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Know Your Breath For most of us, respiration is an automatic, subconscious function. But a new wave of breath research could change your mind — and your body.

38

Not Set in Stone Scientists once thought that your personality doesn’t change much once you reach your 30s. But an influx of new research points to the various ways it can evolve over time.

MARTA ZARASKA

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50

We can’t escape COVID-19, even in our sleep. Psychologist Deirdre Barrett is tracking our dreams about this new, everchanging reality.

An estimated 9 million people in the U.S. alone have had a transformative neardeath experience.

Scientists are grappling with what’s happening inside their heads.

HOPE REESE

ALEX ORLANDO

Sweet (Pandemic) Dreams

Death Defying

TIMOTHY MEINCH SEP T EM BER/O C TO B ER 2 0 2 1 . D IS C OVER

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CONTENTS

p. 18

p. 60

COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS EDITOR’S NOTE

Some Introductions Editorial Director Steve George spotlights Discover’s two newest editors.

p. 20

This month, take a look at why we get migraines, the science of the Dark Ages, how NASA decides what astronauts should eat, clever crows, and more!

EMILIE LE BEAU LUCCHESI

20

60

Heart Ache

Can Life Exist on a Rogue Planet?

VITAL SIGNS

HOT SCIENCE p. 9

untreated — and often denied altogether — driving many from the profession. Can we do better for today’s nurses?

After surgery for a faulty heart valve, this 16-year-old kept getting bacterial infections. But during her latest stint in the hospital, new and frightening symptoms started to emerge.

JULIA MICHIE BRUCKNER

24

HISTORY LESSONS

Frontline Fatigue Military nurses in WWII experienced PTSD that was left

OUT THERE

With the right conditions and a bit of luck, some of the most inhospitable worlds in the universe could still be habitable.

KATIE MCCORMICK

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#SCIENCEIRL

A look at the bridge that many believed was a fake.

MOLLY GLICK

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: NASA/JPL-CALTECH; KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER; SEB FALK

6

EDITOR’S NOTE

BY STEPHEN C. GEORGE ®

M AG A ZINE

STEPHEN C. GEORGE Editorial Director ELIZABETH M. WEBER Design Director

Some Introductions

EDITORIAL

Occasionally, I like to shine a light on the unsung heroes here at Discover who spend long hours with writers, researchers and their fellow editors to bring you relevant stories across a range of scientific endeavors.

You may see their names in tiny type over in the masthead on the edge of this page, but that doesn’t convey very much about the talent, energy and passion that these people muster in service to Discover readers.

When you write in to share your thoughts about our stories, these are the people who read every one of those letters, even the critical ones (in fact, especially the critical ones) and use your constructive thoughts and feedback to help inform future stories.

So, this seemed as good a time as any to introduce you to two of the newest Discover team members.

First, Assistant Editor Molly Glick joined us a few months ago, and has done work for Popular Science and Sierra. Thanks to the vagaries of publishing schedules, one of Molly’s first print stories appears only now in this issue (check out Hot Science, page 10). But you’ll see more of them in the future.

Marisa Sloan, another new assistant editor, recently graduated from Northwestern University, and holds degrees in both chemistry and journalism. It might be a couple of issues before you see Marisa’s byline in these pages, but you can find plenty of her work over at DiscoverMagazine.com.

Of course, the issue you hold in your hands is the result of a lot of hard work by many thoughtful and talented people like Molly and Marisa. Every one of them is just like you — passionate about science and understanding the universe around us. I hope you’ll enjoy getting to know all of them through their work in this and every issue of Discover.

Stephen C. George, Editorial Director

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Contributing Editors BRIDGET ALEX, TIM FOLGER, JONATHON KEATS, LINDA MARSA, KENNETH MILLER, STEVE NADIS, JULIE REHMEYER, DARLENE CAVALIER (special projects)

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HOT SCIENCE

TH E L AT E ST N E WS A N D NOT E S PLANT VACCINES • CLEVER CROWS • THE SCIENCE OF MIGRAINES WHAT’S FOR DINNER ... IN SPACE • THE STATE OF SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

INVISIBLE INK

Can you spot the differences between these baby squids? Look closely: The ones with light pink eyes and fewer dark speckles (called chromatophores) got a makeover in July 2020 by scientists using the CRISPR-Cas9 geneediting tool. A team of researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, found a way to make Doryteuthis pealeii hatchlings more transparent by switching off the gene that controls eye and skin cell pigmentation while they’re still embryos. The feat is the first time researchers have knocked out a gene in cephalopods, a class of invertebrates that includes octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus. With future applications in biomedicine, such as pain-management therapies, the potential to turn individual genes off (and on) may not only impact our boneless brethren, but humans, too. — LYDIA RIVERS; IMAGE BY KAREN CRAWFORD

SEP T EM BER/O C TO B ER 2 02 1 . D I S C OV ER

9

HOT SCIENCE

Popular foods like oranges and chocolate are being threatened by plant diseases.

RESEARCHERS ARE FORMULATING UNCONVENTIONAL SOLUTIONS FOR TREE DISEASES THAT IMPACT BELOVED FOODS LIKE ORANGES AND CHOCOLATE. THESE INCLUDE A POTENTIAL RNA THERAPY SIMILAR TO COVID-19 VACCINES. A future in which chocolate, wine and oranges are affordable only for the wealthy certainly feels dystopian. But this may very well become reality, as some of our favorite crops are now in danger of succumbing to plant diseases. To tackle the problem, Anne Elizabeth Simon, a virologist at the University of Maryland, is attempting to create what she calls a vaccine for perennial crops, which could help protect our food supply.

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Researchers have long dealt with pathogen spread among plants by quarantining infected flora to spare surrounding ones. And, depending on the type of disease, plants may also receive pesticides or antibiotic sprays. But to create more reliable protection, Simon is part of a team developing a vaccinelike solution as an efficient and relatively quickly deployable way to preempt, or possibly cure, plant diseases.

This potential fix can’t come fast enough. Currently, the world grapples

with increasing perils to vital agricultural sectors. For example, cacao grown in West Africa, which provides about 70 percent of the world’s chocolate, faces the debilitating cacao swollen shoot disease (CSSD). Florida’s quickly spiraling

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Plant ‘Vaccines’ Could Save Us From a World Without Fruit

EDGLORIS MARYS/SHUTTERSTOCK

damage to the plant. “This could be a vehicle, and not just for one type of tree, but for many,” Simon says. “It’s all In the first half of the because of this very unusual, never20th century, a disease before-seen property.” caused by fungus The iRNA sample was first discovered killed about 4 billion

by University of California, Riverside, American chestnut researchers in the 1950s when it appeared in limequat trees. They found trees. that the iRNA can infect many citrus species with very mild to zero symptoms. Yet its disease-fighting capabilities were only recently discovered when Simon realized iRNA’s ability to co-opt citrus industry is threatened by the its host plant’s proteins to move from disease huanglongbing (HLB) — comcell to cell. monly called citrus greening — which Eager to get the ball rolling, has wreaked major havoc since 2005.

Simon co-founded a company Of course, plant pandemics are no called Silvec Biologics in 2019, new challenge. In the first half of the and is working to develop 20th century, for instance, a disease a single-step preventative caused by fungus killed about 4 billion treatment that tricks trees American chestnut trees. But overall, into eradicating not only climate change, emerging pathogens viruses that cause disease, and human activity, such as ramped-up but also fungi and bacteria global travel, have combined to create a — somewhat similar to how perfect storm that endangers our food mRNA jabs force our immune supply. “The time has come to let people systems to cook up COVID-19 know that there are other pandemics antibodies. going on,” Simon says. “There’s multiple Because iRNA stays in trees pandemics happening with trees, and it’s for decades, Simon says the going to lead to a very different world.” vaccine could possibly offer lifetime protection against several pathogens TREE “VACCINES” when put into newly planted trees — Simon joined the fight against plant similar to giving children a standard set pathogens by chance: While studying of shots. What’s less clear, however, is plant RNA viruses in her lab, she whether highly degraded trees that have happened upon a surprising sample in been infected for several years can still a genetic sequence database that would benefit from the treatment. change the direction of her career.

Simon hopes that the iRNA therapy It turned out to be a new type of can save infected trees that don’t yet viruslike RNA that she named show symptoms. It seems less iRNA. Simon was shocked likely for those with roots to see that while this iRNA disintegrated by disease, lacked the genes to code its like a growing number of own plant-generated moveFlorida’s citrus trees. Even if ment proteins, it was still able the vaccine did work in those to move between cells in a cases, she says, they would be plant’s veins — contradicting too weak to recover.

CRISPR her 30 years of research.

CROPS Scan this code AIDING AILING PLANTS Tweaking the iRNA to carry with your phone’s Simon’s team isn’t the tiny fragments of a virus can camera for more: Can Gene-Edited only one developing provoke plant enzymes to Produce Feed novel techniques to fight chop up the harmful virus into the World? devastating plant diseases. little pieces, without causing

Some researchers have, for example, adapted relatively new technologies to take on these threats. In recent years, scientists have proposed genomeediting techniques like CRISPR for this purpose. By manipulating specific portions of plant DNA, CRISPR could allow breeders and researchers to work more precisely when designing diseaseresistant varieties.

Ultimately, it will likely take a combination of approaches to keep our food system resilient to current and emerging diseases — just as we have combined masking and social distancing, along with various

This orange comes from a tree infected with citrus greening disease.

treatments and vaccines, to work against COVID-19. But if scientists, governments and growers don’t combine forces quickly enough, it’s possible that certain food production costs will skyrocket and affect consumer prices. Florida’s per-box orange price, for example, rose by more than 90 percent between 2003 and 2018 when adjusted for inflation.

That’s why Simon says plant epidemics require a Manhattan Project of sorts, where scientists can bring their minds together and offer their individual expertise. Georgios Vidalakis, a plant pathologist at the University of California, Riverside, and director of the Citrus Clonal Protection Program, agrees. “The clock is ticking and we won’t have decades to spend on this,” he says. “It has to happen soon.”

— MOLLY GLICK

SEP T EM BER/O C TO B ER 2 0 2 1 . D IS C OV ER

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HOT SCIENCE

Crows — They’re Just Like Us! LARGE BRAINS, LONG LIFE SPANS AND ELABORATE PROBLEM-SOLVING IN CROWS MAKES THEM SURPRISINGLY SIMILAR TO HUMANS.

We’ve long known that crows exhibit extraordinary intelligence. These birds — along with ravens, jays and others in the corvid family — have inspired myths and legends for centuries. But the more scientists unravel about their brain structure and behaviors, the more crows seem to resemble humans.

Remarkable leaps in corvid research have captivated John Marzluff, ornithologist at the University of Washington, for decades. He’s explored the exceptional size and function of crow brains, their long life spans (likely up to 30 years) and communal lifestyle. “Big brain, long life and sociality, those are really linked features,” Marzluff says. “You put those together, and it should sound pretty familiar.”

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D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

To top that off, just last fall other researchers determined that crows seem to exhibit a level of consciousness demonstrated only in humans and very few of our mammal relatives, such as primates.

This work, along with many recent neurological studies, is redefining bird brains as we have known them.

The breakthrough study published in Science revealed that crows show signs of perceptual consciousness and an ability to draw on subjective experiences from the past in order to solve a task. This means the birds keep new information, or memories, in the front of their brains for extended periods, and use it in reasoning and navigating new situations they encounter.

The discovery piggybacks on new knowledge about the

forebrain in crows, which has proven to be exceptionally large — another trait they share with humans.

One region, known as the nidopallium caudolaterale, or NCL, seems to function much like the prefrontal cortex in humans. For people and crows alike, the forebrain deals with higher cognitive tasks, including rational decision-making, problem-solving and executive function.

Taken together, these findings help explain the dynamic problem-solving

and tool use in crows that humans have observed for years. The New Caledonian crow, for example, has recently gained popularity for not only tool use, but its ability to manufacture compound tools out of various materials. These innovative birds have been known to make probes, hooks and sharp spears that they use to skewer insects in hard-to-reach places. They also strip down palm fronds so that the main stem forms a J-shape that can grab food.

In research labs, they’ve successfully bent wire to snatch baskets with food inside.

“They understand the concept of hooking and pulling and spearing and what tools are needed to do that,” Marzluff says. These reasoning skills appear to be significantly more advanced than more crude tool use — such as using rocks to break open shells and other food — that researchers have observed in some other animals.

“There are incidental uses of tools,” he adds. “It’s not quite the same as having to take a different material and make it into something.

Rocks, however, are good for pounding always.” — TIMOTHY MEINCH

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HOT SCIENCE

THE SCIENCE OF MIGRAINES WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE LATEST RESEARCH ON THE CAUSES AND TREATMENTS FOR MIGRAINE HEADACHES. If you asked your doctor about migraine headaches just a few decades ago, you may have been underwhelmed with the treatment options.

But within the past 20 years or so, a lot has come to light about what causes migraines and how to help people with them. It’s about time: Migraines have (supposedly) been around since at least the time of ancient Egypt.

Migraines are estimated to affect 1 billion people worldwide. And they’re not just extra-painful headaches, but rather a whole batch of

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D I S C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

disabling symptoms that come in waves. The most well-known include nausea and sensitivity to light and sound. A single migraine attack can last multiple days.

Migraines are, in part, genetic.

