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Ergonomics | Can using a standing desk help you lose weight? | yes_statement | using a "standing" "desk" can "help" you "lose" "weight".. "standing" while working at a "desk" can aid in "weight" loss. | https://www.autonomous.ai/ourblog/standing-desk-help-you-lose-weight | How Can A Standing Desk Help You Lose Weight? | How Can A Standing Desk Help You Lose Weight?
There have been fewer workplace restrictions in recent months. That said, remote workers are more likely to spend their time at home. If they are not careful about their physical habits, they can gain a significant amount of weight.
One way to solve this problem is with a standing desk setup. How can a standing desk help you lose weight? There are plenty of reasons why a standing desk is an effective approach to burn calories and lose weight. However, it must be done in a specific way.
Obesity is a Serious Problem
Obesity remains a major health issue in the United States. The University of Warwick did a recent study on the sedentary lifestyle most remote workers live. According to the study, they are more likely to experience heart disease risks and breathing problems.
Does a Standing Desk Really Help Lose Weight?
Workers may ask themselves, “do standing desks burn more calories''? The American Heart Association did a study on the effectiveness of standing desks. Research shows standing only six hours a day burns 54 calories. It may not seem much, but head researcher Farzane Saeidifard suggests standing is better than sitting. In fact, an active lifestyle can lead to weight loss.
To lose weight by standing desk usage, you have to incorporate a physical regimen. There are more calories burned by standing desk exercises since you are considerably more active. A standing desk provides enough room to perform these exercises.
The Best Way to Use a Standing Desk for Your Health
How can a standing desk help you lose weight? The best way to use a standing desk is through an exercise plan. You need to start with a series of stretches for your body. You can do it during a break or even while you work. Stretches not only keep your body active but also loosens the joints and muscles. Constant movement allows you to burn more calories. Keep that in mind when you use a standing desk to your advantage.
Standing Desk Benefits
You can lose weight by standing desk exercises. Try deep breathing while you perform overhead arm stretches, for example. Once you incorporate yoga into your daily routine, you can experience a healthier way of life. Standing desk benefits include the following:
● They reduce the health risks of obesity
● Standing desks prevent you from sitting all-day
● It allows you to be more physically active
● You have a full range of motion to move around
● Sit-and-stand work areas burn more calories on average
How Can a Standing Desk Help You Lose Weight? Consider Autonomous
With the right standing desk, weight loss can be achieved. Autonomous provides several products at their disposal, such as the SmartDesk Core. The SmartDesk Core is ideal for standing exercises. You can set a particular height for your preferences. Use the desk to perform a series of exercises. Here are a few pros and cons:
SmartDesk Core
Smooth and resilient transitions
Height adjustability at your control
Sturdy foundational support for exercises
Promotes higher energy levels throughout the day
Quick assembly with easy-to-understand instructions
Five-year warranty with free shipping and 30-day trial
Cheap monthly payments with a $100 price cut
No expert assembly
How to Use a Standing Desk
You need to learn how to use a standing desk. To adjust the height of a SmartDesk Core, use the LED keypad. You can set a memory system for up to four different presets. Raise the desktop height to the one you want, then hold M. Now you can select a number for that height.
To maximize your experience, make sure to stand with your elbows at a 90-degree angle. It allows your shoulders to relax, while also correcting your body posture. You can also try to use an anti-fatigue mat beneath your feet. These mats make your feet more comfortable, especially when you stand for a few hours. Last but not least, try to get some fresh air and open the windows. A little sunlight can make a difference in your mindset.
Choose the Correct Standing Desk Base
A standing desk base determines the overall effectiveness. Without a solid frame, you cannot perform exercises on the standing desk. Consider the cost-effective method of buying desk frames separately. Autonomous does offer a base-only frame that uses dual motors. It’s sold at a significantly cheaper price, so you can maintain a strict budget. These frames are powerful enough to lift over 300 lbs. All you need is a desktop, and you are good to go.
Standing Desk Exercises
To lose weight by standing desk exercises, you need to work out while you work. You can perform several different standing desk exercises. For example, you can try squats and lunges for your legs and back. Do as many reps as you feel comfortable, and make sure you have water to drink. You should also do stretches before you do any physical activity.
Consider what body parts you want to exercise with. Squats require proper leg use, so perform a few leg stretches beforehand. You should also do stretches after each exercise to avoid strains. Workouts are a great way to lose weight while you work!
Lose Weight by Standing Desk Activities
Do standing desks burn more calories? While it doesn’t burn that many, it does prevent weight gain from inactivity. The more physically active in exercise, the more calories you can burn. When you work out with a standing desk, weight loss is easily achievable. Next time you ask yourself how can a standing desk help you lose weight, you know the answer.
Make sure you have plenty of food and water nearby. You don’t have to go all out, but you can replenish yourself in the meantime. Be mindful of what you eat, since food with high-fat content can make you gain weight. Standing desks can make work fun, so try it out yourself! | How Can A Standing Desk Help You Lose Weight?
