These findings might help researchers to design more effective drugs for various human infections by focusing on the minimization of the inflammation. Moreover, bats are capable of sustained long flights, as some bat species can fly more than 1,000 km in a single night. With such intense physical activity, cells often produce high levels of toxic (free radicals) that would usually damage DNA sequence.

This study also found that bats are equipped with a highly functional set of genes that mediates DNA repair in response to DNA damage, thus bats are protected from toxic cellular waste with this advanced mechanism. Aging, cancer and infectious diseases are the three major issues medicine is facing today and biological abilities granted to bats seem to provide important clues for us to discover new ways to combat these big health problems

Matter&Beyond: What was your motivation for writing the book, The Heart-Mind Connection?

Well, that book was a collaboration with Dr. Ting who is a Cardiovascular Surgeon and it was actually his idea. He’s a very enlightened surgeon in that he, over the years of training in a practice as a cardiac surgeon, came to realize that the experience of undergoing cardiac surgery certainly taxed the mind and that the interaction of mind and heart was extremely important for outcomes. If you’re a cardiac surgeon and your goal is to improve your patients’ lives it became very clear to Dr. Ting that in order for that to happen cardiac surgeons and cardiologists had to be mindful of the fact that patients needed to be emotionally and cognitively intact, and so he asked me to collaborate on this book, and the book focused on the interaction between mood states and cardiac states.

M&B: What is the nature of this interaction? Does the heart affect the mind or does the mind affect the heart?

It’s bidirectional. There is an interaction or there is a relationship between mood disorders such as depression, anxiety, anger, and hostility and the actual human heart. The connection between those mood disorders and cardiac function is extremely important. But then also if you go into the experience of having heart disease and you were fortunate enough not to have one of those mood disorders, the experience of having cardiac disease will put you at risk for developing mood disorders. So it’s bidirectional. You can start out with heart disease and wind up having your health complicated by mood problems, or you can start out with mood problems and have your health complicated by heart disease. There’s an unholy alliance between depression and anxiety on the one hand and heart disease on the other.

M&B: What happens, let’s say, if you are someone who has a history of a major depressive disorder? What happens to his or her heart?

Major depressive disorder is a condition characterized by certain clear-cut symptoms, and those symptoms include having a depressed mood everyday most of the day for two weeks or more that includes losing pleasure in life, something we call anhedonia, not being able to take pleasure in normal activities that would normally make you happy. Along with that is loss of interest in things, guilt, or feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and worthlessness, loss of energy, loss of concentration, loss of appetite, sometimes even leading to weight loss, not being able to move the way you’re used to. So it’s sometimes you just curl up in bed and this is something we call psychomotor retardation or withdrawal. On the other hand sometimes depression makes you agitated so you can’t sit still and you’re running around sort of ringing your hands and so on. And then the final symptom of major depression is suicidality or morbid thinking. Always focused on death or wanting to die. So that’s the common sort of a cluster of symptoms we see in major depression. Now, say you have no history of heart disease but you suffer from major depressive disorder. You increase your risk of developing heart disease by having this condition of depression. So your risk of having a heart attack for example goes up like 1-1/2 to 2 times what it would be in someone without depression.

M&B: Is it similar with anger and hostility?

Some people believe that if you’re an angry person or a hostile person, that also increases your risk of developing depression. Say you have depression and you unfortunately have a heart attack. If you remain depressed then your risk of having another cardiac event, another minor cardiac infarction or a cardiac arrhythmia would go up three and a half times what it would be if you weren’t depressed. So that means that this connection between the brain and the heart, between depression and cardiac disease are tremendously important in terms of public health. Because those two diseases are causing most of the disability that exists, by the year 2020, the World Health Organization predicts that heart disease will be number one and depression will be number two in the entire world. That includes the developed world, the industrialized countries as well as the developing low income countries around the world. So in terms of the book that we did we thought it was important because these two illnesses, first of all feed off each other and cause a lot of heartache in the population but they also are the most important diseases in public health.

M&B: The heartbeat change is associated with love or certain joy. What is the physiology behind that?

