As a youngster, Alan Sage—scientist, rapper, and vegetarian—put up a fight against biology class dissections. He ate fish until he was about four years old, when he realized fish had eyes. As an adult, he discovered that plants react to glutamate, a neurotransmitter in the human brain, and this discovery tells us that plants have some evolutionary similarity to humans. His interpretation: Plants can think.

Would you like some ketchup with that? I wondered what it might mean to vegetarian philosophy if, through due scientific process, the notion that plants can think (and feel?) became a given. What would it mean to committed vegans and vegetarians?

If plants feel as animals do, will we start to think that eating things without eyes is discrimination against those that do?

These questions get to the very heart of why people are vegetarian in the first place. So, I asked this question on my Facebook page: “Are you a vegetarian? Or vegan? Or are you decidedly NEITHER? Why?”

After listening to architect and rock climber Emily Whiting talk about gothic architecture, which I love, I took a look at her website and list of publications. They include the intriguing “Digital Reconstruction” and “4D Presentation through Time,” the animated movie “Portals,” which allows the visitor to wander among monuments and statues and fly inside Renaissance paintings. In “Detailed 3D Modeling of Castles,” she and collaborators digitally documented heritage sites. Rabelais was grosser, but Emily is a far better builder.

I think Emily has a special fondness for ecclesiastical architecture, just as I do, so I wondered what she might think about the fictional “Abbey of Theleme.” The tale is part of the series of stories collectively called “Gargantua,” by Francois Rabelais, the 16th-century satirical writer of the wild, grotesque, and bawdy. And though my ruminations started with the gaudy architecture of Theleme, I was lured off topic when I read about the gate leading into it. Upon the gate was inscribed a list of the kinds of people allowed inside and, most interestingly, the kinds of people barred from entry (vile bigots, hypocrites, externally devoted apes, base snites, puffed-up, wry-necked beasts, Ostrogoths, forerunners of baboons, dissembled varlets, seeming-sancts, slipshod caffards, and fat chuffcats)!

A neuroscientist by day, Dave Sulzer explores synapses formed by the midbrain dopamine projections that underlie reward, learning and voluntary motor control. But by night, as Dave Soldier, he’s an avant-garde musician. Getting a second wind in retirement (Jonathan Michael Peel)

Should we be surprised, then, that he has such an appreciation for the artistic accomplishments of elephants? Or that he conducts an orchestra of multi-ton retirees from the logging industry? An orchestra that, boasts his partner in the enterprise, Richard “Professor Elephant” Lair, is “three-times the weight of the Berlin Philharmonic”?

Without a score or elaborate cueing and with few limitations beyond Dave’s deliberate gestures to start and stop them, these lucky instrumentalists play pretty much what they want and have a ball improvising on cymbals, gongs, renaats and harmonicas. Dave says some of the players don’t stop when he tells them to do so—even when they KNOW that’s what they should do—just for the fun of it! What teases!

Listening to Andre Fenton talk about his pioneering work on how the brain stores and extracts information, my mind—untrained in meditation and sorely unfocused!—trailed off into the incredible notion that science seems to support: I’m not really just me and you’re not really you.

Speaking not just of our brains but of our entire bodies, Lewis Thomas wrote in the classic “Lives of a Cell”: “A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are shared, rented, occupied.” Dr. Cliff Pickover

Evidently, meditation, which Andre makes an excellent case for, is just the process to bring that idea to light. Neuroscientist Sam Harris describes how in deep meditation the feeling that there is a self thinking the thoughts disappears. “This experience of selflessness is interesting for two reasons,” Harris says, “It makes perfect sense from a neurological perspective, as there is no privileged place for the self to occupy the brain.”

And he adds, tantalizingly, “The loss of self can be utterly liberating.”

“What does it mean that your brain has nothing in common with the brain you had a few years ago?” physicist Clifford Pickover asks. “If you are something other than the collection of atoms making up your body, what are you? You are not so much your atoms as you are the pattern in which your atoms are arranged. Some of the atomic patterns in your brain code memories. People are persistent space-time tangles. It’s quite possible that you have an atom of Jesus of Nazareth coursing through your body. Gilgamesh, the historical king who ruled the city of Uruk, is part of your brain or tendons or heart. An atom in your retina may one day be in the tears of a happy lunar princess a hundred years from now.”

Who are we, where can we draw boundaries?

I wouldn’t be surprised if Andre, the man who as a boy loved Hardy Boys mysteries, who grew up to become a very different kind of detective, sheds some light on that little mystery too.

In reading further about synesthesia, which Steffie Tomson did such a great job explaining, I was taken with the lyrical—and sometimes just plain odd!—ways some famous synesthetes described their gift before we had scientific evidence for it or before it was widely known.

Olivier Messiaen and his very musical scarf! They often had to defend what Vladimir Nabokov, author of “Lolita”, called a “freakish gift.” “The confessions of a synesthete,” Nabokov said, “must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings.”

“This is not imagination,” French composer Olivier Messiaen insisted, speaking of the way his music came to him in what he called “colored dreams,” “nor is it a psychic phenomenon. It is an inward reality.”

