THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ENERGY

The existing (or rather, non-existing) electricity in South Africa affects us

LEM CHETTY

On a Monday work morning in South Africa, the conversations over coffee are not just about the countrywide energy crisis, but the physical and mental crises we are all experiencing as a result. Taxpayers are suffering a form of ‘loadshedding fatigue’, which manifests in disrupted sleep patterns – a case in point: ‘how to turn off a beeping alarm alert’ is a top FAQ on a major security company’s website, while managing ‘heat waves and mosquitoes while powerless’ dominates Google questions. Along with working around inverter capacity, traffic chaos, and the pressure of planning meals and cooking, we need an energy shift to deal with the dearth of electrical energy.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND ALTERNATIVE ENERGY (NOT THE GREEN KIND)

South Africans (and other nations experiencing similar challenges) are in desperate need of life hacks to manage our personal energy. Tapping in to our own reserves may be a solution. Dr Sahba Besharati, a neuropsychologist in the School of Human and Community Development at Wits says, “We know there are electrical frequencies in the brain. These can be picked up by an electroencephalogram [EEG] and they do change in wavelength at times. For example, these frequencies in the brain are different during sleep and during mindfulness practices.” A different energy emanates from the brain as a result of chemical reactions. Think of the times you’ve felt love or happiness in the company of another person. That warm, fuzzy feeling is a chemical reaction, or a type of energy exchange, between people and some animals.

“There is a neurobiological aspect, which has to do with the increase in the hormone oxytocin, not just in romantic situations but between parents and babies, while breastfeeding, or during pregnancy, and sometimes with friends, when we feel effective touch or stroking, and interacting with our pets,” she says.

Biologically, the ‘energy’ – or chemical – comes from the pituitary gland in the brain. Scientifically, this helps facilitate attachments to other people (and pets), Besharati explains. Interestingly, oxytocin is available in some countries as a nasal spray! “Neuroscientists are testing to see if it can be used to help with postpartum depression, for instance,” she says.

Put A Positive Charge On Your Energy

Dr Lucy Draper-Clarke, who holds a PhD in Mindfulness and Education, says her research at Wits focuses on how to help people “develop daily, life-enhancing, contemplative practices” and focus their energy to helping others. This work bridges firstperson experience with neuroscience research and offers ancient practices to meet modern demands.

Perhaps the reaction to a dead smartphone battery in the morning is not to search frantically for a power source, but to use the time to fire up your own energy. “If you start your morning with a fragmented, distracted mind, going from a cell phone call to an email, to social media, you will experience mental exhaustion. Whereas if you meditate every morning, there’s a better chance of your focusing on one thing and getting through that task more effectively. Research also tells us that multitasking is a misnomer – you use twice as much energy shifting between the tasks than if you focused on one at a time,” says Draper-Clarke.

A researcher-practitioner and facilitator of mindfulness meditation, yoga, and expressive movement through dance, Draper-Clarke says, “Closer to home, African practices such as dance and drumming cultivate energy through movement, stamping and dancing. Traditional healers can dance all night without tiring. The music and the drumbeat coming into the body helps them harness energy.”

“Conversely, Buddhist traditions work more with silence, stillness, and solitude, and understand that ‘energy follows focus’. A meditation practice helps us to work with energy, to cultivate and direct it to help others. In Qigong, the meridian lines that connect all the organs in the body have links to disease, dis-ease or illness. Acupuncture moves energy along these meridian lines. So there are effective ways to shift energy, we just must find what works best for us.”

Complaining about things we can do nothing about exhausts us and has no positive impact on the situation. Draper-Clarke says, “Our feelings are transferred to others; we impact those around us.” For example, when an angry person walks into a room, she says our neuroception picks up danger. The angry person is potentially dangerous. It shows up as a quiver down your spine, an awareness.

But the same goes for compassion. People are easily able to identify compassionate people and when they do, they feel safer and more open. We know that when people are emotionally regulated, their brain works better. So, my suggestion is to refocus our energy towards cultivating awareness and kindness, versus fear, in difficult times.”

Science tells us that the possibility to shift our energy exists within us all. C

‘MUSICKING’ AND ENERGY

If you’ve ever stood too close to a speaker at a musical event, you can attest to ‘feeling’ the energy that sound waves generate.