They’re three times more common in women than in men, and you’re much more likely to have migraines if a parent does, too. Scientists used to think that the actual pain of migraines was from the

dilation of blood vessels.

More recently, though, they’ve learned that it’s more than that: The pain comes from neuroinflammation of structures in the brain that sense pain. Since multiple brain regions and multiple neurotransmitters are involved, that’s why there’s such a wide variety of symptoms that come with it.

Different migraine sufferers can experience a different batch of symptoms,

and the attacks can even be different within a single person. Still, there are patterns. “It’s often aggravated by routine activities, like climbing up stairs,” says Dawn Buse, a clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. “You wouldn’t want to do aerobics while you’re having a migraine.” Many people need to avoid light, sound, or even strong odors to stay comfortable during an attack.

But migraine treatments have come a long way in recent decades. The most basic treatments for migraines are called acute medications; these are often over-the-counter medications that people take when a migraine attack starts.

There’s also a suite of preventive strategies available, from lifestyle modifications to pharmaceuticals and even external neural stimulators — handheld machines that zap various nerves.

“It’s really exciting that we have options to offer people and we can tell people confidently, ‘We can help you,’ ” says Buse. “‘We can help you return to and regain the life that you would like to be living.’” — ANNA FUNK

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HOT SCIENCE

Building an Astronaut’s Diet Food is key to our daily functions, fueling our activity and fortifying our bodies and minds. But most of us with access to various food sources don’t need to worry about meal prepping quite as much as NASA. In space, where astronauts confront drastic environmental and physical changes, the need for safe, nutritious and energyladen food is particularly vital to overall health.

But for those traveling far from

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Earth’s food supply, it’s particularly challenging to produce, transport and prepare healthy food. Beyond providing energy and nourishment, space meals must be palatable and stay safe for consumption for months — or even years.

Above all, space food must provide adequate energy to fuel astronauts on their grueling missions, according to NASA. Without a sufficient caloric intake (which exceeds earthly needs and ranges between about 2,700 to 3,700

daily calories) astronauts risk losing body mass — a key marker of nutrition.

In microgravity, proper nutrition can combat the resulting degradation of bones and muscles.

“In general, if it’s good for you on Earth, it’s going to be good for you on spaceflights,” says Grace Douglas, lead scientist for NASA’s Advanced Food Technology research group at the Johnson Space Center.

After decades of nutritional studies and food technology advancements,

STUDIOSTOKS/SHUTTERSTOCK

FOR HEALTHY AND HAPPY SPACE TRAVELERS, FOOD SCIENTISTS MUST MAKE MEALS COMPACT, NUTRITIOUS AND LONG-LASTING.

NASA can’t merely consider health — the nutritional value of a meal only goes so far if it doesn’t appeal to astronauts.

NASA has shifted focus away from supplements and dietary formulas and toward providing as many nutrients from fruits and vegetables as possible. Food derived from a variety of natural sources can provide a variety of phytochemicals — or biologically active compounds — that you can’t get from dietary supplements.

It can be difficult to rely heavily on fruits and vegetables as a space food source because, while they can be packed with nutrients, they don’t contain many calories. This poses an issue for spaceflight, where cargo room is precious. To get food to an acceptable mass and increase its shelf life, the NASA food systems team uses technology like freeze-drying. It is then stored in the spacecraft within flexible, lightweight packaging that looks a lot like the tuna packets sold in grocery stores. Space food scientists

must ensure their products remain shelf stable for months, sometimes years.

NASA can’t merely consider health when designing space food, though: The nutritional value of a meal only goes so far if it doesn’t appeal to astronauts. Douglas and her colleagues aim to offer astronauts several options to avoid menu fatigue. Such variety also provides psychological health benefits.

“Food becomes more important with mission duration, isolation and confinement because it’s one of the only familiar things that they have,” Douglas says.

As space organizations look ahead to long-duration missions, like sending people to Mars and establishing a sustained presence on the moon, it will be key to craft a sustainable food source that doesn’t require resupply missions.

To achieve this, NASA scientists are studying the best ways to grow crops in microgravity. On the International Space Station, astronauts have successfully grown a variety of leafy greens and flowers in the Vegetable Production System, or “Veggie.” The fresh produce could serve as both a sustainable food source and a highly nutritious supplement to packaged food. And eating a fresh leafy green, rather than one rehydrated from a metallic pouch, could help space travelers feel connected with the distant planet they call home. — CLAIRE BUGOS

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HOT SCIENCE

Science Was Alive and Well in the Dark Ages

T

here’s no shortage of myths about the Middle Ages, like the oft-repeated — and easily debunked — notion that everyone back then thought the Earth was flat. Another common misconception is that scientific progress largely went dark

during this era, snuffed out by the medieval Church.

But if you ask University of Cambridge historian Seb Falk, the reality is far brighter. Falk, who researches the history of

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science in the later Middle Ages, has more recently focused on how — and by whom — science was actually done in medieval times. His book, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story

of Medieval Science, gives an insider’s look through the tumultuous life of a single 14th-century monk and astronomer, John Westwyk.

Falk caught up with Discover to talk about myths about the so-called Dark Ages, monks who practice science and the scientific instrument that’s a little like a medieval smartphone.

Q: In your book, you argue that what we think of as the “Dark Ages” was actually an era of scientific interest and inquiry. Where does the idea come from that the Middle Ages were devoid of progress?

SF: Well, just the phrase Middle Ages, or the word medieval is already a kind of slander, right? And

SEB FALK

MEDIEVAL TIMES WERE NOT AS SCIENTIFICALLY STUNTED AS WE THINK. HISTORIAN SEB FALK EXPLAINS HOW THOSE MYTHS AROSE — AND WHAT SCIENTISTS BACK THEN LOOKED LIKE.

discoveries and achievements of the Renaissance was this bit in the middle that you don’t want people to worry about.

DARK DAYS

SAGE ROSS/GFDL/CREATIVE COMMONS CC-BY-SA-3.0

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where it comes from is the period right after the Middle Ages: the Renaissance.

People decided that they would call the period they’re living in the Renaissance because they were trying to recover the glories and the achievements of ancient Greece and Rome.

And in order to do that, they said everything that came between the fall of Rome and the rise of the

Q: Was there a lightbulb moment when you first started to realize, as you say in your book, that the Middle Ages were “so much more than battles and black boils”?

SF: I think it was when I discovered the astrolabe.

I found out about these beautiful brass instruments that were created by people in the Middle Ages. It’s a tangible reminder or lesson that people in the Middle Ages were making these intricate and complex devices.

It was this moment of realization that there’s this whole other aspect of life in the Middle Ages that we ignore because we’re so caught up in the battles and chivalry and wars and conquest and the Black Death.

Q: Your book primarily follows a 14th-century monk named John Westwyck. Why was a crusading astronomermonk your ideal guide to the story of medieval science?

SF: John Westwyck was really important to me because he’s not a household name. So many histories of science are told as these parades of great men. In these biographies, you get a great genius who is portrayed as being ahead of his

Medieval scholars used an instrument called an astrolabe to tell the time, measure the movement of the stars and make mathematical calculations.

time. He does his thing. And everybody says, “Wow!” Then we move onto the next great genius who was ahead of his time.

That’s not how science works now, certainly. But it wasn’t true in the Middle Ages, either. Science has always progressed through the hard work and grunt work; the day-to-day, nitty-gritty calculations and observations of huge numbers of people. It was really important to me that I could tell this story of science through this fairly ordinary guy — at least, ordinary for a literate person in the Middle Ages.

At the same time, Westwyck had this really fascinating, adventurous life where he goes on a crusade and gets sent to the north of England where all the monks are complaining about the terrible food and the terrible weather.

He was really the perfect guide to the

achievements of medieval science.

Q: You mentioned the astrolabe, this ancient instrument that people used in the Middle Ages for telling time and measuring the stars.

Why was this such an important device for medieval science?

SF: I liken it to a medieval smartphone. And the reason for that is that the smartphone brings together a whole bunch of devices that exist as individual devices; it has a camera, a telephone, a GPS and a computer. An astrolabe has a map of the heavens; it has a clock to tell the time; it usually has tools for trigonometrical calculations.

So, like a smartphone, it brings together a bunch of scientific devices in a really neat and convenient package. But also like a smartphone, it’s a beautiful object and a work of art; it’s a design classic. — ALEX ORLANDO

SEP T EM BER/O C TO B ER 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

19

VITAL SIGNS

BY JULIA MICHIE BRUCKNER

Unable to open properly, her heart had to work too hard to pump out blood. When she was 14 years old, surgeons cut through her breastbone to her heart, delicately repairing the abnormal aortic valve.

Though her valve was now working normally and heart pumping well, she was still dealing with the procedure’s unwelcome consequences.

As before, we followed the same routine — strong antibiotics to kill the bacteria in her heart and bloodstream, fluids and medications to quell her nausea and dehydration. She settled into her hospital room with magazines and movies, expecting a long stay.

Heart Ache AFTER SURGERY FOR A FAULTY HEART VALVE, THIS 16-YEAR-OLD KEPT GETTING BACTERIAL INFECTIONS. BUT DURING HER LATEST STINT IN THE HOSPITAL, NEW AND FRIGHTENING SYMPTOMS STARTED TO EMERGE.

C

hloe looked miserable. She was curled up on the hospital bed, sweaty and shaking, wracked with waves of nausea, her heart racing. I gave her a cool washcloth and a basin as the nurse started her IV. I had cared for her before; though only 16, she’d been in the hospital a dozen times already.

“I think it may be another heart valve infection,” I told her.

She nodded, familiar with the diagnosis, and the treatment that followed. She was at particular risk for a type of infection called endocarditis, where bacteria invade and infect the valves of the heart.

Chloe was born with an aortic valve that had only two parts, instead of its normal three, and was unusually small and stiff.

As she grew older, her valve became thicker and less pliable.

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Her thin frame was tangled in the sheets, shaking and agitated, unable to find a comfortable position.

Two days later, I stopped to check on Chloe at the beginning of my night shift. Her thin frame was tangled in the sheets, shaking and agitated, unable to find a comfortable position. Her nurse told me Chloe seemed no better — and perhaps worse — than when she’d arrived. The usual medicines did not seem to relieve her nausea, and she had started having diarrhea.

I wondered if something more was going on. Could it be a more aggressive or resistant bacteria causing her endocarditis, or an entirely new intestinal infection caused by her antibiotics? But blood tests showed the same common bacteria that had caused her previous heart infections, and which her antibiotic should kill. Stool tests sent that day showed no dangerous bacteria.

Perhaps she just needed more time to improve on her current treatment.

As I sat by her bedside, I noticed a few other odd symptoms. Her pupils were as wide as saucers, her nose was running, and her skin was damp with sweat and covered with goosebumps. This constellation of findings pointed in a surprising direction that I had seen before in my

KELLIE JAEGER /DISCOVER

THE NIGHT SHIFT

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VITAL SIGNS

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AN ONGOING EPIDEMIC

Between 2001 and 2014, opiateuse disorders among youth aged 13 to 25 soared nearly sixfold.

Chloe was not alone; teens in the United States are using opiates at concerning levels. Between 2001 and 2014, opiate-use disorders among youth aged 13 to 25 soared nearly sixfold. Although their use has since started to decline, hundreds of thousands of adolescents still misused pain relievers each year between 2015 and 2019, according to a national survey from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

About a third of people over age 12 get their drugs from healthcare providers, at least initially.

Opiates such as morphine and fentanyl can be immensely helpful for the acute, severe pain caused by surgeries like Chloe’s heart valve repair. These medications take advantage of our body’s natural pain response system. Under stress, our body can create its own pain management hormones, commonly called endorphins, sending chemical messengers that connect with opiate receptors in organs all across the body. The opiates we take as medications bind to these same receptors, mimicking endorphins. When bound to receptors in the brain and nerves, opiates quell pain signals, calm stress responses by dampening our “fight or flight” hormones and stimulate our brain’s reward and pleasure centers. These intoxicating effects on the

KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER

adult medicine rotations as a student — opiate withdrawal.

I looked in Chloe’s chart, reviewing the medications she took routinely at home and those we had given her in the hospital. While she had needed opiate pain medicines such as morphine, hydrocodone and fentanyl in the past, we had not given her any this time, nor did she have any recent prescriptions for them.

Returning to her bedside with another cool washcloth, I approached Chloe gently. I asked her to be honest with me, explaining that I truly needed to know everything that was going on so I could help her out of this misery.

Tearfully, she began to whisper about her struggle with opiates, which had started shortly after her surgery. Despite trying, she had been unable to wean off the pain medications, finding herself dependent on the high they provided. She started buying oxycodone pills from a schoolmate at first, but when this got too expensive, she turned to a cheaper and riskier alternative: heroin. At first, she snorted or smoked it, but in the last several months had turned to injecting it. I realized this was likely what caused her endocarditis; the unclean needles introduced bacteria into the bloodstream, where they could nestle into her healing heart valve. Her days in the hospital restricted her access to opiates, sending her plummeting into withdrawal.

While not fatal, opiate withdrawal feels awful.

Taking opiates generally slows things down, making you sleepy, constipated and slowing your heart and breathing rates. But withdrawing from them speeds things up, making you more agitated, with a faster heart rate and overactive bowels. For chronic opiate users, the first few hours without the drug are marked by cravings, anxiety and restlessness.