There have been fewer workplace restrictions in recent months. That said, remote workers are more likely to spend their time at home. If they are not careful about their physical habits, they can gain a significant amount of weight.
One way to solve this problem is with a standing desk setup. How can a standing desk help you lose weight? There are plenty of reasons why a standing desk is an effective approach to burn calories and lose weight. However, it must be done in a specific way.
Obesity is a Serious Problem
Obesity remains a major health issue in the United States. The University of Warwick did a recent study on the sedentary lifestyle most remote workers live. According to the study, they are more likely to experience heart disease risks and breathing problems.
Does a Standing Desk Really Help Lose Weight?
Workers may ask themselves, “do standing desks burn more calories''? The American Heart Association did a study on the effectiveness of standing desks. Research shows standing only six hours a day burns 54 calories. It may not seem much, but head researcher Farzane Saeidifard suggests standing is better than sitting. In fact, an active lifestyle can lead to weight loss.
To lose weight by standing desk usage, you have to incorporate a physical regimen. There are more calories burned by standing desk exercises since you are considerably more active. A standing desk provides enough room to perform these exercises.
The Best Way to Use a Standing Desk for Your Health
How can a standing desk help you lose weight? The best way to use a standing desk is through an exercise plan. You need to start with a series of stretches for your body. You can do it during a break or even while you work. Stretches not only keep your body active but also loosens the joints and muscles. Constant movement allows you to burn more calories. Keep that in mind when you use a standing desk to your advantage.
Standing Desk Benefits
You can lose weight by standing desk exercises. Try deep breathing while you perform overhead arm stretches, for example. Once you incorporate yoga into your daily routine, | yes |
Ergonomics | Can using a standing desk help you lose weight? | yes_statement | using a "standing" "desk" can "help" you "lose" "weight".. "standing" while working at a "desk" can aid in "weight" loss. | https://www.standingdesknation.com/blogs/benefits/standing-desks-weight-loss | Standing Desks and Weight Loss - The Whole Story - Standing Desk ... | <
Standing Desks and Weight Loss - The Whole Story
How Standing Desks Help With Weight Loss
Let’s get one thing straight. If your life is highly sedentary and you sit most of the day, a standing desk is not a miracle pill that will automatically help you achieve your ideal weight.
In fact, studies show that standing desk users typically only burn an additional 170 calories per day during their time standing (compared to sitting all day).
If that sounds confusing, here is another way of looking at it: the 3-4 hours of standing that typically occur with a sit-stand desk burn an extra 170 calories, compared to sitting for those 3-4 hours.
That’s about the same amount of calories as eating two Oreo cookies - hardly enough to make a meaningful dent in your weight loss plan.
But stay with me here…
While this fact is commonly offered as evidence when articles and “experts” claim that standing desks don’t facilitate weight loss, it also misses the forest through the trees. Yes, the above facts are 100% true, but by the time you finish this article, you will understand that they are also short-sided, and don’t really answer the question: Can a standing desk help me lose weight?
So, in this article we hope to offer you a deeper perspective on the topic of standing desks and weight loss, and ultimately explain why standing desks CAN help you lose weight and burn fat.
Standing Desks Increase Overall Metabolism and Burn More Calories
Dr. James Levin, M.D., Ph.D introduced important research into the study of whether or not standing desks help people lose weight:
Dr. Levin's research focuses on the “non-exercise activity” humans do throughout the day, like standing, walking, fidgeting, etc. All of these activities create thermogenesis in the body - which is a fancy way of saying that they generate heat in the body and turn on our body’s calorie burning engine. Dr. Levine calls this process “NEAT” (short for non-exercise activity thermogenesis).
Dr. Levine's findings clearly demonstrate that the more time you devote to fidgeting, walking, and standing during the day, the more calories you burn. But here is the important distinction from the studies we mentioned at the top of the article: NEAT doesn’t just burn calories while you stand or walk. The thermogenesis caused by non-exercise activity continually keeps your body’s metabolism higher day and night.
So while you may only burn an extra 170 calories during the time you spend standing - the act of standing and moving essentially kicks your metabolism into high gear, helping you burn as many as 2000 extra calories in 24 hours!
So to summarize, by naturally increasing your NEAT movements during the day, a standing desk improves your body’s overall metabolic rate - boosting calorie burn throughout the day and night (even when you're sitting). That boost in metabolism and extra calorie burn helps you lose and regulate your weight, and keeps your body generally healthy.
Standing Desks Balance and Enhance Hormones that Boost Fat Burn
Despite what some might say, there is more to weight loss than simply counting calories. It's also important to consider body's hormones, and understand how they contribute specifically to our body's ability to burn fat.
In the prior section, we talked about the importance of NEAT, and how it helps us to burn extra calories throughout the day and night. Well, it turns out there’s even more benefit to the NEAT movements encouraged by standing desks.