Let me preface it by saying that this is the age old philosophical question which Plato and Aristotle sort of debated. Love is an idea as Plato thought. So, is there sort of an idea of beauty and of love that exists outside of the materialistic world? Are we somehow plugging into that ideal world of love as material organisms? Or does it come as a result, as an epiphenomenon of the material world we’re living? Does it emerge from the biological material world that we’re living? That in a way becomes a philosophical question. As scientists when we see human behavior, there’s something that we do, and it’s called reverse engineering. Let’s look at the behavior or the experience of human love. Where does that come from? Let’s work backwards from human love to try to understand in a biological way where it came from. We are the ultimate mammalian life. We might start a little controversy about that and especially with the all wars that we fight, but be that as it may, we are these high level, high functioning mammals. Our infants are born [in need of] altruism, which means that they are absolutely helpless when they are born. So parenting for the human being is extraordinarily important for the continuity of our species, and so our infants are in total need of care.

M&B: Isn’t this the same for all the animals?

It’s different in reptiles. If you go to Borneo and you study the life of the Komodo dragon, you’ll find out that komodo pups know immediately what they have to do when they plop out of komodo mommy. They have to roll around in their own feces in order to throw mommy off the scent because mommy will look at them as food. So that’s their strategy for avoiding being eaten by mommy. They also know how to climb up trees to get away from mommy. So here the survival strategy of reptiles is not one of attachment; it’s one of separation. All psychiatry is tied up in that simple fact. There would be no psychiatry if we were reptiles. But because we’re mammals, there’s psychiatry because all of the disorders we have are really disorders of a dysfunction in parental and social attachment. Only mammals for example have a part of the brain called the paralimbic cortex. So reptiles have primitive limbic areas, they have hippocampus, they have amygdala, so they show fear, and they act when they’re threatened, etc. They’re outfitted with those structures which allow them to do those simple attachments-attachments to food and to sexual objects etc., but don’t allow them to do social attachments very well, and there’s some reptiles that are better at it than others. Crocodiles, for example. They do a version of taking care of their pups. Birds also take care of their nestlings very well, and crocodiles actually have brains that are more kind of on the bird-like end of the spectrum, allowing them to do a better job as reptiles taking care of their young and having something of a social life. Nothing to the extent that mammals do and you can look at a mammal brain, and you can see where this is taking place. So the anterior cingulate is an area of extreme importance for mammalian behavior.

M&B: This unique mammal feature, the limbic system and the paralimbic system; would you elaborate a little bit more on them?

I had the privilege of meeting back in 1990 Paul McClain, who is a famous neuroscientist who coined the term limbic system. He studied emotional parts of the brain in reptiles and in monkeys and in human beings. He talked about what he called the mammalian behavioral triad. There are three things that mammals do that reptiles don’t do very well. One is that all mammalian infants cry for their mothers in the same way, so every lamb baas for its mother the same way. Every human infant cries for its mother in the same way, that’s called a separation cry, and you can study it. So when you look at rats they have an ultrasonic isolation cry; you can study it, and you can deprive them of relationships and you’ll see the cry. That’s typically mammalian. Another feature is play, so mammals play, and that serves a social binding function. We play sports together; it serves a social binding function. Then the third thing is maternal nurturance which is extremely important, and mammals do that parental nurturance piece pretty well.

M&B: Are there any experiments that may illustrate the role of love?

There are a couple of experiments that Paul did and they are very illustrative. They get us back to a focus on love. So one experiment was to take hamsters and you can ablate, sort of take out the anterior cingulate. When you do, the hamster pup no longer cries for its mother when it’s separated and the hamster mother no longer responds when the hamster pup cries for her. You can also put morphine in that area, and get pretty much the same results. So you could put morphine in the hamster pup’s brain in the anterior cingulated, and the hamster pup will no longer cry for their mother, it distorts that bonding. And you can do that with squirrel monkeys too and you’ll get similar results.

M&B: Do the results apply to human beings as well? Could the use of morphine stop a healthy heart or brain from giving love or responding to love?

