Less > More: A fresh perspective

There has been a new discovery in psychology, a finding that is dominant enough to affect all our lives and almost all aspects of our lives. About a year ago, psychology researcher Norbert Schwarz and his team conducted a study into the inner workings of the minds of two people during a specific type of a conversation – where one is trying to impress the other and expect something in return, like a job or their money, and the other is listening to everything that is being put on the table and making up a decision whether to give them what they expect. The results of the study surprised even the researchers enough that they categorized its generality as a paradox and called it ‘The Presenter’s Paradox.’

The idea is simply this: Whenever you are on the presenter’s end of submitting a list of your accomplishments, you mention all of your accomplishments, regardless of how big or small they are, instinctively assuming that the person you are presenting them to is adding them all up. The person on the receiver's end, though, hears a completely different story. They don’t add you accomplishments, they instinctively average them out. If you scored a 750 on GMAT (say 10 points for this), organized a college festival in the capacity of a student president (say 10 points again), served as the editor-in-chief of the college magazine (10 points), and then also mention that you came second in a cooking competition (2 points), your hope is that your score adds up to 32 as it has in your head; when in reality, from the perspective of the judge, you only scored an average of 8, as opposed to scoring an average 10 had you not mentioned the cooking competition bit at all (not 10+10+10+2=32, but 32/4=8). In short, quality, not quantity.

This phenomenon of adding-versus-averaging has caused quite a sensation in psychology fields in the past year since its publication. Follow-up studies – a total of seven – have found the same behavior exhibited in a variety of different circles. In one study, customers were asked to price an ipod without any freebies and another identical ipod that came with a free song. On average, they were willing to pay $242 for the one without the free song and $177 for the one with the free song. This seems counterintuitive. Why would anyone pay more for less? (Here's another neat example of this same phenomenon). In a second study with different participants, they reversed the scenario and asked them to guess which one a customer was more likely to buy, and 92% of them said the one with the free song would sell more. Our reasoning dramatically transforms when we are presenters and receivers, and it turns out that this reasoning takes place completely differently in our subconscious mind than our conscious.

I had written a blogpost a year ago about the brain having evolved to conserve every last bit of neuron in order to save brain space, because it only has a limited amount of gray matter to work with for a million of its callings. It only allocates the absolutely-necessary number of neurons to any task and not a neuron more – it’s frugal but it gets the job done like a pro. Averaging is a much better way of conserving brain space than summation. In the above example, 8 is a much simpler number than 32 – not just in terms of the number of digits but also in terms of how it is arrived at. In the case of summation, the brain begins with the first number, adds it to the second, adds this new number to the third...and with each iteration the number gets not only bigger but more importantly much different than the previous summation. However, in the case of average, the brain only has to vaguely average out the first two numbers, and from the third number onwards the average will be much closer to the average of the first two and not vary significantly – and any significant variation in new items added will immediately tell you whether the average has gone up or down with just a glance at the numbers without having to do the math. You instinctively know that the average of three 9s and two 8s is higher than the average of three 9s and two 8s and a 3, without even knowing what that average is. You know, instinctively, that the average of the whole set has gone down with the addition of a number that is significantly less than the average of the first five; and if this newly added number is not significantly less than the average of the first five, you again know instinctively that the average hasn’t changed much – a very simple but effective tool in decision-making that consumes much less brain power than having to individually add up each number and remember the new summation each time. This logic applies whether you are dealing with 4 items or 10, although the study hasn’t been conducted for very large number of items so I don’t wish to speculate there.

The brain has evolved over millions of years to do this kind of averaging without associating concrete numbers to anything. It comes naturally to us – provided we are at the receiver’s end.

This finding has significant impact on how you should conduct yourself, be you an interviewee (presenter) or be you designing a product for sale (presenter), be you gifting many gifts on someone's birthday (presenter) or be you accepting punishment (receiver). Yes, it even applies to how you perceive punishment, which was one of those 7 studies. Participants of the study were asked to choose between two punishments for littering: a) $750 fine, or b) $750 fine plus two hours of community service. Paradoxically, 86% of the participants chose option B because they reasoned that it was less severe than option A – which is ridiculously, obviously not true. Not only that, but they also reasoned that option B was significantly less severe than option A. The Presenter’s Paradox had come into play, (this time being not the presenter but the receiver) and their brains averaged out the overall punishment, because not many perceive community service as a severe form of punishment in comparison with a $750 fine, so the overall perception of the severity of punishment diminished.

