Choosing a metaphor over a simile for the title of this essay took a considerable amount of energy. The choice, however, seemed instantaneous to me. It bypassed acceleration. I found myself at highway speed as though long before I had used some onramp to merge with thoughts that, like other cars, were zooming toward random destinations. In a split second, I was at full throttle.


Sorry, enough with the metaphor except to say that the supposedly idle mind is very much like (here’s the simile) an idling car. And the reason is that the vehicle of transport is an active brain that constantly consumes glucose. The activity is itself evidenced by dreams during sleep and daydreams. The brain never seems to shut off. The engine idles, ready to kick in the turbo charger. Advice here: Keep the tank filled. You will find yourself in need of fuel as you race down thought-highways, sometimes merging not only with traffic in an orderly flow, but also playing bumper cars with similes and metaphors. “Where,” I might ask you, “do you think analogies originate? Where do you think Ah-ha! Insights come from?”


The answers to both questions lie in sideswipes and collisions in thought-mergers. And the reason they occur is that the engine of the brain is always consuming fuel. If you find yourself in a period of writer’s block or spiritual dryness, don’t blame your missing muse; get thee to the gas station to pick up some vending-machine food.


The title of research by Camila Pulido and Timothy A. Ryan says it all: “Synaptic vesicle pools are a major metabolic burden of nerve terminals.” * If you don’t have fuel, you don’t have ATP synthesis. Your brain has, in the words of the authors, “a resting metabolic rate that is much higher than other tissues.” I suppose that’s why it is so difficult for us to “hold that thought” when we are in the midst of a conversation. We can’t apply brakes to a vehicle running on a full tank at high speed. I suppose, also, that is why we can’t really pull into the parking garages along thought-highways as we race toward conclusions. As the authors also write, “Given the vast number of synapses in the human brain and the presence of hundreds of SVs [synaptic vesicle pools] at each…this hidden metabolic cost of quickly turning synapses in a ‘ready’ state comes at the cost of major ATPpresyn and fuel expenditure, likely contributing significantly to the brain’s metabolic demands and metabolic vulnerability.” Duh! This brain-car needs a fuel supply to operate proton pumps. Insights don’t accelerate. They are like photons that always seem to travel at speed. (Sorry, I just mixed metaphors, but such is the nature of thinking. Thought collisions, as I said, are inevitable. The brain is often like—here’s the return to the simile—a self-driving car without collision-avoidance and lane-detector)


In short, even when your brain is “resting,” it is still using, even by way of leaking, fuel. The engine’s on. You still consume glucose at about half the rate of full-throttle thinking. Maybe that’s the reason that in the most unexpected moments and places in our lives, we suddenly arrive at metaphors, at similes, analogies, and insights.


Note:
*Published in ScienceAdvances. 3 Dec 2021, Vol 7, Issue 49. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi9027 Online at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi9027  Accessed December 5, 2021.

In 1935 J. R. Stroop wrote a dissertation that has since spawned hundreds of studies on the Stroop effect by experimental psychologists. Simply put: Stroop tested the brain’s ability to read the names of colors written in colors inconsistent with the name and then name the colors. Red, for example, appears in blue ink; blue, in red ink.


Now, you just had no difficulty reading the last sentence in black ink. You would probably have no difficulty reading the words if they were written in inconsistent colors, also. But if you tried to name the colors you saw in the context of words for other colors, you might find your brain struggling a bit. Not to worry. Many people have difficulty with the task that involves a highly practiced skill like reading and a background knowledge of colors.


Let’s use the Stroop effect with regard to social and political identities. I propose this in light of the commonly displayed maps of states deemed “Republican” and “Democrat.” Red states are the former; blue states, the latter.


Apparently—to me anyway—a number of TV pundits and newspaper editorialists can’t wrap their heads around “blue leanings” in red states and vice versa. Like reading, a practiced skill that conflicts with naming an inconsistent color, the commentators’ brains balk when social and political realities conflict with their entrenched thinking. And as a result, they have difficulty with behaviors and opinions that run contrary to either color designations. Thus, a Midwestern Caucasian kid recently found not guilty of murdering two Caucasian men has been labeled in a number of press outlets as a white racist. An African-American adult who allegedly drove an SUV through a parade, killing and injuring numerous people, has become de-personified as “a red SUV” that killed the people; to say otherwise, to personalize the man as an African-American, means reading “blue” written in red ink.


We don’t live in strange times, however. The Stroop effect that describes a confused brain is a human phenomenon that probably goes back to pre-literate times. No doubt one could run other experiments to demonstrate the brain’s difficulty reconciling well-practiced tasks analogous to reading and its attempts to identify inconsistent properties or uses, maybe a hand axe used as a spoon or a fork used as a writing instrument. I’ll leave the experimenting to the experimental psychologists and the interpreting to the cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. But in these times, reading blue as only blue and red as only red can be a costly error. Nicholas Sandman, the teen who attended a pro-life rally in D. C. and who was vilified by the Washington Post, CNN, and other news outlets, won a hefty civil suit against the Post and CNN and sill has, as of this writing, other suits pending. No doubt, at the time of this writing in December, 2021, Kyle Rittenhouse also has pending civil suits.


I’ll simply note that almost all of us are burdened by contradictory and inconsistent phenomena. That media pundits have difficulty seeing tints in a spectrum of life’s colors is not unusual; in fact, given the animosity of our age, one should probably expect the color blindness. But before we condemn the pundits, we should all note that almost all of us have difficulty with the complex thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of others that we see from practiced and over-learned perspectives. Those settlements by major new outlets should provide all of us with a lesson about the social and political Stroop effect. All stereotypes contain unseen inconsistencies. Before you read “red state” or "blue state,” check the actual color of the ink. 