Within a day, the body is wracked with tremors, insomnia, runny nose, profuse sweating, belly cramping, vomiting and diarrhea.

Now we knew we didn’t just have to treat Chloe’s endocarditis, but address her opiate dependence, as well.

brain are what give chronic opiate use the particular potential to develop into full-blown addiction.

Outside the nervous system, opiates can slow down the intestines, disrupt deep sleep and blunt the body’s immune response. They can also cause the lungs to breathe slowly and irregularly, which is often the cause of death from overdose.

Studies show that 5 to 7 percent of adolescents and young adults prescribed an opioid will go on to develop an opioid-use disorder. Accordingly, all who care for teens must be wary of their potential to spark dependence. They can even lead to a more dangerous road — now, more teens are transitioning from prescription opioids to heroin, which is often less expensive and easier to acquire.

While adults are increasingly receiving care for opioid use disorders, for adolescents, the rate of treatment is actually declining, particularly among youth of color. It’s often harder for teens to get successful treatment because many care facilities are uncomfortable with or inexperienced in treating them. Those that do accept teens may find it

difficult to keep them in treatment. And many providers who care for adolescents are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the use of effective medications such as naltrexone or buprenorphine.

Thankfully, Chloe was open to treatment and had access to care from our hospital’s adolescent addiction team. She was given methadone during her hospitalization, which quickly quenched her withdrawal. Within weeks, her endocarditis was cured, and she left the hospital with a plan for tackling for her opioid-use disorder: She started taking methadone daily to address her body’s cravings for opiates. To deal with the psychological effects of her dependence, she began attending weekly counseling and group therapy sessions.

Tired of spending time in the hospital, Chloe was driven to put her surgery — and all its complications — behind her. D

It’s often harder for teens to get successful treatment because many care facilities are inexperienced in treating them.

Julia Michie Bruckner is a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado. The cases described in Vital Signs are real, but names and certain details have been changed.

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SEP T EM BER/O C TO B ER 2 02 1 . D I S C OVER

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HISTORY LESSONS

BY EMILIE LE BEAU LUCCHESI

Frontline Fatigue MILITARY NURSES IN WWII EXPERIENCED PTSD THAT WAS LEFT UNTREATED — AND OFTEN DENIED ALTOGETHER — DRIVING MANY FROM THE PROFESSION. CAN WE DO BETTER FOR TODAY’S NURSES?

I

n February 1945, U.S. Navy nurse Dorothy Still was a prisoner of war in the Japanese-occupied Philippines.

Along with 11 other Navy nurses, Nurse Still provided care for civilian inmates in a prison camp where food was scarce and guards were brutal. Few inmates weighed more than 100 pounds, and most were dying from malnutrition.

On the night of Feb. 22, Nurse Still and the other inmates watched as their captors set up guns around the perimeter of the camp and turned the barrels inward. Other guards dug shallow graves. The inmates had long suspected the camp commander planned to massacre them all, and it seemed the rumors were coming true. Yet Nurse Still and another Navy nurse reported to the infirmary for the night shift. They had little medicine or food to offer their patients; comfort and kindness were all they had left to give.

Nurse Still heard gunfire the next morning at dawn and assumed the massacre had begun. She steeled herself to glance

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D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

At the end of the war, mental health care was limited — and reserved for men. Nurses, it was assumed, did not suffer.

out the infirmary window and saw parachutes gliding to the ground. Liberation had come just in time! U.S. and Filipino forces swiftly evacuated the 2,400 inmates to safety.

But that wasn’t the end of Nurse Still’s journey. She was haunted by the horrors she witnessed in the prison camp, and the trauma stuck with her for the rest of her life. Now nursing leaders and advocates are saying the problem of not addressing nurses’ mental health needs has again reached a critical point.

Nurses have been on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis, but most aren’t receiving comprehensive mental health screening or treatment. Nursing advocacy groups and scholars who study PTSD in nursing warn that leaving nurses’ mental health needs untreated could lead to a nursing shortage, much as it did after World War II.

SUFFERING IN SILENCE Back in the States, Nurse Still was tasked with speaking at war bond drives about the three years she was a prisoner of war. She found the experience troubling and requested a transfer to Panama, but her memories followed her to her new

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Taken as prisoners of war in 1942, Dorothy Still and 11 other Navy nurses provided medical care in the midst of brutal suffering at Los Baños Internment Camp.

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U.S. Army nurses as well as hundreds of physicians, pharmacists, and medical assistants were also held captive in the South Pacific. But at the end of the war, as the U.S. prepared to welcome home millions of men and women who served their country, mental health treatment was limited — and reserved for men. Nurses, it was assumed, did not suffer.

At the time, the U.S. military was the largest employer of nurses, and it had established an expected code of silence regarding how nurses responded to their own trauma. In 1947, an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry claimed a military hospital was a controlled environment that insulated nurses from the brutality of war. The study’s author claimed that nurses’ mental health needs were “less complex,” and that nursing fulfilled women by catering to their natural instinct to care for men: “They were supplying a service which gratified the passive needs of men. And which identified these women with the mother, the wife, or the sweetheart back home.”

Many nurses, including Nurse Still, responded to the lack of mental health treatment by leaving both the military and nursing. The late 1940s saw a shortage in nurses at time when hospital admissions rose by 26 percent. The shortage persisted until the late 1960s when wages began to increase.

After three years as POWs, the Navy nurses were liberated in 1945. Here, they speak with Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid after their release, and are shown next to the aircraft that brought them from the South Pacific to Hawaii.

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A LOOMING CRISIS

The pandemic has meant that for the first time since WWII, the vast majority of U.S. nurses are fighting a common enemy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that for the first time since WWII, the vast majority of U.S. nurses are embroiled in fighting a common enemy.

It’s a demanding and emotional battle that advocates say adds a deeper stress to an already taxing job.

Across the country, nurses have been caring for patients dying from COVID-19 who do not have the support of family at their bedside due to visitor restrictions. “The nurses are often the ones who are serving as the loved one and helping the patient navigate the end-of-life journey,” says Holly Carpenter, a senior policy advisor with the American Nurses Association.

In addition to caring for dying COVID-19 patients, Carpenter says, many nurses were not properly equipped at the height of the pandemic

FROM TOP: U.S. NAVY; U.S. NAVY BUREAU OF MEDICINE AND SURGERY

post. At times, she was depressed. Other times, she couldn’t stop thinking about all she had endured.

She sometimes cried without provocation and struggled to stop crying once she had started. On advice of her fiancé, she booked an appointment with a naval physician.

During her appointment, Nurse Still told the physician she had been a prisoner of war for more than three years, and asked for a medical discharge based on the trauma she was experiencing. The doctor asked when Nurse Still was liberated; the date was the same as the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. The physician said those men were heroes, but Nurse Still was a woman and a nurse, and therefore, did not suffer. Denied treatment, Nurse Still left the appointment shaking. She vowed she would keep her pain to herself.

The Navy nurses weren’t the only medical care providers taken prisoner during WWII. Sixty-six

! st ed Ju a s le Re Actual size is 40.6 mm

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with the personal protection equipment needed to avoid infection. These nurses lived in fear of being infected or transmitting the virus to loved ones at home.

And on top of these stressors, nurses are also still coping with the usual demands of the job. “There are the things that have always been there — long shifts, sometimes mandatory overtime, a workload that’s heavier than you’re comfortable with, having to work through breaks or lunchtime, having to come in early and stay late,” Carpenter says.

Prior to the pandemic, studies estimated that as many as half of criticalcare nurses experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Since the pandemic began, researchers have found the crisis has amplified symptoms of mental health problems.

A 2020 study in General Hospital Psychiatry found that 64 percent of nurses in a New York City medical center reported experiencing acute stress.

“Acute stress included symptoms like nightmares, inability to stop thinking about COVID-19, and feeling numb, detached, and on guard,” says study leader Marwah Abdalla, a clinical cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. “This is concerning. We know that if these symptoms persist for more than a month, it can lead to PTSD.” A person is diagnosed with PTSD if they meet criteria outlined by the DSM-5, the psychiatric profession’s official manual. Criteria include experiencing, witnessing or learning about a traumatic event (such as death, serious injury, or sexual violence); intrusive symptoms like dreams and flashbacks; avoidance of reminders of the event; negative changes in thoughts and moods; and behavioral changes. A person can also develop PTSD if they are repeatedly exposed to details of a traumatic event.

Suffering from undiagnosed or untreated PTSD is a life-altering condition with diverse ramifications, and may lead a nurse to leave health care. “We’re

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D I S C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

Some nurses experienced PTSD before COVID-19, but the conditions of the pandemic have amplified mental health problems.

“We’re potentially setting up an occupational health care crisis,” Abdalla says.

potentially setting up an occupational health care crisis,” Abdalla says. “This has long-term implications for the health care industry and our ability to deliver adequate health care for our patients.”

Carpenter says health care organizations must be proactive with screening nurses for symptoms related to anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Such screenings must be confidential and come with the assurance that a nurse’s license or job will not be compromised.

Organizations also need to work to destigmatize mental health diagnosis and treatment.

“Historically, nurses are always looked upon as the healers and the helpers,” Carpenter says. “They feel they need to be strong for other people. What do you do when the hero needs help?”

For Nurse Still, help never came. She left the Navy and nursing, married, and had three children.

She returned to nursing in the late 1950s after her husband died suddenly and she needed to support her family.

Only in the 1990s did she begin speaking about her experiences in interviews with oral historians and documentary producers. She also wrote a memoir, but kept the story light and did not disclose her extensive suffering.

The profession has advanced since Nurse Still’s 1940s appeal for mental health support was rejected.

“We do recognize the full PTSD, compassion fatigue, and burnout of nurses. It’s been chronicled now and we understand it,” Carpenter says.

Now the challenge is encouraging each nurse to seek and receive help. Otherwise, advocates warn, their health and wellbeing will continue to decline, and history may repeat as stressed nurses leave a strained profession. D Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi is a journalist in the Chicago area and the author of This is Really War: The Incredible True Story of a Navy Nurse POW in the Occupied Philippines.

ELDAR NURKOVIC/SHUTTERSTOCK

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FOR MOST OF US, RESPIRATION IS AN AUTOMATIC, SUBCONSCIOUS FUNCTION. BUT A NEW WAVE OF BREATH RESEARCH COULD CHANGE YOUR MIND — AND YOUR BODY.

IAMJORGE/SHUTTERSTOCK

BY TIMOTHY MEINCH ome of us are better at holding our breath than others. But we’ve all been put to the test.

Tune in to your body next time you plunge your head into water. Close your lips and conserve the air within. Many people describe a wave of relaxation in this moment — an all-consuming calm, a quieting of the mind, a slowed mental state — until the lungs demand another breath.

When that happens, most of us experience a rush of anxiety. The mind goes on immediate alert at the mere prospect of lacking oxygen, even if your blood and organs have plenty for another minute or two. But you don’t need to go swimming to find this anxiety.

You’ve likely held your breath plenty over the past tumultuous year and a half. Treading cautiously in supermarket aisles. Whiteknuckling it through social isolation, then reentry. Gasping at political upheaval and racial tensions. On many levels, 2020 forced humans everywhere to consider their breath as an act of survival.

For most of us, thinking about — let alone improving — our respiratory system has always been more reactionary than preventative. Things must veer woefully off course before we pay attention. Even within the medical field, lung specialists such as pulmonologists mostly study how to treat ailments like asthma, emphysema or respiratory illness.

Only recently have researchers begun to truly examine the fine-tuned ways we breathe on a daily basis. Their work suggests we could all be doing much better. Specifically, conscious breath work can be a powerful tool and effective medicine for the body and mind.

SEP T EM BER/O C TO B ER 2 0 2 1 . D IS C OVER

31

Many humans have grown lungs while they’re half full Compared up to be chronic shallow (or, more aptly, half empty, to dieting breathers. To illustrate, take a in this scarcity mindset). few seconds now and notice Shallow breathing avoids or fitness, your own natural breathing engaging the diaphragm breathing has pattern. At the end of your near your belly, and it’s been a sort of excessive by definition. natural exhale, when your body is ready to inhale again, “As we age, we put on elephant in the don’t. Instead, exhale more weight, take on stress and room of health air; then even more, forcing stop breathing with our it out of your mouth. If you and wellness. diaphragm,” says Michael J. found plenty still to exhale, Stephen, a pulmonologist at it’s mostly coming from Thomas Jefferson University. the lungs, specifically the bottom half “This is ineffective breathing.” that gets stimulated by the diaphragm If you pushed through to achieve that muscle near your belly. full exhale a moment ago, you might Like an overzealous server at a have noticed a prolonged, satisfying restaurant, adults are prone to refill their inhale immediately followed. Do it on

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repeat for a simple practice of deeper, slower breathing. In your body, this biologically signals “all is well” to the brain and a full cast of players.

The heart rate slows; the vagus nerve engages, which is a vital component in the rest-and-restore parasympathetic nervous system; and the brain releases your feel-good serotonin and dopamine hormones. All you have to do is think about your breath and treat it like a conductor’s baton. Or, in Stephen’s words: “It’s a natural Prozac.”