Non-exercise activity also helps engage chemicals in your body that work to regulate blood sugar and burn fat. And in this section, we're going to focus on two key hormones: Insulin and Lipoprotein Lipase.
Blood sugar (insulin) is the hormone that regulates glucose (sugar) in the blood. Insulin works by helping the body's cells absorb glucose. If your body has too much insulin, your cells absorb too much glucose, which then gets converted into fat.
So the regulation of your blood sugar is absolutely vital to burning fat and properly losing weight. The most common methods of balancing your blood sugar are through diet and exercise. No news there.
However, it turns out that the same metabolic processes that we discussed above that boost our metabolism and calorie burn, also have a positive effect on our blood sugar.
An Australian study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise examined 23 overweight office workers over two weeks. The first week, they spent 8 hours of days sitting at a desk. The second week, the alternated 30 minutes of sitting with 30 minutes of standing.
Researchers analyzed blood samples to see if there was a difference in glucose levels and found that the glucose levels improved by 11% when workers alternated between standing and sitting (in just the first week).
Lipoprotein Lipase (LPL) is a lesser known hormone, but no less crucial. LPL is a key enzyme in the body that essentially captures and burns fat in our blood stream.
Turns out that standing and non-exercise activity significantly increase the LPL activity in your body. Conversely, sitting has been known to decrease LPL activity by as much as 90% - 95%.
All this is by way of saying that standing desks do more than just burn calories. A standing desk helps the body activate the chemicals and enzymes in your body that help burn fat, specifically. And last I checked, that’s usually the REAL goal of any diet or weight loss plan.
Wrap Up
As you know, there are many articles that say standing desks don't offer a significant weight loss benefit. While this may be true, most of these articles fail to tell the whole story.
While true in their assertion that we don't burn that many more calories while standing compared to sitting, these articles fail to take into consideration the global and long term benefits of non-exercise activity (standing and moving).
The core benefit of a standing desk, as it pertains to weight loss, is the encouragement of this non-exercise activity: standing, swaying, moving, etc. All that activity helps boost the body's metabolism, burn calories around the clock, and balance vital hormones for weight loss and calorie burn.
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What standout customers are saying
I did research for months when trying to find a standing desk to fit my employees' needs. Some were too bulky, overpriced with little to no customer service support- but then I found Standing Desk Nation. Not only did they personally help me find the right desk for our needs, but they continued to offer support even after we purchased. I recommend Standing Desk Nation to anyone who is looking for an office upgrade. Great company with great products. We did one large order to start, but continue to come back because they really are the best in the business.
Standing Desk Nation is awesome. The customer service response I've had was better than any other company response. From getting the questions I had before purchasing my Ergotech Freedom Desk 42 answered before I ordered to dealing with a damaged replacement product, Standing Desk Nation personnel have been quick to respond and take action! Our business will definitely consider them first for any future products they carry. I could not be happier with the desk I ordered. Love it.
I love my Flexispot 47 inch standing desk converter! I haven't sat down since i got it! Super Quality, Super easy to install, Super easy to lower/raise! I am so happy with my purchase! Brian and Jaki were awesome to work with, friendly and knowledgeable about the product! I would highly recommend this company to anyone. TRUST me, you'll be SUPER SATISFIED!
I am enjoying using my stand up desk. I stand all day Monday through Friday and I feel more productive. The desk top has ample work space. The surface is very nice to work on. Unfortunately, my initial purchased desk was delivered with some flaws. I was disappointed. However, Brian and Standing Desk Nation stood behind their product. They sent a replacement desk that was in new condition and pay for the return shipping of the initial desk. I was most relieved as to me it was an expensive purchase.
I would recommend the product and Standing Desk Nation. Great product and great customer service!
We recently purchased 30 of these desks and our employees are very happy with them! Very easy to assemble...you literally take it out of the box and put it on your desk. The customer service is also excellent! Brian at Standing Desk Nation was very responsive to my questions and made the whole process very easy for us. I would highly recommend the ZipLift and Standing Desk Nation!
I purchased both the Flexispot Wellness Mat and the Vivo Compact Height Adjustable Standing Desk. I love them both and they have made a huge difference for me by helping to avoid back and hip stress from sitting at my computer! The team at Standing Desk Nation helped me immensely. They asked me to send pictures of my existing desk and measurements so that they could recommend the best compact desk for me. It is all a perfect fit. Thanks Brian and team!!
The desk is great. It definitely makes a long day at the desk a better experience. I experienced some difficulty with the keyboard tray due to my improper installation and Brian and his staff could not have been more helpful in dealing with my problem. They went above and beyond. | <
Standing Desks and Weight Loss - The Whole Story
How Standing Desks Help With Weight Loss
Let’s get one thing straight. If your life is highly sedentary and you sit most of the day, a standing desk is not a miracle pill that will automatically help you achieve your ideal weight.
In fact, studies show that standing desk users typically only burn an additional 170 calories per day during their time standing (compared to sitting all day).