As a general rule, in any situation where you are either presenting, or are being presented, multiple items with the expectation of an impeding decision of approval or selection, stop and ask yourself which side of the fence you are on (presenter or receiver) and:

1. Remove items that reduce the overall quality of your presentation if you are the presenter, or
2. Add, don’t average, all the items if you are the receiver.

Now then, since I have the habit of relating everything I read or observe to filmmaking/filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick had noticed, or at least had an inkling of, this phenomenon back in the 70s, as is visible in this quote:

“It is not so important to make a good film as it is to not make a bad one.” - Kubrick

He knew that if he made a bad film, his good films will not come for his rescue and his overall reputation would suffer. He ended up making only 11 feature films in his entire career. Had Sydney Lumet made only 11 good ones, instead of the 50 eclectic feature films he did make, he too would’ve been revered alongside Kubrick, not an inch lower. The saying “less is more” isn’t all bullshit.

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The horror... The horror...

I wrote something long. Actually, it was much longer, but lest I waste your precious time, I deleted it and have presented here its condensed version. Basically, in a nutshell, I think horror films being made these days are not scary and suck donkey balls. Having sudden, loud, unceremonious BANG!s come out of nowhere when you least expect it is not scary. And sadly, that's what constitutes the bulk of modern horror genre.

While I'm the last person to impose "rules" onto the making of a film, there are certain common elements that emerge when you examine the classics of this genre, elements that run mostly in the subtext and hence work on the subconscious mind. Working on the subconscious is essential to evoking an emotion that has evolved over millions of years and has been buried deep inside the psyche: fear. Once you take care of the subconscious, you can spread you creative wings to work on the conscious.

So, the common elements of horror classics:

1. Always, always set the scene of your story in an isolated place, not surrounded by any physical human interaction for many miles in all directions. The reason this is of paramount importance in evoking fear is because it evokes another emotion that in turn evokes fear: helplessness. If shit goes down, there's no one around to help. Humans have evolved in groups, always living and hunting and protecting in groups. The very presence of another human being in a lonely place, even if he's an unlikable character, can create a sense of comfort. That's the last thing you want in your film - comfort. Remember that while watching the film, every member of your audience places him/herself in the place of the protagonist, mentally detaching themselves from the asshole in the next seat. By placing your protagonist and/or his family in an isolated location, preferably geographically detached from civilization, you are also psychologically detaching your audience from everyone else. That sets in helplessness, the most delicious item in your recipe. Think of this as the no-escape rule. It's so powerful that even if you are cognizant of this plot tool, it STILL works on you. Additionally, it also serves an another purpose: at the climax of the film should you choose to return your protagonist back to civilization and restore normalcy, the sudden burst of relief you would aim to achieve in act III, the conclusion, would be amplified manifold.

Examples: The Shining - set in a hotel in an extremely isolated place that is literally cut off from civilization during winters. In fact, to establish the extent to which it is isolated, Kubrick opens the film, as the credits roll, with a bird's-eye view of a car driving to this hotel through long stretches of uninhabited mountains. Evil Dead - a cold, lonely place in the woods, connected to only by a bridge that our Evil Force rips apart early in the film. Psycho - a gigantic single house and motel set in the middle of nowhere, with no one to reach out to if nigga comes attackin'. Setting your film in such a lonely place does half the job of creating tension and terror. The audience may not consciously think about all of this, but it's ALWAYS there in the back of their minds that there is no one out there to help, that the VIEWER, not the protagonist mind you, is in a state of helplessness. That activates every fear and anxiety center in their brains. It doesn't matter if it is supernatural horror or natural horror, it works.

A bad example of this would be The Woman in Black. They do set the story in an isolated village, and the house of interest IS away from the village, but the very fact that there are PEOPLE in the village accessible at anytime to the protagonist takes away all of the anxiety and fear characteristics of the story.

2. Never show the ghost till the very climax of the film, at least not completely anyway. This one applies only to supernatural horror. What is not visible is always scarier than what is. There's a reason why we were afraid of something being under the bed in our childhood. We can't see it. We imagine it. As a filmmaker, your most potent tool is not any of your overpriced editing gadgets but the imaginative power of the mind of your audience. Don't work ON it, work WITH it. Show them glimpses, occasionally, if you must, but never the whole thing. However, keeping them completely ignorant about the ghost can work against you. There's point after which the audience tires out of imagining all by themselves without receiving any catalysts and cues. Reveal the whole thing only at the climactic end, and when you do reveal, make sure it rewards their feared expectations. Don't build so much tension during the course of the film and in the end "reward" them with a ghost that looks like a constipated cat. They'll hate you for it. But to some extent, this can be applied even to natural horror films. In Psycho, the mother (or what's left of her) is not shown till the very end of the film; but as a general, it's more applicable to supernatural horror since supernatural ghosts ignite the audience's imaginative creativity more than a familiar human figure.