Stephen published his first book, Breath Taking, last year. It was one of at least two new books in 2020 that renewed broad interest in the nuance and science of breathing — along with

KIOSEA39/DREAMSTIME

Most of us live in a habitually stressful world.

All the stimuli can influence and shape our breathing habits in surprising ways.

THE DIAPHRAGM’S ROLE IN DEEP BREATHING

Diaphragm

Exhalation Diaphragm relaxes

Inhalation Diaphragm pulls down and belly expands

journalist James Nestor’s New York Times bestseller Breath. Both works, along with a wave of recent studies, demonstrate how slow, deep breathing can stimulate much more than the lungs. Various research has connected conscious breath work to treating symptoms of anxiety, sleep apnea, PTSD, chronic pain and depression. The mysterious ways that breath influences blood pressure and inflammation could even usher in wide-reaching treatments for heart disease, the No. 1 killer for humans worldwide.

DESIGNUA/SHUTTERSTOCK

STRANGE VIBRATIONS Compared to dieting or fitness, breathing has been a sort of elephant in the room of health and wellness in recent history. And yet, every human is vastly more dependent on their breath than nearly any other function, from a sheer nutrient standpoint. Oxygen is a fundamental building block for all the metabolizing, muscle-building, fatburning and resting that has captured the attention of the wellness world.

Consider that each time you take air into the nose and mouth and force it down to the lungs, you’re distributing oxygen through the bloodstream to

every finger and toe, to the nervous to function best when synchronized, system and the brain. Then, of course, according to a review paper Noble you exhale. Most of us mindlessly repeat published in late 2019 in Frontiers in this cycle some 20,000 times a day, Physiology. exchanging more than 2,600 gallons of WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY? air. These figures are based on a widely As humans slow their respiratory rate accepted normal respiratory rate of to about six breaths per minute, that 12 to 16 breaths per minute in resting frequency translates to about 0.1 Hertz. adults — or even up to 20 breaths per Incidentally, similar breath minute, according to some rates have been recorded in medical literature. numerous studies over the Donald Noble, a physioloyears that observed how gist and behavioral scientist breathing can synchronize at Emory University, wonders with the heart rate while if humans have normalized people practice yoga mantras, an excessive respiratory rate.

Zen meditation and even “There may be good reasons rosary prayers. to aim lower,” he says. His Noble’s work has shown work has investigated a how tiny mechanisms biological vibration coincidthroughout our cardiovasing with a respiratory rate of cular system oscillate at that six breaths per minute, about same frequency of 0.1 Hertz. half of the so-called norm.

“It’s almost like an inherNoble’s research explores ent rhythm,” he says. “Your how breath informs and breath may be reinforcing this interacts with the cardiovasThese 2020 rhythm that you already have cular system, neuropathways books probe going on in the background.” and relay neurons and the numerous Specifically, he’s talking receptors within them. All elaborate ways respiration about the resonance of Mayer these elements have a close affects wellwaves, which may help connection. And many seem being.

D IS C OVER

33

WHAT I LEARNED IN 6 MONTHS OF DAILY BREATH WORK

yoga traditions). But these questions from Haley Niichel demonstrated she understood the power of breath, not only to heal and restore, but its potential for harm in people with particular conditions or risks.

“This practice is NOT for pregnant mamas,” she emphasized.

This was in November of 2020, when my partner gifted me a 90-minute kriya and pranayama session online with her friend, a certified breath instructor. It seemed like a fun and healthy activity for the two of us who were becoming overly paranoid shut-ins in a new city mid-pandemic. We’d get through it, one breath at a time.

Via Zoom screen, Niichel led us through three seated breathing techniques that could be combined for a 15-minute-or-less daily practice.

The first, known by some yoga practitioners as breath of fire, had us forcefully breathing through the nose with a contraction of the abdomen, ending with a long breath hold. The second involved rapid arm movements, with “mitten hands” raised like you’re about to start belting “it’s fun to stay at the Y” — then arm pumping in and out with sharp nose inhales and mouth exhales. We repeated this arm-andbreath dance for a couple of minutes.

Eyes closed, shoulders burning, we sought a rhythm and tried to ignore how awkward we must have looked.

The third technique was more calm and meditative: slow deep inhales and exhales, with subtle hand gestures called mudras on the lap.

For 90 minutes, Niichel watched us practice and encouraged us

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to take notes and drill her with questions. Then she sent us on our way. She asked that we commit to the practice daily for at least a week or two, and notice how we felt.

More than six months later, I’ve only missed a handful of days and I have no plans to stop. Neither does my partner, who has reported relief in her neck after a decade of chronic pain and limited mobility.

While our observations are only anecdotal rather than data-driven, here’s what I’ve noticed:

• A RESET: My daily practice reduces physical stress and mental anxiety (at least momentarily). I notice this especially when I do breath work over lunch on a workday. Similar to how waking in the morning can feel like a fresh start, worries that flooded into my morning become muted or disappear altogether during or at the end of a breath session. This seems to have generated more focus, energy and productivity in my days.

CLARITY: During the practice, as thoughts and emotions sink into the backdrop a bit, creative inspiration or focus often emerges.

The title to this story, for example, effortlessly popped into my head while practicing — as did many of

•

the words and ideas connecting the research and data in this piece.

A WARM BUZZ: Most days, during the third phase of my practice and for several minutes afterward, I feel a tingly yet heavy calm in my head and body. This differs from the decluttering described above. It’s a physical sensation, similar to the warm buzz some people feel after consuming a mind-altering substance.

SLEEP ROUTINE: After years of failing to go to sleep at a decent hour and wake early (without feeling groggy), I settled into the best sleep routine of my adult life. This includes falling asleep regularly before midnight, and starting most mornings with a journaling exercise first thing upon waking.

•

•

While the practice above falls in the realm of intense breath work (and might pose health risks for some), Patricia Gerbarg, an integrative psychiatrist who specializes in breath practices, says that a technique called coherent breathing brings similar benefits.

The goal is to inhale and exhale gently (ideally through the nose) at an even rate between four and six breaths per minute. Nearly anyone can safely practice this at any time to activate the rest-and-restore parasympathetic nervous system.

“It tells the brain, ‘the conditions are safe,’ ” Gerbarg says. “The less effort, the more you get out of this one.” — T.M.

FIZKES/SHUTTERSTOCK

MY BREATH and mindfulness teacher got my attention, and respect, days before our session began: “Try to show up with an empty stomach (no food for two hours if possible).”

The pre-session email also asked students about pregnancy, blood pressure issues or heart irregularities. This breath work sounded intense, and it is (inspired by kundalini and sattva

COURTESY OF CLAIRE PARIS

regulate blood pressure in our arteries.

GOING DEEPER in the container on the choppy surface.

Paris is a master at holding her breath.

These waves seem to oscillate around Paris and a research partner then started Based in Miami, the French-American 0.1 Hertz. When we inhale and exhale diving down about 30 feet to effectively scientist regularly practices six-minuteat that rate, our respiration has the release the fish underwater. plus breath holds in a pool, and dives potential to optimize the rhythm of variToday, her freediving practice is more than 200 feet down in the ocean ous mechanisms and align them with equal parts competitive, self-care and on a single gulp of air. She’s one of those our heart rate. “When you breathe at that practical. Every six months, she travels people who feels an exceptional calm same rate, it’s like pushing the swing at to Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas and stillness when immersed in water. the perfect moment,” Noble says. to service a hydrophone located on “Underwater was always my sanctuThese findings land alongside numera limestone ledge roughly 50 feet ary,” Paris says. ous studies that demonstrate a connecunderwater. For nearly a decade, the She grew up on the Atlantic coast tion between mindful, deep breathing equipment has been recording sounds of France and spent part of her teen at various rates and improved blood above the world’s second deepest marine years in a fishing village in West Africa, pressure. Because our blood vessels sinkhole (second to Dragon Hole in the where she’d join fishers at sunrise in extend virtually everywhere in the body, South China Sea). Freediving helped their wooden boats. Later, she obtained the potential benefits of this vascular solve some costly and logistical hurdles a Ph.D. in oceanography. The ocean synchronization are vast, including accessing the microphone submerged and swimming, she says, have felt like increased metabolic efficiency and off a remote island, where storing scuba reduced oxygen consumption. tanks and coordinating dives Ultimately, these foundational pose challenges. systems inform daily wellness, Similarly, Paris explains how whether you’re just battling the freediving can be a vital scientific plight of aging or competing tool in under-resourced parts of in triathlons. “Together, they the world, low-budget research presumably improve physiology,” scenarios or environments where Noble says. bubbles from scuba equipment Earlier in 2020, a group would scare off marine life. Also, of researchers published some protected refuges prohibit similar findings in Clinical dive equipment. She points out Neurophysiology, drawing that many cultures around the a potential link between six world have tapped into extraorbreaths per minute, or 0.1 Hertz, dinary breath-holding abilities and heart rate variability (HRV) for centuries, often to secure in humans. This health metric food in island communities measures the variation of time or even sabotage sea vessels in between each heartbeat; low conflicts. Modern dive equipHRV has been linked to worsenment largely has displaced this ing depression and anxiety. Tech human skill. But at the start of companies now sell devices to 2020, Paris launched a first-ofOceanographer Claire Paris set multiple U.S. women’s records track your HRV in real time. A its-kind scientific freediving before designing a freediving course for marine scientists at the separate study in 2018 demoncourse at the University of University of Miami. strated how ultra-slow breathing Miami. The class is designed to home since she was young. But it wasn’t — at 0.05 Hertz, or three breaths per support marine researchers in the field. until her 50th birthday in 2008 that minute — might induce altered states Beyond her ocean studies, she also she formally learned the mechanics of of awareness, based on sleeplike brain competes in international freediving freediving. This practice trains the lungs waves seen in people while meditating. events. In May, she claimed her fifth and body to withstand significant apnea As the data stacks up, Noble and other U.S. women’s record in freediving. One (breath holding) and depth underwater, researchers emphasize that there’s likely of those involved swimming 603 feet without scuba equipment. no magical perfect rate. It seems to vary underwater in a pool — the span of an Paris got certified, then discovered from person to person. More imporAmerican football field and back, plus new potential for these skills while tantly, their work can show how specific conducting research in Belize with a breath rhythms are ideal for unique ALTERED STATE National Science Foundation grant. circumstances and needs. Sprinting, for Scan this code with She was releasing fish larva in a drifting example, or having sex might demand your phone’s camera for more: Intense Holotropic chamber to study how they navigate very different respiratory patterns than, Breathwork has changed their way to a reef ecosystem. Along the say, swimming. Especially if you swim lives. Is it safe? way, many died while sloshing around like Claire Paris.

SEP T EM BER/O C TO B ER 2 0 2 1 . D IS C OVER

35

Paris uses her breathing skills to service a hydrophone 50 feet underwater.

Freedivers report feeling meditation-like calm while diving into the deep.

FROM LEFT: COURTESY OF CLAIRE PARIS; DIMABERKUT/DREAMSTIME

For context, the American a few feet into the end zone — with no parasympathetic nervous system. So Psychological Association announced supportive oxygen. One of her comfreediving could be stimulating multiple “a national mental health crisis” in 2020, petition strategies is to avoid wearing feel-good sensations. But it’s dangerous. based only partially on the COVIDgoggles. “I like the sensation of the water Multiple diving sources site a fatality 19 pandemic. A Gallup poll three running on my eyes,” Paris says. “You rate around 1 in 500 for recreational years prior showed that nearly half of have a lot of receptors on your face that freedivers.

Americans frequently face stress in their trigger the dive reflex.”

Thankfully, you don’t have to take that daily lives. And the medical world knows This reflex, also known as the plunge, or any risk, to flip the parasymthat chronic stress has been closely mammalian dive reflex, can sound pathetic switch. Again, deep and slow linked with chronic inflammation. This like a mix of woo-woo mysticism and breathing should do the trick. persistent swelling of white blood cells mutant superpowers. But it’s actually A WORLD OF STRESS documented in scientific literature. in the body has become a likely marker Most of our daily lives are filled with for early mortality, and a big contributor Essentially, submersion in water triggers rapid-fire stressors that trigger physiin a host of autoimmune diseases, such a series of rapid physiological shifts ological responses in the body, includas asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and in humans and other warm-blooded ing rapid breathing. It doesn’t require diabetes. Some more extreme breath animals. Many of these mechanisms some scary predator like a lion or bear practitioners, such as Dutch athlete Wim directly preserve oxygen by reducing in pursuit to ramp up this sympathetic Hof, claim that breath work and cold blood flow to nonessential extremities exposure can treat many of these and prioritizing vital organs disorders. such as the heart and brain.

The latest science does make a Heart rate also reduces. compelling case that prioritizing The way that the lungs slow, deep breathing is one natucompress under extreme water ral way to counteract inflammapressure, which doubles at a tion, and a world predisposed depth of just 33 feet compared toward stress. While it’s old news to the ocean’s surface, also to practitioners of yoga and enhances the dive reflex. Paris meditation or anu tradition that says she has observed her values breath work, the measurheart rate drop below 40 beats able impact and data have been per minute at extreme depth, sparse in modern medicine over compared to her normal resting the years. rate of 60-plus beats.

In late 2020, a team of She and other freedivers scientists and physicians often describe an extraordinary published a study that linked calm and altered consciousness, slow breathing with significant similar to what is experienced decreases in blood pressure and during meditation, that kicks in called for larger clinical trials. after pushing past the discomMechanically, the researchers fort of wanting another breath.