One of the real problems that we face in psychiatry is when we run across an addicted mother. What happens to the mother child relationship when the mother is addicted to heroin or to cocaine or to other drugs of abuse? The child gets neglected, the mother no longer responds to the needs of the child. So we see there’s even a reflection of those basic experiments in the human model when we’re talking about maternal-child relationships. So again that’s kind of circumstantial evidence where there’s reverse engineering, and mothers also have this phenomenal hormone, neuropeptide hormone, this again is exclusively mammalian, called oxytocin. So it’s used in pregnant women to get them ready to give birth, and so once a pregnant woman gives birth it’s responsible for milk production and so on. This is another example of this – if we think about maternal love, one of the requirements for maternal love is that there needs to be oxytocin involved. Oxytocin needs to allow that brain to have the experience of being connected and bonded to offspring.

M&B: The relation between the brain and the other organs such as the heart, is it really a top down relation where the brain commands, or is it a bottom-up relation where bodily sensors form the human brain?

What you’re referring to when you bring up this fact that the body sends markers up to the brain, and the brain takes note of that and becomes behaviorally engaged, that is absolutely true, and it’s something that Tony Damasio calls a somatic marker hypothesis of how the brain works. This is also something that William James postulated in the late 1800s-that emotion is a reflection of the body’s activity. Your heart racing or your stomach turning, emotion is secondary, it’s the brain trying to make sense of what the body is going through. What came first, the chicken or the egg, that kind of a problem. The fact is, the organism works as a unity and you need all of its component parts for it to work, and you really can’t tease a part, what came first and what came second.

M&B: From our physiology, it is evident that we are born to love.

It is very spiritual about this kind of understanding of love and connecting it back to the brain. How the heart becomes a reflection of what the brain is about, and also this need we have as human beings for connection. Spirituality really is this need we seem to have as human beings to be connected to something greater than ourselves. So we have this part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, which allows us to think into the future and when we think into the future, we gain security when we see a future of connectivity, of attachment. That becomes a workable definition of spirituality. So many of us feel connected to a higher power, to God or to nature, but that is also a common reflection of what people refer to as love, and again you can choose to understand its biological origins. The body will be connected up with that whole experience, so your heart will be connected up. If you’re feeling connected to God, or to the scene of an ocean, and you’re feeling connected to the universe, when you’re looking up at the stars, there will be a bodily sensation connected up with that experience, and that will become for you part of what you understand to be spirituality.

Biological systematics classifies animals according to its own standards. So far about two million animal species have been distinguished. Each species has distinguishing characteristics and study of a few members of a species gives us general information about the whole of that species. For example, study of a pigeon gives us general information about all birds from nightingales to eagles, from grebes to albatrosses.

Systematic study of a species reveals that the assertions of being more or less developed are of relative nature. Also, study of the general control mechanisms in animal bodies shows a relative complexity in their metabolic and, especially, hormonal and nervous systems from one-celled organisms to mammals. It is difficult to attribute this complexity to chance or coincidences. Determining an entity of such complexity and adaptive effectiveness requires an absolute knowledge, will and power.

The standards by which to determine the degrees of development for animals vary from species to species. For example, with respect to the sense of smelling, sharks, according to our present knowledge, are relatively the most developed among vertebrates. Compared with a shark which can smell a drop of blood in the sea from a distance of about 25,000 feet, man is very much less developed. If we judge the degree of development according to the sense of smell, in place of men or monkeys, sharks will be the first. Whereas, with respect to the sense of seeing, eagles are much more developed than sharks, as well as than men and monkeys. An eagle can see a rabbit on the ground from a height of about 6.000 feet. Also, a bat which catches its prey in the dark with its ultrasonic equipment and a rattlesnake which catches rats with its infra-red eyes are far more developed than human beings in their respective areas of specialization.

Supposing a man was to enter the world of flies, what would flies say about him? ‘How simple and undeveloped that being is! He does not know how to fly. Even with the planes he made, he cannot fly as perfectly as we do. We turn somersaults, alight wherever we wish and take off very easily. Even one-tenth of the subtleties of art in our wings is not to be found in his most elaborate devices. Despite his abilities, skills and knowledge, he is completely unable to make one wing such as ours!