3. Set MOST, not all, of the events in the film in the dark. The dark, as Kirk Douglas nailed it in The Bad and the Beautiful, has a life of its own. "In the dark," he continues, "all sorts of things come alive." There are again evolutionary bases for why dark in itself is pants-shitting scary. Having a fear of the dark because of there being some sort of evil ghost out there kept our human ancestors from venturing into the dark at night, thereby protecting them from predators in the jungle. Fear of ghosts, as modern science suggests, was instrumental in our species' evolution - not because ghosts exist but very the fear of it protected them more earthly predators and kept them from extinction. A mere fear of predators wasn't enough to protect them at night because dark essentially made them blind and gave the more evolved predators an evolutionary advantage. A fear of something more sinister, however, worked to their advantage. This fear was only necessary at nighttime, since if they stayed locked in their caves day and night out of fear of ghosts, they'd starve to death. Daylight gave them all the advantage they needed to hunt, and their fear gave them all the protection they needed at night. Fear of the dark is ingrained into our very DNA. Combine this with point #1 and you are almost done with the subconscious architecture of your film.

4. For fuck's sake, don't include gay people in your movie. You are making a horror film, not a Prada commercial. We unfortunately live in a time of political correctness gone mad. Don't have black people in a positive role? Get accused of racism by black organizations. Don't have women in intelligent roles? You such a sexist pig! Mildly pat a dog? Get sued by PETA. And lastly, don't have two men making out with their tongues in each other's mouths and in YOUR face? Homophobic! What happened to all the good old days when you could just make an honest film without being counterproductive to the film's emotions? Even gay people find gay people in horror films un-horrifying. Stick them to the chick flicks.

5. Stay away from loud noises. This is a direct result of advances in sound engineering. A silent scene, the protagonist looks around the room, the lo! The ghost pops out of nowhere and the speakers tear their anuses apart and bang your eardrums out. Almost every horror film being made these days abuses sound technology this way. But you don't. Instead, use atmosphere and mood to create fear. Create a consistent tone with creative use of lighting, camera angles and movements, solid performances, believable character reactions and their motivations. NOT through bullfucking aural rapefests at every turn you take. Watch old films of this genre, classics or not, because they could scare you without using cheap-ass sound effects.

This newly invented lost-and-found-footage genre horror has actually taken care of this problem. They obviously can't use sound effects since there's no score. [REC], the Spanish original, is a perfect example of a very well made modern horror film that scares through atmosphere and intelligent storytelling without the use of nuclear bombs for sound. Both sequels sucked, the American remake sucked harder, but the original still retains its shine.

6. Lastly but equally importantly, the film should be a progression, not stagnation or decline. Start the film with some tense event, if you so choose, since it's important to grab the audience's attention from the start. But from the next scene on, bring it down to almost no drama, no action, no excitement, and slowly build your way upward, clue by clue, event by event, until the climax where everything, or most of it, is revealed and dealt with. Paranormal Activity, for example, doesn't reveal too much the very first night he places the camera. Only the wind blows. The second night, well I don't remember exactly but something slightly more noticeable happens, and it builds on and on. This is the only way you can do it because giving away too much at the very beginning creates two hurdles: 1. The audience won't be able to take in too much info in too little time. You have to gradually slide it in, like a frog in a glass of water that is being slowly boiled without its being aware of it. 2. The audience will be disappointed when what follows isn't more exciting than what came so far. It creates stagnation and saturation and elicits that very familiar response: boring. [REC] actually does this building up of tension in such a clever way that starting at the ground floor of the building, the tension and excitement builds with each floor they go up, revealing more and adding more conflict, until they reach the penthouse where all hell breaks loose.

That's it. I could still add in a few more generic themes, but I've already bored you enough. Goodnight amigo, and stay straight!

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What makes No Country For Old Men a great film?

There’s been much talk and debate ever since this film was released and won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, about its artistic and narrative merit.  Comments from naysayers vary from “It’s a pointless, plotless affair in pretentious filmmaking” to “dafuq did I just watch?”, while accolades from yay-sayers range between carried-away OMFGs and “the Coen brothers have weaved pure cinematic gold...instant classic.” I, under the pretense of having something new to add, will make a vain attempt here to justify why No Country For Old Men is the rightful recepient of the title of not only the best film of the year 2007 but also the best film of the decade 2000s and, at the end of the century, the heir to the title The Godfather held in the 20^th century: the best film of the century.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I usually am not one to analyze and dissect films or other forms of stories, and in fact that is the least of my intentions here. After all, movies I firmly believe should be open to subjective interpretation, not to objective analysis, and each person should be entitled to conceive it in any way they choose. But there is a good deal of backstory and context within which the film makes sense and sheds more light on the characters, their beliefs and motivations, and all the underlying richness of the film. This context is what I wish to explore, not just partially as I will do here but in greater depth in future through other novels of Cormac McCarthy (especially The Sunset Limited, which I need to re-watch).