In multiple studies, mindfulness and meditation have correlated said the most likely connection “Everything slows down,” Paris with a decrease in heart rate and blood pressure. between that deeper, slow says. Biologically, after the lungs breathing and blood pressure strain for a bit to no avail, the nervous system. Rush-hour traffic or an is the stimulation of the vagus nerve. spleen delivers a burst of oxygen-rich attack on social media can spark plenty The ongoing work could generate shifts blood. That might contribute to the of small-scale fight-or-flight reactions. in medical policies and treatments for euphoric sensation. “Time doesn’t In this sense, Noble wonders if reducing strokes, heart disease and, count anymore. It’s like being in another humans today have adapted to operate ultimately, mortality rates. dimension basically,” Paris adds. “There at a heightened state of stress, while Of course, the work of science and have been moments where I come back the mind struggles to relax. He calls it scaling integrative medicine research up, and I just want to go back to that a sympathetic bias.

“We’re bent toward can be methodical and slow going. So place where I was.” responding in a chronically stressed don’t hold your breath while waiting for Research indicates that the dive reflex, state,” he says. Perhaps our environment more results. with long breath holds, especially actihas influenced the average respiratory Just think about slowing it down from vates the vagus nerve, a communication rate of 12 to 16 breaths per minute. time to time. D superhighway between our brain and When Noble considers that rate, he nervous system. This vast nerve, which Timothy Meinch is features editor at Discover. sees “someone who has adapted to the is really more of a meandering network, Follow @timeinch on Twitter. chronic stressors of the modern world.” plays a key role in activating the relaxing SEP T EM BER/O C TO B ER 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

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SCIENTISTS ONCE THOUGHT THAT PERSONALITY DOESN’T CHANGE MUCH ONCE YOU REACH YOUR 30S .

BY MARTA ZARASKA

IF YOU WERE A RAT, the smell of cat urine would likely scare you as much as a rattlesnake’s hiss. But the rat navigating a maze for Joanne Webster, pathobiologist at London’s Royal Veterinary College, was no ordinary specimen.

As it explored the labyrinth that stretched ahead — cautiously, at first, then more boldly — the rat stumbled upon a strange smell wafting from one of the corners. The scent seemed to draw it in.

What the rat found so tempting, as did many

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of his labmates tested in the maze, was indeed cat urine — turned, somehow, from rodent repellent to love potion. The rats had previously been infected with Toxoplasma gondii, a brain parasite that, as the scientists running the trials were learning, considerably altered the way the rats behaved. Not only did they display this potentially fatal, certainly ill-advised feline attraction, but they were also more eager to explore the maze than uninfected animals were. For better or for worse, their rat “personality”

IN STONE PATHDOC/SHUTTERSTOCK (2)

BUT AN INFLUX OF NEW RESEARCH POINTS TO THE VARIOUS WAYS IT CAN EVOLVE OVER TIME.

had changed towards a higher level of openness to experience.

Research shows that human personality can change, too, sometimes even dramatically — and not just because of a parasitic infection. In fact, personalities can fluctuate with age, shift because of life events and even change due to things we ingest.

What’s more, we can actually alter our personalities with our own efforts, and making those changes may be simpler than we think.

MALLEABLE MAKEUPS Back in the 1990s, it was generally believed that adult personality was fixed. (At least, so long as the brain remains intact.) In other words, it doesn’t change much once we hit our 30s. Thanks to an influx of new studies, however, researchers are now discovering that personality is actually quite malleable over time.

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their personality traits will change, planet, from Germany and Italy to In one according to a study co-authored by Estonia, South Korea and Japan. When 2019 study, Brent Roberts, a personality researcher you compare yourself to your peers, as many as at the University of Illinois Urbana“simultaneously you can look to be Champaign. And the longer you wait 97.9 percent of the same person, but also be changing, between tests, the higher the likelihood because everybody is getting more conpeople showed that the person’s agreeableness (being scientious or everybody is getting less polite, kind and friendly), neuroticism neurotic,” says Roberts. Scientists call shifts in (a tendency towards anxiety, self-doubt this “the maturity principle,” since most personality traits and low emotional stability) or conscipeople would agree that becoming across a 50-year more emotionally stable and conscienentiousness (being responsible, reliable and hard-working) will undergo tious — specifically, more diligent and period. considerable shifts. organized — is a good thing.

Old views die hard. “Even some Plus, some degree of change happens academics hold the belief that personto almost everyone. In one 2019 study, ality doesn’t change,” says Roberts. “I’ve found this as many as 97.9 percent of people showed shifts in attitude to be immune to the data.” personality traits across a 50-year period. For most Sometimes, though, it’s easy to overlook the variparticipants, the changes were modest. But for a ous ways our personalities change over the years. few they were large (by psychological standards).

Why? Because similar shifts might be happening to “We find that some people really seem to undergo our peers, too. dramatic changes,” says Wiebke Bleidorn, a psychologist at University of California, Davis.

WITH AGE COMES …

A growing batch of recent studies suggests that Many of us look at our early youth with dismay, adult personality can be altered at any age – though, criticizing how reckless and self-centered we were. as Bleidorn and her co-authors show in a 2017 Research shows that as years pass, most people’s study, the magnitude of such shifts is by far the personality changes towards more conscientious, greatest for people in their 20s. And after we hit less neurotic and more agreeable behavior — which our 80s, the general pattern of change is no longer basically means getting along well with others. for the better. In one Scottish study which folSimilar patterns have been found all across the lowed people for six years after the age of 81, their

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Scientists found that rats infected with the T. gondii parasite were more adventurous than their uninfected peers.

extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness all declined significantly as they grew older. “As a system, we tend to deteriorate as we get closer to dying, and personality traits are a kind of indirect indicator of our overall functioning,” says Roberts.

Some researchers argue that such personality developments — first becoming nicer and more responsible with age, then more grumpy and fickle — may be biologically built into our species, a bit like children’s developmental milestones.

What seems to support this theory is the fact that personality maturation is universal across cultures.

This holds true as well in observations of chimpanzees, who turn more agreeable and conscientious as they age. “It seems that there is also something like a genetic program that drives personality maturation,” says Bleidorn.

Most scientists today agree that the way our personality traits shift with time is not only simply biological, though; our environment likely plays a role, too. These changes may follow predictable life events and common experiences, like falling in love, graduating, becoming a parent and, later, retiring.

BIG MOMENTS

FROM TOP: YAKOBCHUK VIACHESLAV/SHUTTERSTOCK; VYSHNOVA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Personality tends to be at its most stable in midlife.

Bleidorn believes this may be due to the fact that this is also the period when someone’s environment is more consistent. “Most people are done with having children, live in the same house, have a stable social network, maybe the same romantic partner — which may have to do with their stability in personality,” she says.

On the other hand, in early youth we experience both a lot of novelty and a lot of personality change.

For example, researchers have studied how people’s first serious relationships can trigger such shifts. In a German study published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, adults who started their first romantic partnerships between the ages of 18 and 30 became considerably less neurotic and more conscientious compared to those who remained single. What’s more, as Bleidorn notes, “these positive effects remain even if people break up.”

Getting your first job also seems to predictably change people for the better. Another 2011 German study found that entering the labor market boosts conscientiousness — we become more likely to show up on time, pay our bills, and work hard.

Meanwhile, if you happen to be a married woman, and you’ve noticed that since the wedding your husband is happy to trade his party outfits for slippers, you are not alone. One study done on more than 300 heterosexual spouses — specifically, 169 married pairs — living in Florida showed that over the first 18 months of marriage, new husbands became much less extroverted. For those who find this disappointing, the upside is that said husbands also became more conscientious

Most people become more conscientious over time. Meanwhile, key moments, like first relationships and entering the workforce, can also trigger personality shifts.

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FEELIN’ GROOVY Getting older, going through major life milestones or building new habits aren’t the only things that can alter

One study showed that behavior tweaks helped participants change certain traits, like saying “hi” to a cashier to boost extraversion.

— that is, more likely to deal with dirty to deeper, more substantial shifts in Major life dishes in the sink and pay bills on personality traits. After all, personality events, like time. The personality of the wives, on traits are nothing more than a sum of divorce or the other hand, showed an uptick in personality states: moment-to-moment emotional stability after their vows. For feelings, actions and beliefs. When retirement, instance, they became less easily upset you work on these, you can alter your likely affect and less prone to worrying. personality. Practice makes perfect, as Admittedly, the evidence on how our personality the saying goes. marriage changes personality is not yet in the first CHANGING IT UP as strong as it is with first jobs or first place because If you’d like to change at least some relationships. The same goes for the part of your personality, you’re in good transition to parenthood or divorce. they change company. A staggering 87 to 97 percent While some researchers have found that our everyday of people said they would too, in a becoming a mom or a dad makes people more neurotic (think of all the new behaviors and 2014 survey with 200-plus participants published in the Journal of Research in reasons to worry), and less conscienthought patterns.

Personality. Conscientiousness topped tious (which makes sense given all the the wish list of desired traits. Luckily, new demands on their time), most given the proper tools, says Roberts, studies find no differences in personality people can indeed alter their personality. between parents and people without kids.

In one experiment, university students entered Retirement, meanwhile, can sometimes cause a 15-week program designed to help them change increases in agreeableness, but not all studies show their personality traits. The whole idea was based these effects. Divorce is a mixed bag, too. For some on the oft-referenced adage to “fake it till you make it means more extroversion; for others, less. Roberts it.” Each week, the students received a list of chalhas an explanation for such confusing lenges through a computer program. These ranged results: “It’s not the event per se, from very easy, like saying “hello” to a cashier at a but your experience of it,” he store to boost extroversion, to more difficult — say, says. “It’s not the divorce, arriving five minutes early for appointments to but whether it was a good bolster conscientiousness. The students had to or a bad divorce. That’s choose several tasks off a list, with the program far more important suggesting more and more demanding options when it comes to as the trial progressed. It all worked quite well. personality change.”

For example, those who wanted to increase their Major life events, extroversion — and completed two challenges per like divorce or retireweek — managed to reliably increase that particular ment, likely affect personality dimension over the semester. our personality in the While these changes don’t take a lifetime to first place because they accomplish, they don’t happen overnight, either. change our everyday Personality interventions, on average, require 24 behaviors and thought weeks to bring out marked changes, according to patterns. If sustained, these a recent analysis of over 200 studies. Neuroticism changes in behaviors can lead

LEFT: DEAN DROBOT/SHUTTERSTOCK. RIGHT: STUART WILKINS/SHUTTERSTOCK. PORTRAITS FROM TOP: WIEBKE BLEIDORN; L. BRIAN STAUFFER; JOANNE WEBSTER

your personality. “Magic mushrooms” might be particularly effective at shifting certain traits. In a 2011 study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, their active compound, psilocybin, has been shown to make people more open to experience, with effects remaining even after a year. However, that particular study was small and has yet to be replicated. Another hallucinogenic drug, LSD, can also change brain dynamics and make people more open to experience, as demonstrated in a 2016 experiment using fMRI scans. But while research and development in psychedelic therapy has accelerated in recent years, these substances still remain largely illegal in the U.S. and most countries. — M.Z.

appears to be relatively malleable; in these experiments, people became considerably more emotionally stable in just four weeks.

One question that remains unanswered is how long such effects last. Roberts suspects that the best analogy here is physical exercise. “If I only try a little bit, it’s probably not going to have a lasting effect,” he says.

There are some things, however, that can change your personality with almost zero effort on your part — but with some potentially nasty side effects.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT Humans are no rodents, but research indicates that T. gondii infection can affect our personalities, too.

Studies show that infected people are less conscientious and more extroverted than those who are T. gondii-free. What’s more, at least 40 studies have by now linked toxoplasmosis with schizophrenia.

“Almost everything we’ve seen in rats [has been] seen in people too, right down to this bizarre attraction to the smell of cat urine,” says pathobiologist Webster, one of the authors of the study on the infected rats.

T. gondii is a tiny parasite that you can pick up from eating undercooked meat or by changing a cat’s litter box. These single-celled organisms impact behavior because they’re “trying to maximize transmission from an intermediate host — such as a rodent — to its definitive host, which

is the feline,” Webster says. Experiments on rodents suggest that cysts of the parasite present in the brain can alter levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in reward and motivation. When a rodent is more motivated to explore and more attracted to cat urine, it’s more likely to be gobbled up by a cat, thereby spreading the parasite. Webster believes that T. gondii’s impacts on humans are just a “knock-on effect” that wasn’t intended for our species. Yet the parasite doesn’t know what host species it’s in, and will influence the behavior of rodents and humans alike.

Eating undercooked meat is probably not the smartest way to change your personality. But for many people, altering certain traits could have a considerable payoff. High levels of conscientiousness, openness to experience, emotional stability and agreeableness have all been linked to relationship satisfaction, academic achievement, job performance, and even how long we live. Being very conscientious can lower a person’s mortality risk by 44 percent — more than even the best Mediterranean diet.

“If we could put conscientiousness into a pill, it would be the most successful pharmaceutical in history,” says Roberts. D

FEATURED EXPERTS

WIEBKE BLEIDORN Psychologist, University of California, Davis

BRENT ROBERTS Psychologist, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Marta Zaraska is a science journalist and author. Her most recent book is Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100.