Messiaen wrote about his synesthesia in his “Technique of My Musical Language.” “I am affected by a kind of synopsia,” he said, “found more in my mind than in my body, which allows me, when I hear music, and equally when I read it, to see inwardly, in the mind’s eye, colors which move with the music, and I sense these colors in an extremely vivid manner… For me certain complexes of sound and certain sonorities are linked to complexes of color, and I use them in full knowledge of this.”

In his multi-volume “Treatise of Rhythm, Colour, and Birdsong,” Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colors of certain chords. He described simple gold and brown chords and others that resembled purple rocks speckled with little gray cubes. He saw cobalt blue ones and deep Prussian blue ones tinged with a bit of violet, gold, red, ruby, and “stars of mauve.” With his music, he said, “I paint colors for those who see none.”

Watching the videos and reading about Judy Lee, I recalled something Marilyn vos Savant said: “Everyone knows we need teachers and nurses, and we all love to recognize the individual genius philosopher or mathematician. But the occupational group most responsible for modern society is engineers, who should win a ‘most under-appreciated’ award.”

It’s all French to me! How true! I’ve lately started to notice the way roads work and I’ve wondered about the layout of pipes and cables underground. I stand in awe of those who pioneered and perfected the technique of using circulating refrigerant to exchange hot, wet air for dry, cooler air, giving us both refrigeration and air conditioning. I’m more and more mindful that with just a flick of a finger I connect with deep wells of oil and veins of coal, with sun, wind, and water. Without knowing how it happens, I use those elements to light up or warm or cool my environment. Everywhere we turn we see such everyday miracles. We don’t often see or hear about the miracle workers.

Who are the people who make these things happen? How do they choose to become engineers? I’m sure we could find many answers, but I asked one engineer I know.

It’s a dark and stormy night. Rod Serling’s familiar voice assures us that Millicent Barnes, the young woman sitting alone on a bench in a drab bus depot, is “not given to even the most temporal flights of fancy.” She glances up at the clock, then walks up to the ticket counter. “Excuse me,” she politely asks the scruffy old ticket agent, “The bus to Cortland? It was due half an hour ago. When will it be in?” Mirror, mirror on the wall…

“She’ll be in when she’ll be in! I told you that the last time you asked!” She denies she’s asked before, and he tells her “You’re either walkin’ in your sleep or hung over or somethin’!”

She steps into the lady’s room. As she washes her hands, the cleaning lady eyes her as if she’s a ghost. “Are you all right, miss?”

“Of course I’m all right!” Millicent says.

“Well,” the maid says, “it’s just when you were in here before…”

“I wasn’t in here before!” Millicent exclaims, anger hardening her face. As she opens the door to step out, she glances in the mirror and sees the momentary reflection of an exact replica of herself sitting on the bench she’d left a moment ago.

I love how biology teacher Caryn Babaian suggested her students learn anatomy by sketching out Charlie Brown’s insides. Maybe if I’d had a teacher like Caryn, I wouldn’t have gone through school thinking biology was just about cutting up frogs and persecuting little mice.

Close observation of nature has its rewards The video interview with Caryn caused my mind to go off in all directions. Caryn’s fashion sense inspired me, too. (Take a good look at that great get-up she’s wearing in the video!) Listening to Caryn, I was suddenly interested in Leonardo’s Notebook, in cave drawings as an early means of illustrating biology, in artist teachers in history, and in the Bela Legosi film “The Devil Bat”!

But most of all, I took to heart what Caryn said about the value of seeing by drawing, for example, a leaf. I remembered “Leaf by Niggle,” a short story by J.R.R. Tolkien. In that story, artist Niggle paints a tree, beginning with a careful rendering of a single leaf. We can interpret the story in many ways, but the more attention he pays to his leaf, the more he sees—within the leaf, around, and beyond it.

Observing closely what we observe in nature—and drawing or otherwise trying to recreate what we see is the best way to do that—we enter into it. By paying attention we do more than learn terms we can repeat on a test: We can use careful observation as a ritual. By focusing and seeing—really seeing—the architecture of an endocrine system, the anatomy of a leaf or the social habits of an ant, the pattern of conch shells, fractals, snowflakes, and cells, we can live in the moment and at the same time get reminded of what a tiny space we occupy in Deep Time. We can become more mindful and appreciative of what cell biologist Ursula Goodenough called the sacred depths of nature.

When I heard featured scientist Len Zon say he feeds sea monkeys to the zebrafish he uses for cancer research, I knew I wanted to write something here about the sea monkey phenomenon I remembered from childhood. I was worried the subject was too trite compared to the important work Len does. Was it scientific enough? I decided that outside of their contribution to research biology, the sea monkey phenomenon is a part of popular culture. So, at the very least it’s social science.

Monkey Sea Monkey Do Sea monkeys are a genetic variant of Artemia, crustaceans also known as brine shrimp. Their eggs are metabolically inactive and remain in a state of suspended animation for up to two years. Drop the eggs into the right environment, though, and they come to life!