So, first things first: the protagonist of the film. Most people believe that since the antagonist is Anton Chigurh, the protagonist must be the guy he is chasing, the hunter Llewelyn Moss. He’s not. As uncoventional as it may seem, the protagonist is actually the sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the narrator of the film. Despite him not being physically present in most of the events, the entire film is actually told from his perspective. There is no rule written anywhere that the lead character of a story must be present for a precise number of onscreen minutes, nor that the story must physically revolve around him. What determines whether he is the lead or not, however, is the perspective: is the moral compass of the movie, for the most part anyway, inclined relative to the character in question? It could be very subtle, but perspectives, like assholes, are always present. That’s what makes a film work, even if you can’t verbalize or analyze it.

Secondly, the era. The film is not set in modern-day Texas but in 1980. This is easily deductible through the general setting of the film, including cars, and through Chigurh’s words exchanged with a shop owner he intends to kill:  “You know what date is on this coin? 1958. It's been traveling 22 years to get here. And now it’s here.” 1958 + 22 = 1980. The reason I mention this is because era is one of the most important aspects of the context of this film, the hint to which is in the very title of the movie. As a matter of fact, era is important to the context of any film, even if its moralities are timeless and omnipresent, but I must resist digressing towards unnecessary generalities.

Now, the key to understanding this film lies in the opening monologue by the narrator, Sheriff Bell. I’ll reproduce it here only in its relevance:

I was sheriff of this county when I was 25 years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman. Father too. Me and him was sheriffs at the same time, him up in Plano and me out here. ... Some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lot of folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough never carried one. ... Gaston Boykins wouldn’t wear one up in Comanche County. I always liked to hear about the old-timers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can’t help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can’t help but wonder how they’d have operated these times. There’s this boy I sent to the electric chair at Huntsville here a while back. ... He killed a 14-year-old girl. Paper said it was a crime of passion, but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it. Told me he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said if they turned him out, he’d do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about 15 minutes. I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t. The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."

(Ah, the calm, comforting resignation with which Tommy Lee Jones utters these words is just priceless!)

As I mentioned above, it’s 1980. Richard Nixon had declared War on Drugs in 1971, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was established in 1973 for this purpose. DEA took its job seriously, as it does to this day, and busted pretty much every single “lab” (the jargon for places, including shady basements, where drugs like cocaine, heroine, etc. are manufactured or “cooked”) and incarcerated most drug dealers, distributors, and users. DEA was only getting stronger and more well-established, and the future for those who depended on home-grown illegal drugs didn’t look very promising. By 1980, the organization had become strong enough that if you cooked within the US, DEA would hunt you down. That was the trend. In such difficult times, the demand for imported illegal drugs rose exponentially. Afterall, DEA couldn’t bust labs situated in countries outside their jurisdiction. Their neighboring country, Mexico, where drug laws hardly existed and crime was a way of life, was the perfect haven to cook and import drugs from. And since Mexico shares her border with Texas, Texas acted as the gateway for illegal drugs into the US, importing not only drugs but also the perils and heinous crimes that go with it – thus breeding the infamous “Mexican drug cartel.” A new wave of crime was beginning to spread through the country – mindless, passionless, cold, brutal, unmotivated, unforgiving – in other words, the embodiment that is Anton Chigurh.

Chigurh is the physical manifestation of a characteristic drug trafficking trade gone wrong and its ensuing chaos – beginning with a killing spree at the location of the exchange and followed by money missing and the pursuit of it involving a range of insensible, incomprehensible murders. The events leading up to the initial massacre are kept as vague as possible to give it the look and feel of generality; to imply that it’s not important specifically what caused the massacre because although causative reasons might vary with each such massacre, the factor they all have in common is deception and betrayal centered around money. That’s how it begins – without a specific beginning. And if you watch the film closely enough, when Moss is killed at the end of the hunt, you are shown neither the act of killing itself, nor the killers and nor the bodies clearly enough, just the sheriff’s perspective from his car as he witnesses things from a distance and approaches the scene of crime to find two floating bodies in the pool. The end of the hunt is also kept as vague as possible, to give it the same feel of generality as the ordeal’s beginning. It’s a film without a beginning or an end.