Dr Susan Harrop-Allin, Senior Lecturer in Community Music at Wits, says, “Sound waves, like light, are a form of energy, so music can be considered as a form of energy that we experience in a sensory way.”

She subscribes to the theory of Christopher Small who coined the verb ‘musicking’, which emphasises music as human action. It encompasses all musical activity, from composing, to performing, to listening and singing in your mind. Through ‘musicking’ anyone can access the energy of music, through various forms of participation. Perceptions that you must be talented to produce music are incorrect. Neuropsychology and musical psychology tell us that your brain is hardwired to do ‘musicking’ of any kind.

“In experience one is energised by music, and collaborative music-making creates a special kind of energy between its participants. There is a useful term called ‘musical flow’ that describes what musicians feel when they’re in synchronisation with each other; when musical challenge and achievement are matched. There’s a timelessness about it, for example, when a choir or instrumental ensemble creates overtones – those sounds are produced through intense musical co-operation and listening to each other. We hear notes ‘above’ the melodies we’re singing, but which (magically) nobody is actually playing or singing.”

In South Africa music is a commonality, especially in our strong choral tradition in churches, singing and dancing for social occasions and rituals. “Musicking is integrated into our society, and not separate from it,” she says.

Draper-Clarke’s research concurs: “Music and community can support us and shift locked energy, even trauma. We do this through stamping, dancing, any rhythmic movement.”

To access musical energy, Harrop-Allin says it is often more satisfying to make music with a group, rather than individually, whether it’s through performing, creating, or listening.

“There is an immediate engagement with many parts of the brain; it just lights up. Listening is not passive, it’s participatory, with tapping with the beat and singing or hearing a song in your head. Music has the unique ability to be heard and replicated in your brain. Hence, all human beings have musical potential. And music isn’t only the purview of the ‘talented’ but embedded in our experiences of being human.”

While she admits that music often does require ‘energy’ to be created or heard, sometimes the opportunity to go backwards can help … perhaps in a battery-operated or wind-up wireless radio.

Our planet Earth is our perfect home, the only one we have. But it was not always hospitable. In the beginning, just after what is known as the ‘Big Bang’ about 4,6 billion years ago, our planet was a raging mass of hot chemicals. There were no atmosphere, no oceans, and no life. This blob of a protoplanet comprised various bits of accumulated leftovers from the birth of our sun.

Planet Pizza

Professor Gillian Drennan, Head of the School of Geosciences at Wits, explains what happened next:

“These leftover particles were pulled together and collided with one another under the influence of gravity. That was 4,6 billion years ago and if someone had caught a glimpse of this new protoplanet back then, it would have appeared as a big threedimensional pizza. Imagine a ball of pizza with pepperoni, onion and tomato equally distributed throughout. That is what the early Earth was like – a complete mishmash of ingredients.”

As collisions continued and the protoplanet (a large body of matter in orbit around the sun) grew, it heated up. It became so hot that it began partially to melt, explains Drennan.

“As it melted it began to differentiate or separate into different layers of increasing density towards the centre of the Earth. Melting allowed various volatiles in the accreted [accumulated] particles to escape, giving rise to the development of an atmosphere and even the oceans.” Volatiles are the group of chemical elements and chemical compounds that can be readily vaporised.

“It is also thought that the oceans might even have resulted from the accretion of some comets,” adds Drennan.

The Goldilocks Zone

For Earth to sustain life, several things had to emerge from this hot globule to make it the only planet in our Universe where life exists (as far as we know at the moment).

Firstly, our planet’s position in our solar system had to be just right. Our planet would not be what it is today if it wasn’t for our sun, believed to be a third or fourth generation star.

The Earth is perfectly positioned from the sun to support life, in what is often referred to as the ‘Goldilocks zone’, a habitable band where water remains liquid.

“If we were any closer to the sun, we would all fry. And if we were any further away, we would all freeze,” says Professor Mary Scholes in the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences.

CRUST-COOLING CONVECTION

Secondly, our planet is still in the process of cooling down from its original cataclysmic formation and the heat produced by radioactive elements in its interior. The most efficient way for this to happen is convection, says Professor Roger Gibson in the School of Geosciences.