Would it not be true for a honey-bee to say of us:

‘Those clumsy ones can draw with tools and only after calculations the hexagons that I can make so easily and exactly identical to one another. They cannot make so sweet and healing a substance as honey that I produce in great amounts.’ Again, should a microbe or virus not consider itself as more powerful or developed that man seeing that it can cause him to die? With respect to their ability to swim and live in water, are not fish more perfect or developed than us? But then animals living on land are surely more developed than fish in respect of the mechanisms enabling them to live on land.

When we consider the world of insects, we are amazed at the degree of social organization they have achieved: the solidarity in the social life of bees, ants and termites, the communication among them, the absolute obedience of the individual to the commands of the collectivity, and the fulfilment by each individual of its duties to the community- compels us to wonder whether insects or human beings are more developed in this respect. It is for this reason that some socio-biologists tend to think of a society of insects as if it were an individual organism, operated by a single brain, the individuals in the community functioning like separate cells within the larger single organism.

Those who classify creatures according to the complexity of their brain structure and faculties assert that the more complex a brain is, the more developed the animal. However, even though the weight of the brain or the ratio of brain weight to general body weight sometimes appears to confirm this assertion, it usually leads on to wrong conclusions. Those who argue that the mammals whose brains are smaller than the human brain are simpler than human beings, forget that the main difference between human beings and mammals lies in man’s memory and capacity of thinking and speaking, and that there are great differences among the intellectual capacities of human beings. Also, every human being is different from others in many ways-in character, ambitions, attitudes, etc. 

It is function which determines the form and type. That is, an architect does not determine the function of a building after he has built it. On the contrary, he builds the building according to the function it will serve. In the same way, the structural perfection of the human brain corresponds to its functional perfection. That is, man did not become man after he had acquired his brain capacity or complexity. Rather, he was given a brain according to his functions with respect to other creatures and to the duties he was expected to perform. Thinking, as evolutionists do, that brains in animals grew more complex and their ‘intellectual capacity’ increased in parallel with the line of evolution, means attributing all the intellectual faculties and activities like thinking, reasoning, imagination, speaking and so on, to the brain as a physical entity. This is the crudest sort of materialism and reduces man’s existence entirely to matter, rejecting the existence of the spirit and spiritual dimension of man. Also, it is not possible by this hypothesis to explain the differences among human beings in their intellectual capacities, desires, ambitions, and character. If it were possible to increase or strengthen man’s intellectual capacities by making him a bigger and heavier brain, rather than educating him, would it not be more reasonable to try to find ways of enlarging his brain or, as some assert, enabling him to use a greater part of his brain?

How can we regard it as simpler or ‘less evolved’ that in the cytoplasm of one-celled organisms many vital activities like digestion and excretion are carried out? As a small watch is usually more intricate and requires more artistry in its production than a big clock, it may well be said that one-celled animals are more complex or difficult to come about than large, multi-celled ones. Again, although it seems at first sight that the more the number of cells increases, the more complex the creature grows, no one can say that an elephant is more developed than a mouse. Both being classed as mammals, with respect to their bodily activities, one cannot be considered more developed or simpler or requiring more artistry than the other. This leads us to reflect on the following Qur’anic verses:

God does not disdain to coin even a gnat as a parable, or a larger creature. As for those who believe, they know that is the truth from their Lord. But those who unbeliever say, ‘What does God wish to teach by such a parable?’ He leads astray many thereby, and guides many. He leads astray only the corrupt. (al-Baqara, 2.26)

O mankind! A parable is set forth, so listen to it: Surely, those whom you invoke, apart from God, will never create a fly even if they combine together for the purpose. And if the fly took something from them they could not rescue it from it. Hence, weak are both the seeker and the sought! (al-Hajj, 22.73)

It is foolish to regard the bony scales of fish as simple while regarding the pituitary glands on the skin of frogs as developed and the scales of lizards as more developed and the feathers of birds as much more developed and the hair of mammals as the most developed. It is no more than a speculative assertion that those protective parts of the bodies of the animals mentioned evolved each from a simpler one by chance. Is it not more reasonable to accept that each species of animals was given a particular body with its particular parts and systems according to the function it would serve among creatures and the environmental conditions to which it would be best adapted and adaptable?