If that sounds confusing, here is another way of looking at it: the 3-4 hours of standing that typically occur with a sit-stand desk burn an extra 170 calories, compared to sitting for those 3-4 hours.
That’s about the same amount of calories as eating two Oreo cookies - hardly enough to make a meaningful dent in your weight loss plan.
But stay with me here…
While this fact is commonly offered as evidence when articles and “experts” claim that standing desks don’t facilitate weight loss, it also misses the forest through the trees. Yes, the above facts are 100% true, but by the time you finish this article, you will understand that they are also short-sided, and don’t really answer the question: Can a standing desk help me lose weight?
So, in this article we hope to offer you a deeper perspective on the topic of standing desks and weight loss, and ultimately explain why standing desks CAN help you lose weight and burn fat.
Standing Desks Increase Overall Metabolism and Burn More Calories
Dr. James Levin, M.D., Ph.D introduced important research into the study of whether or not standing desks help people lose weight:
Dr. Levin's research focuses on the “non-exercise activity” humans do throughout the day, like standing, walking, fidgeting, etc. All of these activities create thermogenesis in the body - which is a fancy way of saying that they generate heat in the body and turn on our body’s calorie burning engine. Dr. Levine calls this process “NEAT” (short for non-exercise activity thermogenesis).
| yes |
Ergonomics | Can using a standing desk help you lose weight? | yes_statement | using a "standing" "desk" can "help" you "lose" "weight".. "standing" while working at a "desk" can aid in "weight" loss. | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-standing-desk-isnt-going-to-help-you-lose-a-lot-of-weight/2017/11/17/3f287c90-ca50-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html | A standing desk isn't going to help you lose a lot of weight - The ... | A standing desk isn’t going to help you lose a lot of weight
From the Apple Watch to standing desks, a number of products attempt to get users to stand more and sit less. But how many more calories do you burn, and can this help you lose weight?
A new study set out to answer these questions by analyzing data from nearly 50 previous studies on the topic. The studies included more than 1,100 people in total. All of these earlier studies measured the difference between calories burned while sitting vs. standing.
The results show that standing burned an extra 0.15 calories per minute, on average, compared with sitting. Men burned an extra 0.2 calories per minute while standing, which was twice as much as women, who burned an extra 0.1 calories. Men burn more calories per minute because they typically have more muscle mass than women, the researchers said.
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The findings mean that, for a person who weighs about 140 pounds, substituting sitting with standing for six hours a day would burn an extra 54 calories per day, the researchers said.
This amount is probably not enough to help people lose weight, but it could help prevent weight gain, said study lead author Farzane Saeidifard, a research fellow at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who presented the findings at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions meeting last week.
Standing is “better than sitting, but you need more activity” for weight loss and for overall health, Saeidifard said. On a calorie-burning scale of 0 to 100, where sitting is 0 and activities such as swimming and running are 100, standing would be about a 5 to 10, Saeidifard said.
A growing body of research has found that sitting too long is linked with an increased risk of a number of conditions, including breast and colon cancer, diabetes and heart disease, as well as an increased risk of early death.
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In a separate study, Saeidifard and colleagues looked at the effects of substituting sitting with standing on the severity of heart-disease risk factors, such as high blood pressure, high blood sugar and high BMI.
The researchers reviewed seven studies involving about 830 people in total. In these studies, some participants received an intervention, such as a standing desk at work, while others — the control groups — remained sedentary.
That study found that, over about four months, people in the intervention groups stood longer, on average, than those in the control groups. And those in the standing groups showed a slightly greater reduction in blood glucose levels and body-fat levels at the end of the intervention, compared with people in the control groups.
It’s helpful to know that “just substituting sitting with standing” can lead to some reductions in fat and blood-sugar levels. But again, people still need more activity in their day for weight loss and overall health, Saeidifard said. The Department of Health and Human Services recommends that people engage in 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week.
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Overall, the main takeaway of this research is “Please sit less,” Saeidifard said. “You can substitute sitting with at least standing,” and preferably with other activities such as walking, she said. | A standing desk isn’t going to help you lose a lot of weight
From the Apple Watch to standing desks, a number of products attempt to get users to stand more and sit less. But how many more calories do you burn, and can this help you lose weight?
A new study set out to answer these questions by analyzing data from nearly 50 previous studies on the topic. The studies included more than 1,100 people in total. All of these earlier studies measured the difference between calories burned while sitting vs. standing.
The results show that standing burned an extra 0.15 calories per minute, on average, compared with sitting. Men burned an extra 0.2 calories per minute while standing, which was twice as much as women, who burned an extra 0.1 calories. Men burn more calories per minute because they typically have more muscle mass than women, the researchers said.
Advertisement
The findings mean that, for a person who weighs about 140 pounds, substituting sitting with standing for six hours a day would burn an extra 54 calories per day, the researchers said.