As the end approaches, it becomes increasingly clear that Chigurh isn’t even pursuing Moss for the money. It appears so initially when he tracks Moss through a tracker hidden inside the case, but even after Moss gets rid of the money, Chigurh continues pursuing him anyway. He was never after the money, only the sadistic thrill of the kill. (In fact, Chigurh kills Moss' wife because "I gave him my word.") The Cartel doesn’t kill Moss for the money either, only to send out the message not to fuck with them, to not put your nose where it doesn’t belong even by chance. And when the sheriff comes face-to-face with the aftermath of all these atrocities he is struggling to comprehend, he is all but nostalgic about a time gone by when crime used to be much simpler to understand, when murder came with motive, when no one killed without reason, when criminals were easier to deal with – the tone with which he utters the opening monologue which if you go back up and read will tell you why he believes he is no longer lives in a country for old men like him but is instead trying to find his place in such a world. His nostalgia isn’t reflected just in the opening voice-over monologue alone but also in the ending monologue where he tells his wife the dream he had the other night about his father.

But the most pivotal and perhaps the best part of the film is the penultimate scene where the sheriff visits his elder wheelchair-bound brother who tell hims the story of how their uncle was killed in 1909, trying to convince him that he isn’t dealing with anything new, that this country has always been hard on people, and that he “can’t stop what’s comin’.”

No Country For Old Men is a film where everything came together to make the perfect symphony.
_______________

Favorite dialogue from the movie:
Moss: "Is he dangerous?"
Carson Wells: "Compared to what? The Bubonic plague?"

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No donut for dear Miss Angela Fine :(

It's been a while since I posted anything and I am still drafting a post, in which I've already lost interest and hence have shelved it forever, but I thought I'd post an excerpt from a hilariously titled, hilarious book, Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere, which was pretty amusing to read:

The second tear was for Angela Fine, because she is beautiful and pure and nice, and staples pictures of kittens to the pay envelopes of the entire IT department every Friday because she believes that little things count. If I were her lover I would be the most dedicated, kind, brave, understanding, sensitive lover any woman ever had. I would give her cunnilingus every morning, and fix her car, and rub her back and change all of the light bulbs in her house on a regular schedule before any of them ever actually burned out, and I would defend her home from thieves and her heart from loneliness and her body from violence and her laptop from viruses and unstable Microsoft updates. Because that is what a beautiful, perfect creature of Angela Fine’s caliber—a caliber of one, a class unto herself—deserves.

But Angela Fine does not get what she deserves. Instead, Angela gets:

1. A new pair of wide-rimmed glasses, slightly tinted—not nearly as flattering or sexy as the small, black-rimmed librarian glasses she used to wear, yet still gorgeous in context and incredibly lucky to be on her face—with which, aided by mascara, she disguises a swollen black eye; and

2. A small, perfectly round scab just beneath and behind her right ear, approximately 8 millimeters in diameter; a kind of scab the Old Me knows well from his awful childhood; the kind of scab you get when your sadistic, abusive boyfriend or stepfather stabs you with a cigarette, as punishment.

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Best films of 2011, in that order

My take, for my sake:

1.       1.  The Tree of Life

I have a feeling that in 20 to 30 years’ time, this film will be regarded with the same veneration that 2001: A Space Odyssey is today. 9/10

2.       2.  The Artist

That magic, sheer magic of silent cinema resurrected. Being a Griffith and Buster Keats admirer and all, this struck an unforgettable chord with me. The Heartist. 9/10

3.       3.  The Ides of March

I’m not much of a Clooney-as-an-actor fanboy. In fact, I’m not much of a fanboy of any actor, except maybe Jimmy Stewart, Ed Norton, and Samuel Jackson, and for reasons not necessarily related to their acting. But Clooney-as-a-director, specifically Clooney-as-a-director-of-political-dramas, I don’t really think it can get better than him. I’m placing this at a higher position than The Descendants, a classy gemstone of a film made by one of my most favorite filmmakers, Alex Payne, so it can say how much I loved it. 8/10

4.       4.  The Descendants

There is something about the subtleties of Payne’s wrting/directing, something inexplicable, that makes me watch it over and over and over again like you listen to your favorite song in repetitions. The Descendants just goes on to reinforce what I already believed after watching Sideways several times. 8/10

5.       5.  Our Idiot Brother

One of the sweetest, dumbest, warmest flicks of the year. And the only film this year I watched twice back to back. 8/10

6.       6.  A Separation

Despite my skepticism of how good and how overrated the film might be before actually watching it, I was thoroughly, and pleasantly, surprised to be proven wrong. One seriously awesome movie! 8.5/10

