Terry Gross at NPR:
Southern California families who have lost everything the in recent wildfires are reckoning with what it means to start over. Writer Pico Iyer’s eerily timed memoir, Aflame: Learning from Silence, speaks to that experience.
In 1990, Iyer was alone in his mother’s house in Santa Barbara when a wildfire swept through the region. Suddenly, it seemed, he was surrounded by flames.
“I literally didn’t have time to pick up the passport that was two feet away,” Iyer says. “I just grabbed my mother’s cat, raced into a car and drove down the driveway, not thinking that the car was probably the worst place to be.”
Trapped in the car with a panting cat on his lap, Iyer says he tried to focus on keeping the cat alive — and not on how vulnerable felt as as he watched the house he had just escaped from burn to the ground.
More here.
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The literature showed insects to be far more sophisticated than one might expect of an automaton. Many have nociceptors that send signals to other parts of the insect brain, such as the central complex (associated with spatial navigation and locomotion) and the mushroom bodies (linked to learning, memory, and sensory integration). Cockroaches have a nervous-system pathway that leads up from the body to the brain and back again. In a 2019 study, researchers exposed cockroaches to a hot stimulus and a neutral stimulus; the neutral stimulus prompted a weaker signal from the body to the brain, and the hot stimulus led the roaches to try and escape. (Unsettlingly, cockroaches without heads responded to the heat but did not try to escape.) A recent genomic study of mantises, which are notorious for eating their mates during and after sex, found genes that code for nociceptive ion channels—proteins that respond to pain.