This amount is probably not enough to help people lose weight, but it could help prevent weight gain, said study lead author Farzane Saeidifard, a research fellow at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who presented the findings at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions meeting last week.
Standing is “better than sitting, but you need more activity” for weight loss and for overall health, Saeidifard said. On a calorie-burning scale of 0 to 100, where sitting is 0 and activities such as swimming and running are 100, standing would be about a 5 to 10, Saeidifard said.
A growing body of research has found that sitting too long is linked with an increased risk of a number of conditions, including breast and colon cancer, diabetes and heart disease, as well as an increased risk of early death.
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| no |
Ergonomics | Can using a standing desk help you lose weight? | yes_statement | using a "standing" "desk" can "help" you "lose" "weight".. "standing" while working at a "desk" can aid in "weight" loss. | https://www.houstonmethodist.org/blog/articles/2021/aug/are-standing-desks-really-worth-it/ | Are Standing Desks Really Worth It? | Houston Methodist On Health | Are Standing Desks Really Worth It?
You can't take the desk out of your desk job, but — with a standing desk — you can take the chair out of it. And, if the rising popularity of these desks is any indication, perhaps it's because there's reason to believe it improves our health as much as our productivity.
Still, you may be unsure whether a standing desk is really worth it. Of course you're tired of sitting all day, but is a different desk really the right solution?
First, there's the question of whether a standing desk is worth the price tag? This decision is a bit personal. But, keep in mind: A standing desk doesn't have to be a several hundred dollar investment. There are a variety of standing desk converters (which sit on top of the desk you already have) that won't break the bank.
Price tag aside, you might still be on the fence (or, more realistically, in your chair) about the actual health benefits of a standing desk. Do they exist, or is it simply wishful thinking?
Using a standing desk may help reduce lower back pain and neck pain
You probably already know this, but, when you're sitting all day, it's prretttttyy easy to slouch, lean and just generally slide your way into some unfriendly postures — including, but not limited to, hunched shoulders, a neck that's stretched out forwards and idle abdominal muscles.
When sitting, your spine is generally in a less effective position, and this places more demand on your back muscles and neck muscles. As a result, your abdominal muscles need to be very engaged to help absorb the extra stress. But, many people neglect the full use of their core while sitting. What's more is that sitting also reduces your blood circulation in your legs, which puts strain on your hamstring and quadricep muscles.
By the end of the work week, there's back pain, neck pain and maybe even some leg pain.
The benefit of standing instead of sitting is that it makes it much easier to keep your spine in normal alignment, meaning your muscles don't have to work as hard. For instance, standing more naturally engages your abdominal muscles, resulting in a properly aligned spine and optimal use of your back and neck muscles.
But, a word of caution: You can have bad spine alignment while standing, too — whether that's because you're not establishing correct standing posture, you're not engaging your muscles properly or you're making one or more common work desk mistakes.
Unfortunately, a standing desk won't help you lose weight
In a perfect world, standing at your desk most of the day instead of sitting would result in some extra calorie burn.
The reality, however, is that standing burns only slightly more calories per hour than sitting — about 88 calories per hour vs. 80 calories per hour, one study shows. This small increase isn't likely to contribute to any weight loss or weight maintenance goals you may have.
What this study found instead is that replacing periods of sitting with walking caused more energy expenditure — about 130 more burned calories, in fact. (Wait a minute...should we be investing in treadmill desks instead of standing desks??) The exact calories burned per hour while walking varies depending on your weight and your pace, but walking can generally aid in weight loss for some people — especially when combined with efforts to eat healthy diet.
But even though standing doesn't really burn more calories than sitting, know that sitting too much can, over time, impact your health — even if you're getting plenty of exercise.
A sedentary lifestyle (aka, sitting too much) increases a person's risk of developing type 2 diabetes by more than 90%. One theory as to why is that sitting makes it harder for your body to absorb sugar in your bloodstream, resulting in increased blood sugar levels. Over time, blood sugar spikes can contribute to insulin resistance (aka, type 2 diabetes).
Admittedly, the evidence isn't overwhelming, but one study found that alternating sitting and standing throughout an eight-hour workday has modest but beneficial effects on how blood sugar is regulated after a meal. This suggests that investing in a standing desk (and actually standing at it) may potentially help reduce your risk of developing diabetes.
Plus, sitting too much isn't just a risk factor for type 2 diabetes. It's linked to a variety of health issues.
Prolonged sitting can negatively impact your health
The last reason a standing desk might benefit your health? Well, because the alternative can actually be bad for it. Research shows that sitting more than eight hours a day can have a serious impact on a person's health.
In fact, prolonged sitting is a risk factor for a variety of chronic health conditions, including:
And if you think the only eight hours you sit are while you're at work...think again. You probably also sit during your commute, while you eat, while you watch TV and more.
So, it's important to make sure you're moving more and sitting less — whether this means alternating sitting and standing throughout the day at your new standing desk or taking frequent, short breaks to get up and move around.