7.       7.  The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Fincher has finally found his voice, his style. I thought he wouldn’t be able to pull off another high-wire film like The Social Network again, but he did, very visibly so. To have two of films two years in a row win the Best Editor Oscar actually says quite a lot about his newfound style. 8/10

8.       8.  50/50

A moving drama peppered with comedy in small doses and a powerful performance from its lead, it so didn’t turn out like another one of Seth Rogen’s cut-and-dried attempts at light comedy of retards. 7/10

9.       9.  Hugo

Scorsese’s first  (in hopefully a line of) big bugdet film about how loss is defined in childhood, about how cinema can offer at least a semblance of comfort in its escapism, and most importantly, about a legendary filmmaker whose name was lost in the pages of film history. No one, NO ONE, is more qualified to make a film about origins and history of cinema than Scorsese. 8/10

1     10.  Carnage

Though not exactly an admirer of Polanski (LOVED the Pianist), he certainly pulled this (small) film like only he could. Strangely, despite being set only inside a house, the film cost $25 million to make, taking into account the actors’ and director’ sallaries and about 400 special effect features including the views from the windows. Strange. 8/10

1    11.  We Need to Talk About Kevin

Tilda Swinton’s best performance of her career which she might never be able to outperform herself. 7/10

12.  Contagion
One of Soderbergh's best, and unlike most films of this genre, rooted very strongly in real science. No heroism, no buffoonery. No star is given an ego massage of extra screen time. It captures an epidemic on a large-scale perspective. 8/10

Anywho, I still have yet to watch many, many more films from last year, all waiting on my IMDb watchlist with over 700 films, documentaries, TV series, short films, etc. on it. But I’m saving those for later times, for my old age, so this is good enough for now.

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Evolution, death, living, and the 5 most important drugs

I’ve been procrastinating on writing this article for many a month, and the longer I sit on it (or it sits on my mind), the more lethargic I feel, lethargy that spills into everything else. So anyway, evolution is one of my most obsessive topics in science, and I spend more time thinking/reading about it than any other thought seed. Recently, after watching a TED talk about the future of evolution (people who are too sensitive to the whole eugenics business and feel their heart stabbed with even the hint of “controlling” evolution can conveniently stop reading at this point and return to their routine without bothering with the above-linked video), there was something mentioned in it that irrelevantly ignited my interest in pharmacology. In essence, after much thought, the idea boils down to this: you don’t need to meddle with genes in order to have a conscious influence on our species’ evolution; we are already doing it – in the form of medical interventions of all kinds, especially those that delay fatality.

Up until a few hundred or a few thousand years ago, man was completely subject to the will of nature, physiologically speaking. Any harmful genes and genes that would decrease the probability of survival of an individual – example, diseases acquired through hereditary, genes influencing moronic behaviors that lead to death, etc. – were all eliminated from the human gene pool through the death of the individual if the death occurred before breeding. What we define as harmful in this context need not necessarily be something extreme like cancer or plague but even a mild infection that could lead to gangrene and eventually death, or an infection during a simple fever (which is a time when the immune system is fighting to normalize body temperature and any secondary sources of malice, even something as inconsequential as a dog bite or bruised infection, would not be sufficiently dealt with by the busy immune system and thus increase chances of death). So there need not necessarily be something wrong directly with the genes themselves; the body’s immune system, which is a manifestation of those genes, can instead be easily influenced by external agents, and thus also the chances of carrying on of those genes into the next generation; or, death could not even have been from a physiologic dysfunction but rather from being eaten by a predator or death by stupidity, all of which are again manifestations of survival instincts influenced by genes. Evolution has its fingers in every pie. In as many cases as not, death used to occur well before breeding, and therefore, those genes were eliminated from the gene pool through evolutionary natural selection – a phenomenon powered by the thin line that separates death and survival.**

However, with the institution of medical science that has been gradually increasing in depth over the past couple of millennia, we have been actively delaying death and getting better at it, thereby being able to reproduce before death (not that there’s something called ‘reproduce after death,’ but you get the point) and pass on every kind of gene, good or bad, to the offsprings, and they to theirs. The larger-perspective consequence of this medical intervention simply means that we are keeping natural selection from acting on those undesirable genes and ensuring that they are kept active/present in the human gene pool. As a quick illustration of this effect, two graphs demonstrate the average life expectancy of an individual over the past few centuries and the infant mortality rate for the 20th century, both of which show that medical intervention has increased the chances of gene survival in the gene pool:

(Remember, though, that death can occur even after infancy but before reproduction - the so called "virgin deaths," for lack of a better term - so the graphs are valid yet unavailable for that demographic as well)

The conclusion here is that we are not at the mercy of nature anymore to survive, and even without actually manipulating the genes directly, we are still consciously influencing their presence in our species. Since genes are what determine the course of evolution, we humans have already begun to control the future of our species on an evolutionary scale (you could also argue that veterinary science has done the same for animals, although to a lesser degree). And in addition to delaying death and ensuring reproduction, medical intervention also treats or cures inherited/congenital and other diseases arising from those genes or from external agents, which, as I said earlier, are again manifestations of genes.

