudes influence over others! I say; someone else acts. That’s control, isn’t it? That’s a connection. 
 
Language obviously connects us. You could be thousands of miles from me yet connected through this essay, the product of my mind. You and I are separated not only by space but also by time because you read here a final draft (unless you’ve hacked into my computer as I wrote). Somehow our minds merge in these words, not necessarily in agreement, but nevertheless in a connection centering on a common set of thoughts. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Vergil, Augustine, Descartes, and authors too numerous to mention entered my mind as I have temporarily entered yours. There’s no hubris here. I’m not saying that I’m the equal of those I’ve mentioned. But I have at least at your present moment and not at mine, entered your mind. You have control of the remote, but as you channel surfed past this essay, you paused briefly enough for some flash of my mind to spark thoughts in yours. You briefly turned your head to look.  
 
Have you ever experienced a simultaneity of thought with a friend or lover? “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” you asked. No need for a verbal response. Both of you understood. Your experience was not unusual. Lots of people have had such experiences, like finishing sentences started by someone else. 
 
Of course, such sentence-finishing might be a simple artifact of known idiom and not an indication of some mind meld. Given the repetitive nature of our sentence structure and word use, we might easily surmise certain types of phrases, clauses, words, and even entire thoughts that someone is about to express. Given our common experiences, we might simply state the obvious. You might not, as Heraclitus wrote, be able to put your foot in the same … twice, but stepping in a … isn’t beyond either common experience or common imagery. There! How’d you know what I wanted to say? Are you telepathic? Or are you just familiar with “river” as a commonly known part of the Heraclitean expression explaining a world of change that has now become cliché? Or what of the expression, “She’s the apple of my ….” Every language has its idiomatic expressions and ways of expressing common thinking. I don’t want you to think I’m hatching a wind egg here, or, as the Germans say, ein Windei ausbrüten, that is, doing something pointless or chasing rainbows with my references to clichés in an essay on the subject of connecting brains and minds. Every culture has its idioms; but all of humanity shares clichés that serve as universal connectors. How many ways can we say we live in an ever-changing world? That Heraclitean metaphor works around the world.    
 
That we share common expressions in any culture begs the question about what we know, how we come to know it, and how we convey our knowledge to others. Is the bulk of our knowledge expressible in clichés? Are the majority of our expressions ultimately clichés? If so, there’s no telepathy involved in finishing someone else’s thought, no surprising connection of minds (or brains). We finish another’s sentence because there are only so many directions the sentence could go, and we’ve heard most of those sentence endings multiple times. We are immersed in clichés and connected by both verbal and nonverbal language. Do you want to know how to get the park? I’ll simply point. And then there’s the matter of context. Given knowledge about a speaker’s personality, interests, present circumstances, and topic at hand, what else could come out of the mouth beyond the words and expressions we mutually share in a specific culture? 
 
So, what about that Superman/Star Wars Force stuff? Do the eyes “have it”? In eye-to-eye or face-to-face contact, we know others’ thoughts by their gaze. “He looked menacing”; “I could tell she was happy by the gleam in her eyes”; “There was a hint of suspicion in that look”; “I thought I could read her, but she could look you straight in the eye and lie convincingly.” Those and other expressions come from a common verbal storehouse whose use depends on the importance we assign to eyes and “looks.” “Gaze is a powerful element of social interaction,” writes Robert Martone, who also notes, “Belief in the power of gaze appears in stories and myths throughout the centuries” and “…researchers found that subjects associate gaze with a physical force.”** Ah! The power of a stare, especially when it asks, “What do you want?” I’m reminded of the ABBA song “Voulez-Vous”:
 
            People everywhere
            A sense of expectation hanging in the air;
            Giving out a spark
            Across the room your eyes are glowing in the dark…
 
Could ABBA have been onto something with glowing eyes that give out a spark?  They do that in the bar scene, but…
 
But that staring at the back of the head experiment in an auditorium still suggests a mystery. Even if the eyes emit a “spark,” the subject can’t see it. If there’s no physical way for the person to know that two people are staring at the back of his head, why does he turn? Is there really power in the gaze alone? I reiterate, this isn’t a matter of reading the eyes. The center of vision might be seated in the back of the brain, but both the brain and skull block a rear view. 
 