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By signing up, you will receive our newsletter with articles, videos, health tips and more. | But, a word of caution: You can have bad spine alignment while standing, too — whether that's because you're not establishing correct standing posture, you're not engaging your muscles properly or you're making one or more common work desk mistakes.
Unfortunately, a standing desk won't help you lose weight
In a perfect world, standing at your desk most of the day instead of sitting would result in some extra calorie burn.
The reality, however, is that standing burns only slightly more calories per hour than sitting — about 88 calories per hour vs. 80 calories per hour, one study shows. This small increase isn't likely to contribute to any weight loss or weight maintenance goals you may have.
What this study found instead is that replacing periods of sitting with walking caused more energy expenditure — about 130 more burned calories, in fact. (Wait a minute...should we be investing in treadmill desks instead of standing desks??) The exact calories burned per hour while walking varies depending on your weight and your pace, but walking can generally aid in weight loss for some people — especially when combined with efforts to eat healthy diet.
But even though standing doesn't really burn more calories than sitting, know that sitting too much can, over time, impact your health — even if you're getting plenty of exercise.
A sedentary lifestyle (aka, sitting too much) increases a person's risk of developing type 2 diabetes by more than 90%. One theory as to why is that sitting makes it harder for your body to absorb sugar in your bloodstream, resulting in increased blood sugar levels. Over time, blood sugar spikes can contribute to insulin resistance (aka, type 2 diabetes).
Admittedly, the evidence isn't overwhelming, but one study found that alternating sitting and standing throughout an eight-hour workday has modest but beneficial effects on how blood sugar is regulated after a meal. This suggests that investing in a standing desk (and actually standing at it) may potentially help reduce your risk of developing diabetes.
Plus, | no |
Ergonomics | Can using a standing desk help you lose weight? | yes_statement | using a "standing" "desk" can "help" you "lose" "weight".. "standing" while working at a "desk" can aid in "weight" loss. | https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/well/move/stand-more-lounge-less-dont-do-it-to-lose-weight.html | Stand More, Lounge Less? Don't Do It to Lose Weight - The New ... | Stand More, Lounge Less? Don’t Do It to Lose Weight
For those of us who have resolved to stand more and sit less in the coming year, a new study might temper some of our expectations of the benefits.
It finds that people burn more calories when they stand than when sitting or lying down, but the increase is smaller than many of us might hope. For those of us who overindulged and slacked off on our exercise regimens over the holidays, it also means that being upright is unlikely to help us lose weight.
But it does not mean we should take this news lying or sitting down, the study’s authors caution, because frequent standing is likely to have other, substantial health impacts.
By now, almost everyone has heard about, dabbled with or rolled their eyes at the phenomenon of standing desks. Many of us also wear fitness trackers that nag us every hour or so to get up and move.
Science generally supports this rising interest in not sitting. Studies in animals and people show that long hours of stillness change the body’s physiology in multiple unhealthy ways, including reducing blood flow to the legs and brain; worsening the health of blood vessels; and lowering the production of substances that help to control cholesterol and blood sugar.
In consequence, being sedentary can increase our risks for diabetes, heart disease and premature death.
Lots of sitting also is linked with heightened odds of obesity and, for many of us, it is this association that is most worrying and most likely to prompt us to stand.
And, again, past studies have been encouraging, with most indicating that we should expend hundreds of additional calories when we stand often rather than sit.
But many of these experiments have involved somewhat exaggerated behaviors, such as absolute stillness while people sat, with no wriggling or fidgeting, and walking about or performing chores during the upright portions.
Scientists at the University of Bath in England and Westmont College in California suspected that these methods wound up inflating the spread in energy expenditure between being sedentary and upright.
So for the new study, which was published in November in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, they decided to ask people to sit and stand more naturally and to closely monitor how many calories they burned in the process. They began by recruiting 46 men and women whose weight was normal. Ten were Californians; the rest British. The researchers asked these volunteers about their health and exercise habits and then determined their average daily energy expenditure by fitting them with masks that measured their metabolic rate.
They then had each of the volunteers lie down, sit or stand for 20 minutes at a time, on separate lab visits, while wearing the masks. To stave off boredom, the volunteers watched a soothing BBC nature documentary during each session.
They also were allowed to bounce, wiggle, bobble or otherwise fidget as much or little as they wished during the sessions. They were asked, though, to remain in place while upright, as someone would if working at a standing desk.
Then the researchers compared the number of calories they had burned in each posture.
The differences were noticeable. But they also were small. As a group, the volunteers burned about 3 percent more calories when sitting compared to lying down and about 12 percent more standing compared to sitting.
In more practical terms, the researchers estimate that, based on their metabolic findings, most people could expect to burn about 9 additional calories if they stood for an hour instead of sitting and, if they doubled that standing time to two hours a day, would burn about 130 extra calories over the course of a week.