JOANNE WEBSTER Pathobiologist, Royal Veterinary College

Although T. gondii infects rodents to get to the parasite’s feline host, it can impact human behavior, too.

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DEIDRE BARRETT

WE CAN’T ESCAPE COVID-19, EVEN IN OUR SLEEP. PSYCHOLOGIST DEIRDRE BARRETT IS TRACKING OUR DREAMS ABOUT THIS NEW, EVER-CHANGING REALITY.

Early last year as the COVID-19 pandemic began to unfold, Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher and psychologist at Harvard University, started looking into how this chaotic — and largely collective — experience was affecting our dreams. In March 2020, Barrett created an online survey asking participants from around the globe to describe the dreams they had about the pandemic. By the following March, she had collected and analyzed more than 15,000 dreams from more than 5,000 individuals.

Pandemic dreams have been more vivid and bizarre than those observed during normal times, she’s found. And with disruptions in work schedules and disappearance of commuting for many, dream recall increased for a period at the beginning of the pandemic — typically, an alarm interruption doesn’t allow us the same chance to remember our dreams as when we awaken naturally.

As Barrett writes in her June 2020 book Pandemic Dreams, many of us were having dreams with similar motifs, both realistic and metaphorical, related to the spread of the virus — such as ones about being maskless in the grocery store or getting attacked by giant monster bugs, for instance. But those motifs morphed in the months following publication. Barrett continued to analyze dreams during the summer and fall of 2020; those highlighted many people’s stress over returning to work or school. And after vaccines were approved and started to become available earlier this year, she saw in many dreams signs of hope that the world would return to a sense of normalcy.

Discover caught up with Barrett to learn about trends in our collective dreamscape during COVID-19 and her analysis of the online survey, which she plans to continue until the pandemic is, in her words, “sort of mostly over.”

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DB: There were still dreams about getting the virus or being in lockdown.

Some of them were very literal. People would look pale and be coughing and it looked like their coworkers would be infected with COVID. Others were much more metaphorical.

Someone had a new rule at work and had to take off shoes and socks at the office, and there was this disgusting wet carpet that they had to walk over, all day long. One dreamer had been told in real life that her office was going to move some desks in a big open area further apart from each other and put plexiglass barriers between them. In her dream, she got to work and the workers had misunderstood — they’d moved all the desks closer together and put up the plexiglass encircling them. There were just lots of these “I’m back at work and it isn’t safe” dreams.

I saw analogous back-to-school dreams in August. Parents were dropping their kids off at school and the other kids didn’t have masks on or were coughing.

Or the school seemed to have aged a century and had no upkeep, as was the case with one dreamer — she was afraid that the roof was going to cave in on the children if they went inside.

For every change in conditions, I saw dreams in response. In the fall of 2020, I saw older people having a variance on the mask dreams that I see a lot of. In most dreams, it’s almost always strangers that don’t have their masks on; otherwise, the dreamer has forgotten to put one on. But elderly people were having lots of dreams where they were with their family, and their family members didn’t have masks on or were getting too close.

Instead of experiencing sheer terror, these elderly dreamers were much more ambivalent. You could feel that they wanted to be with their family members — yet they were also scared about the lack of masks.

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ou find yourself at a crowded party. People are dancing and drinking and sweating and — wait — why isn’t anyone wearing a mask? You wake up, anxious and confused, and realize it was all a dream: Fears from daily pandemic life just crept into your mind when you were asleep.

Q

Your book was published June 2020, but you continued to collect and analyze pandemic dreams afterward. What trends have you noticed since then?

Dreams of fear among both men and women were elevated compared to their dreams pre-pandemic.

Q

Q

DB: Since the first approvals were announced, there have been more positive, “the-pandemic-is-over,” kind of wish-fulfillment dreams. When those occurred early on, the dreamer would tend to wake up and report that immediately they felt this wave of sadness hitting them — they’d had this wonderful dream about being with family that live across the country who they can’t usually see. Or about being back in their favorite nightclub dancing or at a party, and they’d wake up and they think: “I won’t be able to do this for ages. This is showing me what I can’t do these days.”

But around when the vaccines got approved, there was a steady change and the dreamers would sort of wake up and think, “This is a preview of what we’re going to be doing soon.”

DB: What really jumped out was that, when I did the analysis comparing men and women, fear among both groups was elevated compared to the pre-pandemic dreams. Dreams about illness were way up, dreams about death were way up — like four-fold for death, two-fold for fear.

Women’s sadness and anger was way up. It was double, but it wasn't quite as high as their fear. For men, sadness and anger weren’t elevated over previous non-pandemic times.

When vaccine distribution began, did you get reports of anyone having dreams related to it?

You have looked at variables such as age, geography and gender in your dream analyses.

How do these characteristics influence our dreams, and which are the most significant?

I think that’s related to how the indirect effects of the pandemic hit women harder. If family members are getting ill, women do more of the in-home nursing.

In health care settings, they’re skewed toward the lower end of the earning and educational levels. They were less likely to get good PPE at first, when it was in short supply. More women have been laid off from their jobs because they’re overrepresented in jobs that are part-time, non-contract and can just lay somebody off. Men are more likely to be in jobs that have good contracts where they would need three to six months’ notice, or they would get three to six months of severance pay if they were laid off.

Even though men are just as scared about getting sick and just as scared of

HOW TO SOLVE PROBLEMS IN YOUR SLEEP

OLESYA KUZNETSOVA/SHUTTERSTOCK

What we dream about may seem completely out of our control. But research shows this isn’t entirely true; Barrett explains that we can trigger specific dreams and solve problems by using a method called dream incubation.

While the practice dates back to ancient times, more recent research has attempted to quantify how successful dream incubation can be. In 1993, Barrett conducted a study based on some ancient traditions to measure how well they worked. Subjects reflected on a problem — personal, academic or objective — for 15 minutes before bedtime. After a week of mulling over their problem each night, half of the subjects dreamed about their chosen topic, and 70 percent reported dreaming up a solution to their problem.

Since Barrett’s study participants were “unusually interested in dreams,” she hesitated to apply these results to a broad population in the report. However, as they were “highly comparable to clients of therapists,” in that many study participants chose personal problems to solve, she wrote that mental health professionals may have success in helping their patients resolve dilemmas through dream incubation. More recent research has explored how training yourself to lucid dream can help solve problems as well.

To tackle real-world problems, it might help to try dream incubation for a week. Success is more likely if your problem is relatively simple and concrete — so it’s probably best to save your biggest conundrums for waking hours. — H.R.

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their loved ones being affected in that way, women are angry and sad over all these other social changes that are hitting them harder.

sensitive tend to have more intense dreams. What other personality traits seem to affect the pandemic dreams?

Q

DB: The correlation with personality traits is much smaller than the correlation with hours of sleep at night and how well you remember your dreams — more sleep yields the strongest dream recall. But there are some personality things that correlate.

Being mildly depressed correlates with more dream recall. Being introspective, more interested in emotions, more introverted. And people who are more extroverted, practical and world-focused tend to have less dream recall. Artists, on average, have more dream recall. That’s well-established for dreams, in general.

I’ve also seen another effect: People especially subject to having nightmares when traumas happen are those who have a past history, especially in childhood, of traumas. After 9/11, I saw more people dreaming of things like hijackers on a plane with knives.

But in some cases, those scary people actually represented someone else who had caused trauma in the past. One dreamer realized that one of the hijackers was the rapist that had assaulted them when they were 12 years old.

If you’ve been raped or you were the victim of some other violent crime, that increases your odds of having bad dreams about those scenarios. And you may have a dream that merges multiple traumas. But COVID-19 really seemed to reactivate dreams about trauma even more for people who’d had very serious childhood illnesses — they had been hospitalized either with a series of very painful operations or with an illness that made things like breathing very difficult. Those people seem the most reactivated by this.

You’ve looked at dreams post-9/11 and from Kuwaitis immediately after Iraqi occupation ended in 1991. How do dreams from the pandemic compare with these?

DEIRDRE BARRETT

DB: 9/11 was a one-time event, and a lot of the dreams reflected fears that it was going to happen again, or it would happen in that dreamer’s hometown. But for some of the war populations, data was collected on post-trauma populations during the wars, as opposed to well after — and those dreams are more equivalent to the ones people are having during the pandemic.

But in both scenarios, there are more similarities than differences.

After 9/11, a lot of people dreamed fairly literally about parts of the real events — planes crashing into buildings, bad men with knives, buildings falling down — only they might set them in their own town. You saw the fear that it was going to happen, and closer to home in the future. But there were also lots of metaphors: wildfires, earthquakes. I see all the same metaphors for this, although some of the categories are distinctive to this.

Bug attacks are not something that I ever saw really any of in the other crisis dreams collections. And the bug attack dreams were really common during COVID, more so at the very start.

In April 2020, there were more and more dreams about the secondary effects, such as lacking food or access to education. That also happens in a lot of war populations. Especially in civilian populations in war-torn areas — the economic impact or the kids can’t go to school or you’re nursing someone who’s injured.

Q

Research shows that people who are more emotionally

Q

What’s a bizarre COVID-related dream you’ve had?

DB: In my dream, I invented a phone app by which people could report their COVID dreams. It was analogous to the online survey, but a phone app. I

Barrett’s June 2020 book reported that real-life COVID-19 fears can shape our dreams. Since then, vaccine-fueled optimism seems to have eased pandemic nightmares.

had my phone in front of me, going through these reported dreams. The app worked a bit like virtual reality and augmented reality programming. The phone would project the most vivid image from the dream as a hologram.

Sometimes it was a scary monster, a bleak landscape or a hospital scene.

Whatever was the most vivid moment in the dream would project out in more exaggerated depth than real 3D. I viewed a bunch of images. And then I realized I could comfort the dreamer by hugging the image. I saw a monster that was like a humanoid or blurry ghostly shape, but it had a head that was a COVID-19 particle.

The head was on a vaguely humanoid, Casper-the-Friendly-Ghost body — but it was bright yellow for some reason, and looked shiny. I reached out and hugged this creepy-looking monster. But in my mind, I wasn’t hugging the monster; I was hugging the dreamer and comforting them somehow.

So, I knew I’d invented this app where people could record and communicate their dreams, but at the end of it, it also helped me comfort the dreamers. D Hope Reese is a freelance journalist based in Budapest, Hungary.

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BY ALEX ORLANDO

LEFT: DARIA SERDTSEVA/SHUTTERSTOCK. TOP: BRO STUDIO/SHUTTERSTOCK

AN ESTIMATED 9 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE U.S. ALONE HAVE HAD A TRANSFORMATIVE NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE. SCIENTISTS ARE GRAPPLING WITH WHAT’S HAPPENING INSIDE THEIR HEADS. t the end of Plato’s Republic, the philosopher Socrates shares the myth of Er, a warrior who was killed in battle. Twelve days later, the man comes back to life to tell of the other world he had seen. His soul, he says, left his body to arrive in “a mysterious place,” where others were judged for their deeds and luminous beings descended from above.

While Er’s experience sounds like the stuff of legends, strikingly similar accounts have been reported by real people, stretching across cultures and entire eras in human history. From ancient Greece to the present day, people who survive brushes with death often recount a sense of shedding the physical body and entering another realm or dimension. Some describe intense feelings of peace, passing through a dark tunnel toward a bright light, and reexperiencing life events in rich, panoramic detail. Scientists and doctors categorize these events as near-death experiences, or NDEs. While there is no widely accepted definition of NDEs, the term typically refers to the mystical, profound experiences that people report when they are close to death.

They’re most common in patients who survive severe head trauma or cardiac arrest.

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People who have NDEs are often fundamentally changed by their experience.

scientists have probed the phenomenon. Yet despite almost half a century of investigation, researchers still don’t agree on what’s happening during NDEs, or whether they can be explained at all. Some attribute them to hallucinatory flights of imagination, the last gasps of a dying brain. But others are exploring what NDEs may unlock about our understanding of human consciousness — and the possibility that it continues even after our bodies and brains power down.

RETHINKING DEATH What happens to us after we die? The question has lingered over human

activity for at least 34,000 years, given records of ancient peoples in Sungir, Russia, burying their dead with ivory beads and other ornamental accessories, which suggests some conception of life beyond the grave.

Similarly, reports of NDEs have been referenced by humans wrestling with the possibility of an afterlife since antiquity. They’ve cropped up in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thödol (or the Tibetan Book of the Dead), the Bible and even the works of Ernest Hemingway.

It wasn’t until the 18th century that a physician first recorded his own observation — and scientific analysis — of the phenomenon. Around 1740, the first medical report of an NDE came from a military doctor

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instituted emergency medical procedures to help you,” says Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who has studied NDEs for nearly 50 years.

Such events happen more often than you might think: In the U.S., an estimated 9 million people have reported an NDE, according to a 2011 study in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. These individuals — or NDErs — are often deeply changed afterwards. Some find they have a greater gusto for life, more compassion for others and a diminished fear of death. Others struggle to readjust to everyday routine, baffling loved ones with their new beliefs or divorcing their spouses. Even blissful or euphoric NDEs can leave survivors feeling angry or dismayed to be alive again.

In the past 40 years, more and more

In a 2001 study of 344 patients who were successfully resuscitated in Dutch hospitals, 18 percent reported an NDE.

