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M2A: Fantastic Voyage is a project that tries to demonstrate the differences between processed foods and whole foods inside the human body. Stefani Bardin, a professor of design, and Braden Kuo, a gastroenterologist, sent a M2A* pill camera through two human subjects. One (left) ate ramen noodles, blue Gatorade, and gummi bears. The other (right) ate whole foods, including fresh made noodles. I choose to interpret Bardin’s assessment as praise for industrially-manufactured ramen:
Notice how the shape of the ramen noodles is still apparent on the left and the handmade ramen noodles on the right are no longer recognizable as noodles? Even after two and a half hours? That’s because top ramen is made to survive Armageddon. Our homemade ramen noodles are made to be eaten.
Link -via Geekosystem
*’M’ refers to the camera’s point of entry into the human body and ‘A’ to the point of exit. The designers clearly didn’t want there to be any confusion about how to use it.
by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff
Some psychoanalysts can find meaning in the most ordinary-seeming bits of your life. Some discern it even in your intestinal rumblings. There’s a technical name for those digestive sounds: borborygmi. Several published studies tell how to interpret people’s gut feelings—how to translate those borborygmi into common everyday words.
In 1984, Prof. Dr. Christian Müller of Hôpital de Cery in Prilly, Switzerland, published a report called “New Observations on Body Organ Language,” in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomics.
“New Observations on Body Organ Language,” Christian Muller, Psychotherapy and Psychosomics, vol. 42, nos. 1–4, 1984, pp. 124–6.
Müller paraphrases a 1918 essay by someone named Willener that “concludes that the phenomenon generally known as borborygmi must be regarded as crypto- grammatically encoded body signals that could be interpreted with the help of [special] apparatus.” Müller laments that Willener’s “attempts to follow up on his theory were thwarted by the defects of recording techniques at that time.”
Happily, Müller himself had access to later, better equipment. “We have been trying at our clinic since 1980,” he writes, “to combine electromesenterography with Spindel’s alamograph, and in addition to use digital transformation for a quantitative analysis of the curves via computer.”
Müller reveals his greatest interpretive triumph:
The presence of a negative transference situation was not difficult to deduce from the following sequence: ‘Ro… Pi… le… me… 1o…’. The following translation is certainly an appropriate rendering: ‘Rotten pig. leave me alone.’
This lovely piece of deadpan, intentional nonsense, I am told, was swallowed whole by some readers, and perhaps also some journal editors.
A few years later, Guy Da Silva, a Montreal psychoanalyst, published several apparently quite serious papers about the psychoanalytical significance of borborygmi.
The most accessible (in my view, anyway) is his “Borborygmi as Markers of Psychic Work During the Analytic Session: A Contribution to Freud’s Experience of Satisfaction and to Bion’s Idea About the Digestive Model for the Thinking Apparatus.” This professionally dense monograph appeared in a 1990 issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Freud is Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalysis pioneer who lived in Vienna, Austria. Bion is Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, director of the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis in the 1950s, and later president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
“Borborygmi as Markers of Psychic Work During the Analytic Session: A Contribution to Freud’s Experience of Satisfaction and to Bion’s Idea About the Digestive Model for the Thinking Apparatus,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 71, 1990, p. 641–59.
“The Emergence of Thinking: Bion as the Link Between Freud and the Neurosciences,” Guy Da Silva, in M. Grignon (Ed.) Psychoanalysis and the Zest for Living: Reflections and Psychoanalytic Writings in Memory of W.C.M. Scott, ESF Publishers, Binghamton, NY, 1998.
“Le Modèle Alimentaire dans la Théorie de la Pensée de Bion: Suivi d’une Application de ce Modèle dans l’Analyse d’un Patient,” Guy Da Silva, Symposium of the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal, Spring 1992.
Guy Da Silva digested a little Freud together with a little Bion. He writes: “Borborygmi may signal the process and acquisition of new thoughts (symbolization) and the free associations derived from borborygmi often provide the key to the understanding of the session by linking the verbal flow of ideas to the underlying sensory and affective experience, thereby providing a ‘moment of truth’. Within the primitive maternal transference, borborygmi are often accompaniments to the fantasy or the hallucination of being fed by the analyst.”
The name Guy Da Silva will be familiar to some readers as the star of hundreds of psychologically gut-wrenching films, among them Beyond Reality 3, The Lube Guy, Attack of the Killer Dildos, and Porn-O-Matic 2000. But Guy Da Silva the actor and Guy Da Silva the psychoanalyst are not the same person, no matter how similarly stimulating their work may be.
(Title image credit: Flickr user threefatcats. Captioning via Speechable.)
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This article is republished with permission from the September-October 2009 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
At Christmas dinner this year, you may find yourself stuffed to capacity, unable to eat another bite…until you see a scrumptious dessert. Now, scientists know why. It’s because your stomach gets bigger when you eat sugar:
The sugar in sweet foods stimulates a reflex that expands your stomach, writes senior researcher Arnold Berstad and assistant doctor Jørgen Valeur from Lovisenberg Diakonale Hospital in the latest issue of The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association.
“If you eat dessert after you’re actually feeling stuffed you’re tricking your normal sensation of being full,” they argue. [...]
Glucose – or sugar if you will – stimulates this relaxation reflex.
“In this way it can decrease the pressure on the stomach and reduce the sensation of being full. A sweet dessert allows the stomach to make room for more food,” the researchers write in the medical journal.
Link -via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: Flickr user whitneyinchicago
Pharmaceutical start-up Gelesis has developed a pill that is filled with tiny polymer beads. Swallow the pill, and the beads absorb water in your stomach, swelling over one hundred times in size. The idea is to partially fill up the stomach so that the patient is less hungry:
So when you down a pill with a glass of water, the capsule dissolves in your stomach and the hydrogel beads begin to grow. In a few minutes you’re feeling pretty full, and that second Double Down from KFC is decidedly less attractive.
Of course, now you have a belly full of hydrogel, and this is where the engineers at Gelesis had to be clever. The food is now mixed in with the gel, but you still need to digest that food (the object here is weight loss, not starvation). The hydrogel keeps food in the stomach longer, giving stomach acid more time to break down both the food and the hydrogel, which begins to release its water. Everything then moves to the small intestine where the gel can re-expand to some extent, slowing the absorption of fatty materials and sugars. Finally everything ends up in the lower bowels, and the rest is history.
Link | Image: Gelesis
From the blog Today I Found Out, here’s something I bet you didn’t know about 7-11′s Double Big Gulp:
Today I found out that the 7-11 Double Big Gulp holds about twice the amount of fluid than the average adult human’s stomach. The average adult human’s stomach can hold reasonably comfortably approximately 32 ounces at any given time. The Double Big Gulp holds about 64 ounces of soda or Slurpee.