Realistically, those totals “would not result in sufficient energy deficit to drive a worthwhile rate of weight loss,” says James Betts, a professor of health research at the University of Bath, who led the study.
But there are caveats to that discouraging conclusion. Perhaps most interesting, some people burned more calories than others while seated and standing, because they fidgeted so much. Those people also tended to report exercising regularly.
It’s possible, Dr. Betts says, that “people who are physically fitter and more active may have a greater propensity to fidget.”
It’s also possible that people who do not naturally fidget might slightly ramp up their energy expenditure during sitting and standing if they wriggle, jounce and ignore remonstrations from their spouses and co-workers to just stay still.
More important, Dr. Betts says, “while standing does not represent an effective weight-loss strategy,” it might help some people to avoid adding weight. That’s because even small energy surpluses — consuming a few more calories each day than you expend — can contribute to long-term weight gain and obesity.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section D, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Maybe Take This News Lying Down. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe | Stand More, Lounge Less? Don’t Do It to Lose Weight
For those of us who have resolved to stand more and sit less in the coming year, a new study might temper some of our expectations of the benefits.
It finds that people burn more calories when they stand than when sitting or lying down, but the increase is smaller than many of us might hope. For those of us who overindulged and slacked off on our exercise regimens over the holidays, it also means that being upright is unlikely to help us lose weight.
But it does not mean we should take this news lying or sitting down, the study’s authors caution, because frequent standing is likely to have other, substantial health impacts.
By now, almost everyone has heard about, dabbled with or rolled their eyes at the phenomenon of standing desks. Many of us also wear fitness trackers that nag us every hour or so to get up and move.
Science generally supports this rising interest in not sitting. Studies in animals and people show that long hours of stillness change the body’s physiology in multiple unhealthy ways, including reducing blood flow to the legs and brain; worsening the health of blood vessels; and lowering the production of substances that help to control cholesterol and blood sugar.
In consequence, being sedentary can increase our risks for diabetes, heart disease and premature death.
Lots of sitting also is linked with heightened odds of obesity and, for many of us, it is this association that is most worrying and most likely to prompt us to stand.
And, again, past studies have been encouraging, with most indicating that we should expend hundreds of additional calories when we stand often rather than sit.
But many of these experiments have involved somewhat exaggerated behaviors, such as absolute stillness while people sat, with no wriggling or fidgeting, and walking about or performing chores during the upright portions.
Scientists at the University of Bath in England and Westmont College in California suspected that these methods wound up inflating the spread in energy expenditure between being sedentary and upright.
| no |
Ergonomics | Can using a standing desk help you lose weight? | no_statement | using a "standing" "desk" does not contribute to "weight" loss.. "standing" instead of sitting at a "desk" does not "help" with "losing" "weight". | https://abcnews.go.com/Health/health-benefit-standing-desks-proven-medical-review-shows/story?id=37702143 | Health Benefit of Standing Desks Not Proven, Medical Review ... | Health Benefit of Standing Desks Not Proven, Medical Review Shows
Evidence of health damage from sitting has been growing in recent years.
ByGILLIAN MOHNEY
March 16, 2016, 8:02 PM
4:16
Here are some tips to stay healthy in the office.
Getty Images
— -- The dangers of sitting for long stretches of time have come into focus in recent years, with the sedentary act connected to increased risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. More and more people have been looking at ways of combating "sitting sickness," from using convertible standing desks in the office to having standing meetings.
But a new study says that despite the evidence that too much sitting is linked to these health risks, the health benefits of standing desks and other strategies to promote standing are not proven.
The medical review, published today in the Cochrane Library, looked at 20 studies that focused on various strategies to keep people on their feet rather than sitting all day. The studies had a total of 2,174 participants in the U.S., U.K. and Europe.
In the six studies for standing desks, researchers found that people did increase their time on their feet somewhat from 30 minutes to two hours, depending on the study. However, the small sample size meant researchers couldn't conclusively recommend standing desks. They did point out that other studies in which participants were encouraged to do more activities such as a take a walk during a break only had a modest decrease in time spent sitting.
"This Cochrane Review shows that, at the moment, there is uncertainty over how big an impact sit-stand desks can make on reducing the time spent sitting at work in the short term," Nipun Shrestha from the Health Research and Social Development Forum, Thapathali, Nepal, said in a statement today. "Given the popularity of sit-stand desks in particular, we think that people who are considering investing in sit-stand desks and the other interventions covered in this review should be aware of the limitations of the current evidence base in demonstrating health benefits."
Shrestha stressed the need for additional research to prove that these popular standing desks are helpful to a variety of people. Co-author Jos Verbeek said it was not yet clear from these studies that simply standing instead of sitting was a markedly healthier.
"At present, there is not enough high quality evidence available to determine whether spending more time standing at work can repair the harms of a sedentary lifestyle," Verbeek, from the Cochrane Work Review Group, Kuopio, Finland, said in a statement today.