The above-linked video discusses working directly on the genes themselves and manipulating them consciously, and not indirectly through medical science as I just described, to eliminate harmful genes altogether and tune our mortality, but that is not what I want to talk about here. I am more interested in how medical science has indirectly worked on our genes and helped you and I come into existence and stay in existence.

The following are five of the most important and impressive pharmacological miracles which either we owe our existence to or which humankind is much, much worse off without. I say humankind as a collective term, of course. Individually, we all have, or will have later in life, a medicine which is as important to us personally as these are to mankind as a whole.

1. Penicillin.
The granddaddy of all modern antibiotics and the first antibiotic ever discovered. It is estimated that 75% of today’s world population would not be alive if penicillin hadn’t saved our ancestors from infections. 75% of our current population would never have known what it means “to live.” Penicillin, more than any other single factor, led to the exponential rise in population in the 20th century. We are currently developing resistance to penicillin and gradually making it ineffective on several bacterial infections, but secondary antibiotics derived from penicillin and many other antibiotics discovered even today through the same method Dr. Fleming used to (accidentally) discover penicillin in 1928 are rising up to fill the grandmaster’s place.

2. Ether
What we generally call anesthesia, was discovered in 1842. All surgeries performed until then were live surgeries, with the patient conscious. If a mass had to be removed, you had to be cut open when you could feel every moment of the excruciating pain, many dying of the pain itself. Not that we are here and alive because of this chemical compound, but without it, the millions of surgeries taking place every year would either never take place because of the fear of pain, or be so painful as to suck the life force out of you. In the awe-inspiring HBO TV mini-series John Adams, set in 18th century, one of his daughters undergoes a breast removal for a diagnosis of malignant, cancerous tumor – while she is still awake and feeling every inch of the pain as the blade cuts her breast off, and as Mr. and Mrs. Adams cry in each other's arms at the screams of their daughter's agony during the procedure. The cancer recurs in the other breast a while after, and she refuses surgery and accepts death.

3. Smallpox vaccine

The first successful vaccine in medical history, it symbolizes man’s ascendancy over the dark side of nature, a symbol in the form of a healed lesion on your left shoulder. Small pox has been one of the deadliest epidemics in recorded time – notorious not just for its mortality rates but also for the stretch of time it lurked in our species, spanning over 12,000 years. Even the Spanish flu, which claimed over 50 million lives in early 20th century, did not last longer than a few years. This vaccine used to treat the smallpox virus is ironically made of another virus – cowpox virus. Classic case of fight fire with fire, huh?




4. Antidepressants
There is a very sick mentality among the general population of judging people who are on antidepressants. I once very briefly worked on a psychiatry department account and had a long stint with general physician consulting in my line of work. I could never cease to be surprised at the number of patients with a very chronic case of depression who refused to go on antidepressants simply because of the fear of what their friends might think (I am not exaggerating. I’m barely even paraphrasing). What other people might think! I don’t think the patient is completely at fault here, because as Col. Walter Kurtz rightly put it, “It’s judgment that defeats us.” We are all inherently afraid of being judged, and that fear surfaces in these depressed patients at the sound of being on a drug for the mind, emotionally helpless as they already are. But what sickens me to my gut is when I see or hear someone judging, either vocally or with subtle facial expressions through which they so wonderfully communicate condescension, a person who is on antidepressants. No one judges patients with diabetes, heart diseases, renal failure, or any other physiological issues, but when it comes to a psychological issue, an emphatic “OH!” ensues. Right, here is the truth: clinical depression is neither a choice nor a reflection of the state of lives of people suffering from it. It’s as physiological a condition as osteoarthritis or congestive heart failure. Chronically depressed patients’ brains are physically incapable of producing the appropriate amounts of chemicals required to be happy. The only way to treat it is to fight it with an antidepressant drug, the way you would treat a backache with ibuprofen – i.e., with medicine! You can't (read slowly: CAN'T) cure it by thinking optimistically, thinking happy thoughts, taking a freakin break, or any other pop culture bullshit worthless advices people give. Go watch this enlightening Stanford video, educate your ignorant, harebrained ass, and refrain from making any smartass judgment calls the next time you hear someone is on an antidepressant: you could potentially save them their lives, just by being a decent human being. Too much to ask?