TOP: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM. GIFT OF FRANK JEWETT MATHER JR. RIGHT: MANGOJUICY/DREAMSTIME

A 19th-century etching of Robert Blair’s poem “The Grave,” drawn by Italian illustrator Luigi Schiavonetti, depicts a soul leaving the human body.

from northern France. Pierre-Jean du Monchaux describes a patient who lost consciousness after having too much blood drawn to treat a fever.

The patient later reported that he “saw such a pure and extreme light that he thought he was in Heaven […] and affirmed that never of all his life had he had a nicer moment.” Du Monchaux speculated that too much blood flow to the brain had caused these strong, serene feelings, comparing it to similar reports from people who had survived drowning, hypothermia and hanging.

More than 200 years would pass before research into NDEs really took off. In his 1975 book, Life After Life, psychiatrist Raymond Moody coined the term “near-death experiences” to describe these episodes. The label stuck, as did Moody’s descriptions of the common features reported by survivors, including immense feelings of peace and love, meeting dead loved ones and reaching a barrier or “point

of no return.” The research that’s piled up since Moody brought NDEs into the spotlight has largely affirmed this original description.

For much of human history, death was seen as a simple — and permanent — affair. “When people died, whether they had a car accident or were at war or had an infection, the final thing that would occur is that their heart would stop,” says Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at New York University Langone Health medical center. “That was irreversible.”

Since the heart is intimately intertwined with the functioning of the lungs and brain stem, any process that leads one organ to stop working will inevitably lead to the termination of the other two. In short, if any of those three vital organs ceases functioning, death soon follows. Even today, doctors still often declare death at the precise point in time when a patient’s heartbeat comes to a halt.

But in 1960, just 15 years before Moody would popularize the term NDEs, physicians combined mouthto-mouth breathing with chest compressions to create cardiopulmonary resuscitation. CPR, as we call it today, has made death far less black-andwhite. The arrival of CPR, as well as the emergence of intensive-care medicine, enabled people who had passed the threshold of biological death to come

back, kept alive through life-support machines, like ventilators.

Parnia thinks that, someday, scientists might be able to push the threshold of death even further.

“Actually, the cells inside your body don’t die when you die,” he says. A 2019 discovery showed how brain activity could be restored in pigs more than 10 hours after the animals were killed, a study that Parnia says was worthy of a Nobel Prize. Even when all signs of life have vanished, and brain cells have been deprived of oxygen, those underlying cells don’t die for many hours, and possibly even days. In other words, says Parnia, what we call the “irreversibility” of death is simply a lack of medical means to bring someone back to life.

Advances in medical resuscitation have helped fuel NDE studies, since researchers can now analyze data

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FLOATING ABOVE Before John was 3 years old, his heart stopped. His grandmother recalls the chaos that followed: People rushing to help, chest compressions, John remaining lifeless and blue. He was put in an ambulance and raced off to the hospital.

After John had been revived and discharged from the hospital, one day, while playing, he said, “Grandma, when I died, I saw a lady.” John’s grandmother asked her daughter, John’s mom, whether anybody had said anything to him about his cardiac

arrest. “No, absolutely not,” she answered. But over the next several months, John still continued to talk about what he’d experienced. “When I was in the doctor’s car, the belt came undone and I was looking down from above,” he said.

Some features of NDEs — like those in John’s case report, detailed in a 2014 paper written by Parnia — seem to defy explanation. Parnia, who also led a four-year study of more than 100 cardiac arrest survivors, notes that

DYING, FROM THE PATIENT’S PERSPECTIVE As hospice physician Christopher Kerr puts it, dying is a paradox.

“You’re physically declining, but spiritually, you’re very much alive,” says Kerr, CEO of Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo.

“We view dying as this

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medical phenomenon, when it’s ultimately this human experience that is very rich.” By speaking with hospice patients, Kerr and his colleagues have explored the nature of over 1,500 inner, subjective events — called end-of-life

experiences, or ELEs — that many people go through as they approach death. A key difference from an NDE is that an ELE occurs days, weeks and even months before signs of life fade.

The researchers found that nearly 90 percent of

patients reported having at least one ELE, which can include extraordinarily vivid dreams or visions.

These dreams often featured both living and deceased loved ones. “The closer you get to death, the more likely you are to see

FROM TOP: ANTON_MEDVEDEV/SHUTTERSTOCK; PIXELAWAY/SHUTTERSTOCK

from large cohorts of cardiac-arrest survivors. For example, in a 2001 study of 344 patients who were successfully resuscitated in Dutch hospitals, 18 percent reported an NDE. More recent studies have even attempted to illuminate what happens to our consciousness when we die, a mystery that’s kept humans awake at night for thousands of years.

some NDErs see scenes from their lives flash before their eyes, a phenomenon researchers call the life review. He also says that most tend to focus on their intentions toward other people. “You end up judging yourself based on your worth as a human being,” Parnia says.

“The part that’s particularly inexplicable is they end up experiencing this through the prism of the other person’s perspective.” Beyond that, many of these events depict things that you’d normally be unable to remember, like moments from early childhood.

Another seemingly inexplicable NDE hallmark is the out-of-body experience, or OBE. Many people report that their consciousness seems to float above their body — and, in rare cases, observe and remember what’s happening around them with startling accuracy. In Greyson’s 2021 book, After, the psychiatrist describes how Holly, a patient of his who’d overdosed, was able to recall precise details from his conversation with her roommate (in another room, for that matter) while she was unconscious. Holly even noted the striped tie that Greyson had dribbled spaghetti sauce on. “I was totally flustered by it,” Greyson says.

“The only way it could have happened was if she had left her body, and that made no sense to me at all.”

Parnia’s study of cardiac arrest survivors across 15 hospitals, dubbed AWARE and published in the journal Resuscitation in 2014, was partially an attempt to figure out a way to test the validity of such reports. Basically, were patients really witnessing actual events that had occurred after they’d been declared dead? To study survivors’

SFAM_PHOTO/SHUTTERSTOCK

Advances in medical resuscitation have helped fuel NDE studies, since researchers can now analyze data from large cohorts of cardiac-arrest survivors.

claims, participating hospitals put dozens of shelves in their emergency departments and ICUs. Each had a different image facing up, including pictures of religious symbols, animals and newspaper headlines, only visible to someone peering down from the ceiling. In theory, patients might see the image if their consciousness had somehow decoupled from their body in the emergency room.

people who are deceased who you loved,” says Kerr.

The frequency of ELEs also increased as people came closer to death. Overall, more than 60 percent of patients found their dreams comforting, while around 19 percent reported

Among the 101 survivors who were interviewed multiple times, nearly half reported that they had no awareness or memories at all while they were unconscious. Forty-six percent reported detailed memories, like seeing animals and plants or feeling intense fear, not typically associated with NDEs. And 9 percent of them had NDEs, roughly the same rate that’s been reported by cardiac arrest survivors in other studies. The study authors say that one patient, a 57-year-old man, accurately described sights and sounds during his

that they felt distress.

Kerr notes that, unlike with NDEs, the patients are often healthy and lucid for these events.

“Some of these people are driving, doing their taxes and living alone,” he says.

“You can’t attribute it to

own resuscitation from a vantage point at the top corner of the room. Since this man was in a room without the shelves present, however, he wasn’t able to describe the pictures they held. While none of the patients studied were able to name images on the shelves, only about 22 percent of the cardiac events occurred in those modified rooms.

Still, the study authors suggest that these vivid experiences, both NDEs and other memories, took place during “clinically undetectable consciousness,” citing other examples, such as people

neurotransmitter flux or anything like that.”

In the end, ELEs tend to be life-affirming, according to Kerr. “[The experience] lessens the fear of death,” he says. Even the negative aspects of someone’s life can take on profound

meaning. Such was the case for one aging veteran battling PTSD and survivors’ guilt. “In his end-of-life dreams, he was comforted by seeing soldiers,” says Kerr. “Then he could sleep. He found peace.” — A.O.

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Greyson’s 2021 book, After: A Doctor Explores What NearDeath Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond.

who have awareness of events while in a vegetative state. “For the first time ever, we were able to show that consciousness does occur when the heart stops [and] the brain shuts down,” says Parnia, who adds that this research begs the question: How can someone make memories, and have lucid, wellstructured thought processes, when their brain is either severely damaged or even not working at all?

There’s no denying the transformative power of NDEs. These deeply mystical experiences can prompt major psychological and spiritual changes, like enhanced empathy and less concern for wealth or social status.

Beyond that, simply knowing about them can trigger big life changes.

Greyson points to research on students who have studied NDEs; even a year after learning about them, they often became more caring and altruistic.

“The idea of the near-death experience touches something that we all know deep in our being,” he says. “We are not here alone. We are part of something greater than ourselves.”

Yet not all NDEs are positive. While euphoric NDEs get the most press, other experiences can be deeply disturbing, dominated by feelings of terror, isolation and agony. And while NDEs often precipitate personal growth, they can also trigger symptoms of PTSD and cause major disruptions in people’s lives. “I’ve seen lots of careers end,” says Greyson. “In addition to that, many people were so enraptured by their NDE that they were depressed or angry to be back alive again.”

Regardless of their impact, some scientists and scholars still view NDEs through the lenses of psychology, biology and neuroscience. John Martin Fischer, a philosopher at the University of California, Riverside, and co-author of Near-Death Experiences says that one explanation for the universal similarities in NDE reports is often ignored. “It’s not that we’re in contact with an otherworldly realm,” he says. “We’re all similar.

Humans have similar developmental

histories, psychologies and similar brains.”

Beyond that, all humans have to come to terms with the looming threat of death. When we’re in a situation that seems like it might lead to our death, Fischer continues, we react in similar ways. “The biochemistry and the neurophysiology interacts with our psychology in complex ways to produce similar reactions,” he says.

Kevin Nelson, a neurologist at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, argues that NDEs can be slotted neatly into a neuroscientific framework. Like Fischer, he says that these are complex

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A SKEPTICAL LENS

PARADOX OF DYING

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Scan this code with your phone’s camera for more: a Q&A with hospice physician Christopher Kerr.

phenomena, but also notes that many of the well-known features of NDEs can also be triggered by situations where someone’s life isn’t in danger.

“The context of the experience — feeling threatened — may be as important as the actual medical threat,” says Nelson, who also wrote The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain. He points out that the experience of fainting can generate similar effects: “Done in the safe confines of a laboratory, [it] will induce identical elements to a neardeath experience.” A study published in The Lancet in 1994 found that syncope, or fainting, also prompted NDE staples

like feelings of peace, entering another world and being surrounded by light.

That includes out-of-body experiences, too. Though often a feature of NDEs, they also occur in the general population; one survey of 13,000 people found that almost 6 percent had had an OBE. They’ve been reported by people with epilepsy and sleep paralysis. They can even be triggered in the lab by zapping the brain’s temporoparietal cortex, which regulates how the body perceives itself, with a small electric charge. Most of the time, says Nelson, they occur during the transition between wakefulness and rapid

eye movement (REM) stages of sleep.

Nelson thinks that key characteristics of NDEs can be explained by a sudden shift between different states of awareness, which he calls a “borderland” of consciousness.

Movement between two of these states — wakefulness and REM sleep — is controlled by a switch deep in our brainstem. Nelson Fischer co-authored suggests that under 2016’s Near-Death certain crisis situations, Experiences: Understanding like cardiac arrest, this Visions of the switch malfunctions, Afterlife. causing a blending of REM and waking consciousness, also known as REM intrusion, as if the brain were stuck between gears. “The brain switch is deeply intertwined with [our] fight-orflight reflexes,” he says. In a study of 55 NDErs published in Neurology, Nelson and his colleagues suggest that under life-threatening circumstances, people who had experienced REM intrusion in the past were more likely to have an NDE. Many of these NDE trademarks, such as the light that some describe during an episode, says Nelson, can be traced back to this hybrid state of consciousness. “REM [sleep] is characterized by the activation of visual systems,” he says, “so I would expect someone to experience light.” Similarly, OBEs are sometimes a byproduct of REM sleep, so it makes sense that they would be a feature of REM intrusion.

Other hallmarks, says Nelson in a 2015 paper, like the sensation of bliss often termed “mystical feelings of oneness,” can be explained by fading blood flow and oxygen as the brain fights to keep itself alive.

Greyson has challenged several of these theories. The REM intrusion theory, he says, is refuted by NDEs that take place under certain conditions that inhibit REM sleep, such as with anesthesia. He also mentions studies that show NDErs have the same, or SEP T EM BER/O C TO B ER 2 0 2 1 . D IS C OVER

57

even higher, oxygen levels as those who have never experienced near-death, addressing the notion that fading cerebral blood flow helps trigger the event.

Greyson parsed through many of the supposed explanations in a 2013 paper.

“We can go on and on with all of these hypotheses that have been proposed,” he says. “And it sounds plausible. But when you look at the data, it contradicts it.”

Parnia makes even bolder claims regarding his research — namely, that consciousness appears to continue when the brain is shut down completely.

He suggests this is possible because thought is a “fundamentally different entity” from the synaptic activity we’ve detected in brain cells. “From a scientific perspective, there’s not a single piece of evidence that demonstrates how brain cells could generate thoughts,” he says. “We [don’t] have the tools yet to measure it. That’s something for future generations of scientists.”