One of the problems the animated animals of the film Madagascar encounter is that Alex, the lion, grows hungry in the presence of his friends who are prey animals. Not to worry, however, the happy ending for starving Alex and his friends lies in a diet of sushi for the famished lion.


In a “Marie Antoinette” take on the problems of the real Madagascar under the drought and famine of 2019-2021, one might ask why the island’s starving haven’t turned to sushi. They are, after all, living on an island with more than 4,000 kilometers of shoreline. Shallow and deep fish are as available as Pennsylvania’s shallow and deep oil, coal, and gas. And surely, someone knows how to roll fresh fish with rice and green stuff in a little, very convenient handheld food. Surely, someone can see that an enormous supply of food lies just beneath the surrounding waters.


Obviously, famines are serious matters among the starving, and the extreme poverty in southern Madagascar has exacerbated their plight on the island during the drought. Subsistence farming, the local source of food, doesn’t provide longterm solutions; Madagascar has no massive grain elevators stocked with uneaten grain.


If I were to guess, such a localized drought and famine receives little attention from the well-fed  populations around the world. The absence of concern is understandable. What isn’t personal is meaningless. Not that we can’t wrap our brains around a set of facts; we can do that. But meaningful facts about other humans require personalization before they beget action. Alex’s friends, for example, empathize with his plight even as they face the danger of born of his hunger.


I would note, however, that Marie Antoinettes who might have difficulty empathizing with the starving people on Madagascar seem to have little difficulty empathizing with climate change warriors whose default position is to blame all droughts and consequent famines on global warming. Am I correct in saying that such empathy derives from personalization and that as a result, millions of people have developed an empathy for a “planet under climate stress”?


The energy-fed Marie Antoinettes in industrialized countries might have difficulty distinguishing between eating bread and eating nonexistent cake that they advise eating. They have made the default position personal. They have incorporated it into the essence of their perspectives, and in doing so have either knowingly or unknowingly destined affluent societies to subsistence power in lands sitting above abundant energy reserves just as Madagascar is surrounded by sushi.


The affinity that millions of energy-rich people have for explanations by climate change alarmists and the disdain they have for explanations by those who caution against blind adherence to popular science is the result of personalizing the general idea while ignoring the specifics. During recent years, the alarmists have attributed droughts to climate change, and the general public has repeatedly seen that attribution in the Press, so much so that all droughts appear to be climate driven. The explanations for any weather phenomena always fall on the default climate change model. You might know some people who are genuinely concerned about climate change. For them a hungry lion is poised to wreak havoc in “only ten years,” or only “eight years,” or whatever number the alarmists declare. As a result, many around the world are willing to yield their energy security to the promises of more expensive and less reliable green energy alternatives, believing that subsistence energy is “good for the planet,” and that abundant fossil fuels are “bad for the planet.” And yes, if you think about the nature of most green energy technologies, you’ll note that they are “subsistence energy sources” because energy storage in batteries can never be adequate sources after prolonged periods of cloudiness, windless days, or lowered reservoirs. Climate change is a personal matter for them, and it provides an analog of Alex’s problem on the island. If there’s nothing to eat in the midst of abundant food (his friends, the prey animals), starvation is inevitable. If there is little sunshine or wind over Appalachian coals and Marcellus and Utica gas-rich shales…


So, what about Madagascar’s drought of 2019-2021? Is it driven by climate?


Apparently, not. According to a study by Luke J. Harrington and others, the recent drought and famine are part of periodic weather events that occur about once every 135 years though an even more severe drought occurred just three decades earlier. * The droughts are not attributable to climate change. They are weather phenomena not even attributable to either El Niño or La Niña events that affect precipitation patterns elsewhere.


The recent Madagascar event is not a climate change phenomenon, but it has a lesson that all climate change alarmists should personalize. As the current American administration and other governments have turned their attention to green energy alternatives, they have become the equivalent of Marie Antoinettes. Her famous response “Let them eat cake” seems to be analogous to the politicians’ advocacy of “Let them drive electric cars,” “Let them use wind power,” and “Let them just not use energy.” In fact, the US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has advised people to drive electric cars, advice he specifically gave to those who live in the American Midwest to avoid the high cost of gasoline that has occurred during his tenure as Secretary. “Let them eat cake” has become “Abandon your current cars and tractors and buy expensive electric cars and tractors.” The Secretary seems to believe that an abrupt change can satisfy the energy hunger of Americans and that placing the ravenous lion of American agriculture and industry on an island with untouchable energy sources is not an analog of Alex's problem. Pete’s windmills and electric cars are as real a source of Midwest energy as Don Quixote’s giants are real monsters. His advice is as tuned to reality of the common Midwesterner as was Marie Antoinette’s advice to the bread-less French populace. 


As Texans and Californians discovered recently, windmills have serious shortcomings. They are the equivalent of subsistence farming. When winds die or temperatures drop below freezing, windmills stop turning, and there’s little anyone can do to fill the “inadequate electricity elevator or granary” because batteries can’t store sufficient power to run a complex and large society’s needs. The poor people of Madagascar have twice in three decades discovered that subsistence farming leads to famine during droughts. The industrial world’s massive populations will discover that like those living in the poverty of southern Madagascar, they will themselves live with subsistence electricity as their energy supplies become limited by the natural phenomena du jour.


Those who would eliminate the use of fossil fuels in favor of renewables don’t seem to realize that renewables aren’t consistently renewable. Those in power who want to reduce power are Marie Antoinettes. They won’t personalize the reality until they themselves are forced to eat nonexistent cake.
    


Note:


Harrington, Luke J. et al. Attribution of severe low rainfall in southern Madagascar, 2019-2021. Published online by World Weather Attribution at https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/ScientificReport_Madagascar.pdf   Accessed December 2, 2021.