Back in 1957, the same guy who invented X-ray glasses marketed these brine shrimp as a novelty pet he named sea monkeys. His ads in the back of magazines showed a mail-order kit with which any kid could produce lively little chimp-faced creatures who wore crowns and would swim around in their delightful aquatic kingdom. All you had to do was dump the little packet of “instant life” into pre-conditioned water. In just days you’d get tiny dots swimming around and eventually you’d get creatures about an inch long, guaranteed to live up to two years. But they didn’t look like monkeys.

I asked Facebook friends if they remembered sea monkeys:

I thought of so many ways to run with Stephon’s story, I had a hard time choosing! I finally decided to go with his anecdote about the moon chase, how his childhood in Trinidad stirred his desire to find out how things work.

Stephon tells about the night skies on the southern coast of the island of Trinidad where he grew up. Because there was no light pollution, the moon and stars shone bright in the sky and had, I imagine, a peculiar presence. Stephon and the other kids believed in a kind of ghost they called Jumbies, and it crossed Stephon’s young mind that the moon was something like a Jumbie chasing him. It never caught up with him, though! Easter Island… another great place to see the moon And he wondered why. Stephon took his curiosity about such mysteries and became a physicist. I suspect he found the real reasons behind the phenomena of nature more fascinating than the myths.

Still, we can’t dismiss the allure of the mythical, the fantastic, even when we grow up. It holds some attraction for most of us. We like supernatural and science fiction/fantasy literature. We dress up on Halloween, and we enjoy the preternatural sensations that creep up on us when we hear the scuttle of dead leaves across the sidewalk. Centuries after we’ve learned better, we like to think the dead can walk. Maybe we’ve yet to evolve out of a need for the liminal, the fantastic.

When the Secret Life crew asked Rachel Collins, microbiologist and professional wrestler, what scientist she thought would’ve made a good wrestler, she said “Darwin.” Great answer! Her reason? Because he had a lot of people wanting to wrestle him over his theories. Still true!

The evolution will not be televised! We have a lot of evidence that Charles Darwin was a sensitive, kindly, thoughtful, morally upright man. Not that such attributes would prohibit anyone from becoming a wrestler, but when I tried to picture Charles Darwin, even in a parallel universe, as a Chuck Awesome or Charley Steamboat, I failed. That left me wondering about Darwin’s looks and demeanor. We know he was big on brains. Was he big on brawn?

Well, as a child, Charley, as he was called then, was no wimpy lie-abed. He liked to run and throw rocks. As a young man he hiked the rugged countryside of northern Wales to collect specimens. As an adult knocking around the house, Darwin was heavy on his feet, prone to beat the floor with his cane as he walked. He guffawed and slapped his thighs when his kids said something to crack him up. He walked Polly every day, no matter the weather! (Polly was his little white terrier.) But he sat at his desk and wrote letters a lot. He liked to sit on the sofa and let his wife read to him.

“For if at any time there can be an excuse for the rashness of a Woman who ventures to aspire to the subtleties of a science, which knows no bounds, not even those of infinity itself, it certainly should be at this glorious period, in which a Woman reigns…”—Marian Gaetana Agnesi’s dedication of her book “Analytical Institutions” to Maria Theresa, empress of the Austrian empire, in 1748.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi, polyglot and mathematician Like Jean Berko Gleason, psycholinguist (and speed demon!), the enigmatic Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799) was a walking polyglot. Maria could speak both French and Italian at age five, and by age twelve, she spoke Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, and Latin. But Maria, whose name is attached to a mathematical curve called “The Witch of Agnesi,” is known for her contributions to mathematics. At age eleven, Maria wrote and read, in Latin, her own appeal for women’s right to education and to what she would later call, in the introduction of her landmark book on mathematics, “the sublime sciences.”

Maria Gaetana Agnesi grew up in a wealthy, noble family. At the invitation of her father, scholars regularly gathered at her home, and in the harpsichord salon she dazzled them with talk about the ways of the tides and the origins of spring waters. They talked of light, color, geometry, and the human soul. Afterward, the Agnesi family and guests wound down over fruit-flavored ices while Maria’s sister played the harpsichord and sang arias.

Learning about Mollie Woodworth, neuroscientist, slicer of mouse brains (!), and MIT cheerleader, made me think about my first-ever MRI scan on my brain. I dreaded it. I had nightmares and daymares about it! I dreamed of feeling trapped inside a steel coffin with weird zoort-like noises and the sound of somebody somewhere banging on metal with a hammer. Featuring 250 shades of gray!

Turned out it was a little like that but not so bad at all. I eased my early anxiety in a way perhaps peculiar to nerds, by thinking about all the people whose intelligence, imagination, and hard work had come together to create and make routine the use of this amazing contraption.

And amazing it is. Imagine: a giant magnet that makes hydrogen atoms dance around and align inside our tender tissues, yet we feel nothing at all. Three-D pictures of our innards result, with as many as 250 distinct shades of gray! And a radiologist waits in the wings equipped to decipher their meaning. How ordinary. How extraordinary!