This convection occurs in Earth’s mantle where the rocks are so hot that they are molten and able to flow and even melt. As the upwelling mantle nears Earth’s surface, it starts to flow laterally, splitting apart the thin, cold crust above it. Hot magma rises along these giant cracks and cools down, forming new crust. And if hot magma is rising to the surface somewhere, in other places, cold crust is sinking back down into the mantle.

This conveyor-belt of crust formation and destruction shifts the continental fragments across the planet on which we live, causing them not only to break apart or collide, but physically to move into different latitudes over timespans of tens of millions of years, thus driving significant climatic shifts.

Magnetic Protective Umbrella

The next ingredient in the process to create a liveable environment was for the planet to form a protective umbrella to shield us from objects from space. This is the magnetic field that is believed to have developed around 3,5 billion years ago.

“Our magnetic field protects us from cosmic rays and from high energy particles associated with coronal mass ejections, those high energy particles that come out of the sun and get deflected around the Earth,” says Professor Susan Webb in the School of Geosciences, who studies Earth’s earliest magnetic field.

“Earth happens to have a large liquid core and the rotation rate is such that, between the rotation of the planet and the chemical and thermal buoyancy, we get a dynamo action, which is basically turning mechanical energy into electromagnetic energy that generates a magnetic field,” explains Webb.

Other planets in our solar system lack a magnetic field. Venus, for instance, is rotating too slowly, while Mars is so small that scientists think its core has mostly frozen and doesn’t have enough liquid iron to generate a magnetic field.

Protection from our magnetic field is thought to have been important for evolution, as plants, animals and humans on Earth are protected from genetic damage from these high energy particles.

Magnetic minerals preserved in rocks provide evidence of the strength of the magnetic field in the past and how it, along with the positions of the continents, has changed over time. With rocks as old as 3,5 billion years and as the home to one of Earth’s earliest recognisable continents, South Africa is a rich laboratory in which to study these secular changes, says Gibson.

“Fluctuations in the magnetic field could in the future help explain how life emerged on Earth,” says Webb.

The Great Oxidation Event

Another important role of this magnetic field is that it prevents the Earth’s atmosphere from being stripped away.

Our atmosphere is believed to have formed after the planet cooled down and grew large enough to trap gasses around it, through gravitational force. Other gasses, such as hydrogen sulphide, methane, and carbon dioxide, were spewed into the atmosphere through volcanoes. It took about half a billion years for Earth’s surface to cool down and solidify enough for water to collect on it.

The early atmosphere was highly reducing and anaerobic microbes such as archaebacteria (such as methanogens, or sulphur-reducing bacteria) persisted until the advent of cyanobacteria, which flourished around 2,5 billion years ago. This resulted in oxygenic photosynthesis and oxygenation of our atmosphere for the first time.

“This global phenomenon is known as the Great Oxidation

Event (GOE),” says Professor Pierre M. Durand in the Wits Evolutionary Studies Institute. “The build-up of free oxygen in the atmosphere created suitable environments for eukaryotes [cells with a nucleus] or even complex multicellular life to evolve later in Earth's history. However, this phenomenon may have led to the extinction of various anaerobic [without oxygen] microorganisms at that time.”

The planet’s atmosphere gives us the environment in which we can live and breathe. It is also important as a temperature regulator and one gas plays a lifesaving role: Carbon dioxide (CO2) has a bad rap because of the role it plays in climate change, but it is needed to trap heat.

“The heat that gets trapped does not get reflected back into the atmosphere when the sun goes to sleep, and therefore keeps our planet at a habitable temperature for 24 hours a day,” says Scholes.

Motion Of The Ocean

A global average mean temperature of between 16 and 18 degrees Celsius must be maintained, and weather worldwide plays its part in maintaining habitability on Earth. Helping drive these systems are oceanic currents.

“Ocean currents play a very important role in maintaining patterns of rainfall distribution as well as overall temperature on the land,” says Scholes.

Different forms of life have also emerged to play a role in weather. Vegetation type is linked to rainfall distribution. Keeping ‘the blue planet’, Earth, alive relies on a dance of different parts, where each must work in harmony, even when climate change threatens. But it’s not always a smooth ride and the best way to describe this, explains Scholes, is to compare these working parts to an orchestra:

“You’ve got some things that are constantly going on in the background, like you may always have a singular violin being played. And then every so often you might get a perturbation [disturbance] to the global planet. These are the cymbals coming in; this is something like a big riff, like a tsunami.” C