Brain-to-brain communication rightly falls under the purview of science and technology. Brains are obviously physical objects, so they lend themselves to falsifiable investigations. But then there’s the mind, that which we associate with the brain but that we can’t exclusively assign to the brain’s activities without consideration of that which houses the brain, that is, a body in which resides a character with experience, knowledge, and personality. Each of us is more than a brain. Rather than say, “Each of us has a mind,” I prefer to say existentially, “Each of us is a mind.” And because of unknown variables, we really can’t put minds to the same kinds of scientific tests to which we put brains though we can determine associations among mental states and between thinking and emoting and neurons. We’re close to understanding brains, but it is mind that understands or fails to understand. Sure, I can run wires between the heads of two mice or put a WiFi chip in a human brain, but how do I physically connect two minds?   
 
Neuroscientists have done yeoman’s work in linking and then studying networked brains that exhibit some common mental states and thinking.  Viewing fMRIs of brains in action, they can link types of thinking to types and areas of brain activities, but mind remains largely elusive though one can find peer-reviewed journal articles on the subject.  
 
Where, we must ask, is the place where staring at the back of a head while thinking, “Turn around” meet and connect to the brain or mind of another? Does the juncture lie somewhere between the gazers and the gazed-upon? Does it lie inside the gazed-upon’s head, the skull having somehow been penetrated by the gazing? Should we even use the word juncture or place? My teen friends and I envisioned that our minds met the mind of our subject “somewhere out there,” that is, somewhere outside our skulls. We assigned a “place” to the mind; our minds met the subject’s mind in the space between his and our brains, and definitely, we thought, outside our bodies. Did we have the kind of “out-of-body-experience” that one hears stories of and ascribes to mere aberrations in brain chemistry? Some product of neurotransmitters gone wrong? But then, what are the chances that such aberrations occur  coincidentally in separate brains? Could two teenagers prime their brains by suggesting they run an experiment with the priming itself serving as an open floodgate through which neurotransmitters flow in two brains and the brain of the subject simultaneously? But the gazed-upon is always a necessarily unwilling participant. So, how does that brain chemistry work?
 
Obviously, there was no science in our experimenting. Our results, seeming to us to be invariably the same and repeatable as all science should be repeatable, might have been coincidence in associated experiments run without proper controls and with neither randomness nor numbers sufficient for statistical significance. And maybe my memory has faded. Were there times when the person in front of us never turned? Probably. Yet, I would suggest that if you and I sat side-by-side today in a room with seats in rows, we could, given that we might remove all the distractions of our lives, cause someone sitting in front of us to turn around, simply as a product of our staring at the back of his head and thinking, “Turn around.”
 
As we enter an age when some people will choose to have brain implants that connect them to some hackable server or to the brain of another person as in The Matrix or Star Trek’s Borg Collective, we might consider that such connections have long been a product of human interactions. If you sense that you are being watched, you might be right. Where that “sensing” takes place is supposedly the networked brain or mind; yet, without some physical mechanism identifiable through experimentation, the “place” remains a mystery. 
 
We know we are more than brain. But how much more? Enough to connect mysteriously? Are you thinking what I’m thinking? 
 
 
*Martone, Robert. 29 Oct 2019. Online at Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-demonstrate-direct-brain-to-brain-communication-in-humans/  Accessed December 30, 2020. Of course, there are experiments ongoing to link brains via technology, but I’m not addressing electrical connections unless some quantum tunneling occurs between skulls. This little essay isn’t about a physical interface; such interfacing has been accomplished. There’s no physically invasive procedure involved in staring at the back of a head. 
 
**Martone, Robert. 29 Dec. 2020. When Our Gaze Is a Physical Force. Online at Scientific American:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-our-gaze-is-a-physical-force/  Accessed January 1, 2021.