As Maria Bustillos, studying the reason for DFW's suicide, wrote the most sensible words I've ever heard from a lay person:

I have known intimately and looked after depressed people, and have no illusions about my ability to understand the real nature of that illness. The sort of blues I occasionally suffer through compares to real depression like a broken fingernail compares to being shot in the head and then set on fire and drowned. But it seems to me that the victims of that terrible disorder are often trying all their lives in vain to figure out why this must be so. Why them. And maybe there really is just no reason, or the reason is completely random, a cluster of neurons misfiring one day by accident, a bad thing that happens and could not be helped.

On a similar note, as much as I admire and appreciate Sir Ken Robinson’s intricate critique of the current state of our pathetic school/education systems worldwide, a glimpse of the judgmental attitude towards psychogenic drugs can be seen in these two (1, 2) million-plus-views Youtube videos of his. In the second video although he correctly admits that he is not qualified to comment on ADHD, he somehow believes he is qualified to comment on ADHD drugs. The very least bit of qualification required to comment on this class of drugs is to try one. But without knowing what it feels like to be on one, without conducting proper research into the drug, and without knowing what the drug does inside the brain, Sir Ken confidently posits that psychostimulant ADHD drugs numb your senses and enable you to focus on the “boring” subject by disabling you from attaining the heightened state of enjoyment you feel while watching a work of art. But the reality of it is hilariously contrary – ADHD medications heighten, NOT numb, your senses and therefore enable you to focus on whatever it is you want to focus on, including art. As someone who has tried modafinil, I can vouch for it, and so can academic sources and millions of others on it. Just try watching a film while on modafinil, and you’ll bet your life savings you are enjoying it better than Sir Ken. So making daft statements like these shows not just how uneducated (no pun intended) and biased he is against the science of mind and drugs, but also displays the stupidity of the audience that nods its heads and shares his judgment of ADHD drugs and of those who prescribe or support it. Another sad example comes from Doug Stanhope, one of my favorite and extremely bright comedians. As I said, I love both Robinson and Stanhope in all other respects but fall short of sympathizing with their disdain and judgment towards psych drugs. And all this is just a glimpse; the bigger picture is much uglier.

[I’m sorry about the tone of these two paragraphs above. I vent bitterly because I too was on an anxiolytic for a brief period last year, and save a few friends, pretty much everyone else gave me a judgmental look for it and it wasn’t too long before I realized this was a universal phenomenon that’s causing millions of people around the world to commit suicide simply because they’d rather deal with the consequence of not being treated for their psychological condition than be judged for accepting treatment.]

5. Antihypertensives
Approximately 1 billion people in the world currently suffer from hypertension (high blood pressure), and it is estimated that one out of every four people born will develop severe, chronic hypertension into their adulthood, and another one of those four will develop moderate hypertension (hypertension classification here). Hypertension has been academically called a “silent killer” because the symptoms of hypertension are so mild and unfelt over a long time that you become adjusted to its abnormality as normalcy and it slowly begins to eat away your longevity. One day, thud! Hypertension in rare cases can occur even at young age but normally occurs well into your adulthood, so antihypertensives are drugs that extend your days, and not (just) help you survive till you give birth. Many of us owe our parents’ and grandparents’ long life to this class of drugs.

Of course, utterly needless to say, every class of drugs is important, not just the ones I have chosen to mention here. From nutritionals to antivirals, NSAIDs to antipyretics, analgesics (very commonly used) to ACE inhibitors, insulin to even birth control pills and emergency contraceptive pills – sometimes not just to restore normalcy but to elevate normalcy up to higher standards of healthy living. Some are personally more important to us than any of these drugs mentioned above. But we all need them. Even those who prefer Ayurveda, Homeopathic and other alternative medicines and show a general sense of disdain towards Western medicine owe their existence to them, deny as they might. Pharmacology and medical science is what makes living today better than living in the past – more so than any other perks of human development.

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** (It's also worth noting that the death before reproduction of a single member of a species containing an undesirable gene isn't necessarily going to eliminate that gene from the gene pool. The individual's siblings, their chances of having inherited the same undesirable gene from the common parent, and other members of the species possessing the same gene - all influence how long a gene survives in the system, which is why undesirable genes tend to survive for several generations.)

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I have some thoughts on how wealth affects genes and the human gene pool from an evolutionary perspective, but they are still raw, disorganized and incomplete, so hopefully by next year I can write a blog post about it. 

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