For now, though, Nelson remains unconvinced. “The assertion that our consciousness is retained without brain function [has] no verifiable evidence,” he says. “I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen. But it’s a matter of faith, not science.”

NEAR-DEATH PROFITEERING In the past decade, plenty of popular nonfiction on NDEs has blurred that boundary between faith and science — and made some decent cash in the process. In 2010, the book Heaven Is for Real, in which a 4-year-old boy tells his parents how he visited heaven after surviving emergency surgery, sold more than 11 million copies and became Amazon’s #17 bestselling book of all time. (The movie it inspired, made

by Sony in 2014, grossed over $100 million worldwide.) In 2012, Mary Neal’s To Heaven and Back chronicled the orthopedic surgeon’s NDE after a kayaking accident. It spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Perhaps the most oft referenced of these works, at least among the scientific community, is Proof of

For Fischer, these examples highlight Heaven, written by neurosurgeon Eben the potential for nonscientific works Alexander. In the book, the doctor about NDEs to capitalize on, and describes how he spent a week in a even exploit, our fear of death. “These coma that he says was caused by a rare reports are very vivid,” he says. “And we case of E. coli bacterial meningitis. It look at the positive evidence they offer sold nearly 2 million copies; Alexander for an afterlife and ignore the problems was featured on the cover of Newsweek with the evidence.” and made an appearance on Fox and Researchers like Parnia, however, are Friends. His credentials as a neurosurcontinuing to harness rigorous research geon were used to support his claims approaches in their work. In a followof an afterlife, with an endorsement in up study, AWARE II, Parnia and his the book’s opening pages from former colleagues are looking stockbroker and Hello at 20 hospitals across From Heaven! author the U.S. and Europe, Bill Guggenheim that using modern tech reads, “No one could In the past like brain oximeters find a more perfect decade, popular and EEGs to monitor candidate” to spread brain functioning durthe word about NDEs. nonfiction on ing and after cardiac It didn’t take long for NDEs has blurred arrest. Whatever these others to poke holes the boundary studies show, Parnia in Alexander’s story. says that the empiriIn a feature in Esquire, between faith cal science should journalist Luke Dittrich and science — inform people’s questioned both and made some philosophical and the neurosurgeon’s spiritual beliefs, not qualifications and the decent cash in the other way around; accuracy of his experithe process. as such, these events ences. For example, one shouldn’t be treated of the pillars behind as hallucinations. He Alexander’s proof of even prefers to avoid visiting other realms the term NDE, because of how it has is that his memories couldn’t have been used and interpreted. “You have been hallucinations, since the bacterial millions of people all over the world infection had “all-but-destroyed [his] who are basically telling you the same brain,” a prerequisite for consciousness. thing,” he says. “That means you can But Alexander’s physician, Laura Potter, use all kinds of research methods to told Dittrich that he was conscious understand what it’s like to experience during the first days of his coma — certain things.” which she says was medically-induced, Greyson echoes Parnia’s belief that not caused by meningitis — as he was NDEs are not hallucinations, pointing tapered off anesthesia. to the accuracy of out-of-body reports.

As a neurologist, Nelson says that he But he also acknowledges that we is disturbed by cases of misinformacan’t confirm that NDErs have truly tion like Alexander’s. “He clearly had brushed against the afterlife. “Those are delirium and mistook it for reality,” he just subjective experiences,” he adds. says. Fischer, the philosopher, offers a With the research tools available today, similarly harsh critique. “[His book] explaining those experiences, whatever is not a scientific treatment,” he says. scientists decide to call them, will likely “Further, I will go to a neurosurgeon if I remain an exercise in philosophy just as need brain surgery. But a neurosurgeon much as hard science. D is not really specially trained to tell me about metaphysics.”

Alex Orlando is an associate editor at Discover. Follow @alex_e_orlando on Twitter.

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OUT THERE

BY KATIE MCCORMICK

Cold and dark, rogue planets might still harbor the spark of life.

WITH THE RIGHT CONDITIONS AND A BIT OF LUCK, SOME OF THE MOST INHOSPITABLE WORLDS IN THE UNIVERSE COULD STILL BE HABITABLE.

E

ven as a child, before he devoted his life to the search for extraterrestrial life, Frank Drake wondered whether Earth was alone in its ability to harbor life.

He wasn’t the first or the only one to wonder. There’s a reason so many are fascinated by the question: Its answer helps reveal humankind’s place in the cosmos.

Drake’s musings inspired him to pursue astronomy, serving as director of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and president of the SETI Institute — which, as the acronym suggests, is devoted to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and exploring the possibilities of life elsewhere in the universe.

Drake is perhaps most famous for his eponymous equation — an estimate of how many alien civilizations might exist in our galaxy. Presented in 1961, the equation is generally considered as the start of a new era of searches for extraterrestrial intelligence.

But decades after the invention of that famous equation,

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Previous searches betrayed a lack of imagination.

Who says life should look exactly like it does on Earth?

BEYOND GOLDILOCKS While there are many ingredients necessary for life to properly thrive, two of

NASA/JPL-CALTECH

Can Life Exist on a Rogue Planet?

Drake has conceded that his estimates were overly conservative. Among the too-moderate assumptions was that a potentially inhabited other world must be orbiting a star — overlooking the possibility of life on rogue planets.

Sometimes called “nomads of the galaxy” or “orphan planets,” these cold, dark worlds careen through space with no home, no solar system, no sun to orbit. Long ago, they formed around a star, but were flung out, abandoned by their parents. There are billions of rogue planets — astronomers estimate there could be at least one for every star — wandering the galaxy.

It may seem futile to search for life in such cold, desolate environments, but over the last two decades, astronomers have come up with a number of possible scenarios that would make life possible on a planet without a star.

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OUT THERE

Our Habitable Zone ble bita Ha one z

Current Sun

Mercury

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Uranus Earth Jupiter

Venus

Neptune Mars Saturn

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A rogue planet might maintain a temperature for liquid water to exist on it.

But where would life find the energy it needed?

And the thought is that it came together on our planet, so surely if the ingredients for life are on other planets, life should be able to originate somehow,” she says. For Seager, this means looking for exoplanets orbiting stars that might be outside of the traditional habitable zone, or that might have signatures of unique biochemistries unlike those we find on Earth.

But Florida Institute of Technology professor Manasvi Lingam has taken this idea even further.

Why should the planet have to orbit a sun at all?

Can such a rogue planet still contain the ingredients for life?

LIFE GONE ROGUE Building on other work that began in 1999, Lingam and his colleague Avi Loeb explore this question.

In a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology in 2019, they study how life might survive on a rogue planet in oceans underneath an outer ice layer. This ice layer would form if an Earth-like planet were flung out from the orbit of its sun. The cold of interstellar space would be too much for the oceans to remain entirely liquid.

But the ice layer could also help insulate the inner part of the planet from the frigid surroundings,

ROEN KELLY/DISCOVER

the most essential are a liquid solvent, which helps transport minerals and other substances vital to life between cells, and a source of energy that organisms can harvest to continue to live and grow.

A planet like ours — close enough to a star to have oceans of liquid water (satisfying the solvent requirement) and a plentiful source of visible light for photosynthesis (satisfying the energy requirement) — is a paradise for living organisms.

If we were closer to the sun, the light would be too intense, the heat boiling the oceans. If we were farther away, the oceans would freeze, and plants would struggle to have enough light to convert to chemical energy. As it is, Earth is perfectly situated. Not too hot, not too cold, but square in what astronomers call the habitable or “Goldilocks” zone.

Searches for extraterrestrial life have been dominated by scouring the sky for Goldilocks planets like ours. But many astronomers think this search strategy betrays a lack of imagination that is unnecessarily limiting our searches. Who says life should look exactly like it does on Earth?

Sara Seager, a professor at MIT and expert on exoplanet searches, is among those who think we should broaden our notions of habitability.

“Everywhere we look, we see ingredients for life.

Planets like ours, in the habitable zone around a sun, were the focus of most searches for life.

But those searches may have been too limiting.

THE DRAKE EQUATION SOMEWHAT CERTAIN

PORTRAIT: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. BOTTOM: GROSSINGER/SHUTTERSTOCK

Number of civilizations in our galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.

Average rate of star formation in our galaxy.

EXTREMELY UNCERTAIN

Fraction of those stars that have planets.

acting as a blanket. And deep in the planet’s core, radioactive elements would continue to produce heat, warming it from the inside out.

This combination of outer insulation and inner heating might protect the oceans from freezing all the way through. If Earth were ejected now, the amount of radioactivity probably wouldn’t be enough to prevent its oceans from icing over, and we likely wouldn’t have enough water or geothermal activity to support life. But Lingam and Loeb think that if it had been ejected shortly after forming, when there was much more geothermal activity in the core, then the oceans might have survived.

Lingam’s proposal is just one of a handful of situations where a rogue planet might still be able to maintain a temperature for liquid water to exist on it. If the rogue planet had a dense atmosphere of hydrogen, this would also act as a blanket, even allowing liquid to exist on the surface rather than under a thick ice sheet. Or if planet was ejected from the orbit of a star with a moon still tethered to it, then the moon could remain warm from the friction caused by the tidal forces from the planet.

So, the solvent requirement might be satisfied on a rogue planet. “But then there’s still a missing factor, which is: You might have liquid water, but where does the energy for organisms to metabolize [come from]? Where are they going to get the energy to sustain themselves?” Lingam says.

Average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets.

Fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point.

Frank Drake’s equation heralded a new era in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations).

Fraction of civilizations that develop technology producing detectable signs of their existence.

Length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

near this center — the so-called active galactic nucleus — then it might be able to use that radiation to power photosynthesis.

Lingam found that there is a balance between the usefulness of this light in photosynthesis and the harm of extreme ultraviolet light on cells. But a number of shields, such as soil or the first few meters of ocean water, might also protect life in subsurface seas from ultraviolet radiation, while allowing enough visible light through to foster photosynthesis. Lingam determined that an active galactic nucleus might be able to support life on a rogue planet that is less than about 1,000 light-years away from the galaxy’s center (for comparison, Earth is 25,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way).

STRIKING A BALANCE For this, Lingam considered an unlikely source.

Certain galaxies are considered active, emitting intense radiation as matter falls into a supermassive black hole at its center. And if the rogue planet is SEP T EM BER/O C TO B ER 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

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Although a rogue planet might just be able to support some form of life, could we ever detect it?

Even with these conditions met, whether we can detect signs of life in the near future is still an open question. This is especially difficult in the case of rogue planets, since we likely couldn’t use light from a parent star as a signal, as we do in typical exoplanet studies. According to Seager, “The search is for future generations. … It will be very hard.”

What might life look like on such a planet? “You can certainly think of having something that’s bigger than microbes,” Lingam says. “Even if it’s not as complex as the most complex things we see here [on Earth]. We may not see dolphins,” or any similar developed species.

But whether or not we can find it anytime soon, and whether or not intelligent life can thrive, that life is possible at all on these planets may indicate a hidden abundance and diversity of organisms throughout the universe. Even on Earth, we’ve marveled at extremophiles’ abilities to survive in the most inhospitable corners of our planet. Why not also in the dark cold of interstellar space, on a rogue planet?

Maybe life isn’t just a happy accident that emerges under the perfect conditions on a Goldilocks planet — maybe it’s an inevitability. D Katie McCormick is a physicist and science writer based in Seattle. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, The Conversation and Massive Science.

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#ScienceIRL

BY MOLLY GLICK

Ruyi Bridge in Shenxianju Scenic Area, Zhejiang, China.

SCIENCE IN REAL LIFE

When a video of the double-decker Ruyi Bridge in China’s eastern Zhejiang province widely circulated online in early 2021, some viewers assumed it was fake. It’s certainly a surreal sight. The nearly 330-foot-long winding glass bridge is composed of three wavy footpaths and spans the foggy gorges of the Shenxianju Scenic Area.

Designed by steel structure expert He Yunchang, who also worked on the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games “Bird’s Nest” stadium, the viral bridge evokes the shape of a curving ruyi

scepter that symbolizes good luck and success in Chinese culture.

The site opened to visitors last fall and dares them to walk across a glass deck, peering down more than 450 feet below.

In recent years, China has constructed several fear-inducing, see-through

bridges that attract brave visitors. These include the Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon Glass Bridge, which opened in 2016 as the world’s longest and highest structure of its kind at the time.

To support foot traffic and withstand inclement weather (or tourists dropping cameras and water bottles), each transparent bridge panel is made with lasagna-like alternating layers of glass and polymer to intercept any surface cracks, says Ate Snijder, an engineer at the Netherlands’ Delft University of Technology.

While laminated glass has existed for decades, only recently have bridge

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architects started using these larger — and costlier — panels for sleek new designs.

You may have also seen this glass gracing the exterior of luxe Apple store locations.

A key driver behind China’s glass bridge mania: As one of the world’s largest glass manufacturers, the country has enough oversized ovens to bake these jumbo panels that captivate travelers and the internet alike. D

DISCOVER (ISSN 0274-7529, USPS# 555-190) is published eight times per year (January/February, March/April, May, June, July/August, September/October, November and December). Vol. 42, no. 6. Published by Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Periodical postage paid at Waukesha, WI, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 8520, Big Sandy, TX 75755. Canada Publication Agreement # 40010760. Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Printed in the U.S.A.

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