"Standing instead of sitting hardly increases energy expenditure, so we should not expect a sit-stand desk to help in losing weight. It's important that workers and employers are aware of this, so that they can make more informed decisions," Verbeek said.
As previous studies have shown the dangers of sitting more clearly, it will take time to see how different incentives to be active are helpful, experts said.
Dr. Alice Chen, a physiatrist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, said that more study is needed but that it is already clear that being more active than sedentary can help people maintain their health. She pointed out that people may need more information about how to ease into using standing desks so they can last more than 30 minutes at a time and that future studies may find more proof of the health benefits of standing versus sitting.
"Just putting in sit-stand desks for everyone doesn’t mean that people who sit for eight hours are going to stand for hours," she said. "I think the take-home point is more in terms how can we effectively communicate to the working public the benefits and adverse effects of sitting."
She also pointed out standing forces people to use and strengthen the muscles that help with posture.
Dr. Melanie Swift, director of the Occupational Health Clinic at Vanderbilt Medical Center, said with more study, experts will better understand if standing desks are a better choice than other initiatives, such as moving printers across the office or having walking meetings.
"It’s not clear that the cost of ... standing desks is going to have enough impact on public health to be a wise investment on a large scale," she explained.
She did say that sitting for long periods of time is clearly bad for your health.
"Try not to sit more than 30 minutes at a time, standing up when you get a phone call. ... It can be an opportunity to stand than to sit at the desk," Swift said. "We probably don’t need to go to extremes but common sense simple interventions, they keep you safer." | Co-author Jos Verbeek said it was not yet clear from these studies that simply standing instead of sitting was a markedly healthier.
"At present, there is not enough high quality evidence available to determine whether spending more time standing at work can repair the harms of a sedentary lifestyle," Verbeek, from the Cochrane Work Review Group, Kuopio, Finland, said in a statement today.
"Standing instead of sitting hardly increases energy expenditure, so we should not expect a sit-stand desk to help in losing weight. It's important that workers and employers are aware of this, so that they can make more informed decisions," Verbeek said.
As previous studies have shown the dangers of sitting more clearly, it will take time to see how different incentives to be active are helpful, experts said.
Dr. Alice Chen, a physiatrist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, said that more study is needed but that it is already clear that being more active than sedentary can help people maintain their health. She pointed out that people may need more information about how to ease into using standing desks so they can last more than 30 minutes at a time and that future studies may find more proof of the health benefits of standing versus sitting.
"Just putting in sit-stand desks for everyone doesn’t mean that people who sit for eight hours are going to stand for hours," she said. "I think the take-home point is more in terms how can we effectively communicate to the working public the benefits and adverse effects of sitting. "
She also pointed out standing forces people to use and strengthen the muscles that help with posture.
Dr. Melanie Swift, director of the Occupational Health Clinic at Vanderbilt Medical Center, said with more study, experts will better understand if standing desks are a better choice than other initiatives, such as moving printers across the office or having walking meetings.
"It’s not clear that the cost of ... standing desks is going to have enough impact on public health to be a wise investment on a large scale," she explained.
She did say that sitting for long periods of time is clearly bad for your health.
| no |
Veganism | Can vegans eat Oysters? | yes_statement | "vegans" can "eat" "oysters".. "oysters" are permissible for "vegans". | https://www.10best.com/interests/food-culture/why-vegans-eat-oysters/ | Oysters are okay to eat for some vegans – here's why | Oysters are okay to eat for some vegans – here's why
Animal protein isn’t quite as disqualifying as you might think when it comes to veganism. While the general consensus is that good and proper vegans should subsist entirely on a diet of plant-based foods, there are some outliers to this.
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For example, honey is frequently excluded from lists of banned foods, owing to the fact that it is initially floral in origin, if by way of a little bee ingestion and regurgitation. And a growing number of vegans carve out a head-scratching exception to another type of food entirely: oysters.
How can a person committed to not eating animal products justify the consumption of oysters? Well, it all boils down to some long forgotten sixth grade science class lessons. Though oysters definitely fall somewhere within the animal kingdom (in the superfamily Ostreoidea, to be exact), some argue that they are more akin to plants.
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Oysters on the half shell — Photo courtesy of iStock / Larry Zhou
Consider the sessile (immobile) nature of the oyster, for starters. And then there’s the fact that oysters lack a central nervous system, casting their ability to think and feel – at least in a manner that humans can make sense of – into doubt.
Even the famed ethicist Peter Singer has written in "Animal Liberation" that "One cannot with any confidence say that these creatures do feel pain, so one can equally have little confidence in saying that they do not feel pain." Oyster-eating vegans once again suggest that this makes the animals more plant-like than we otherwise assume.
While oysters might not have brains in the vertebrate sense, they do possess some comparable organs to humans. Chief among these are an oyster’s heart and its kidneys. Beyond that, things get questionable though, with ganglia and nerve cords rounding out the animal’s main organs. You can see how a vegan on the verge of pescetarianism might be inclined to see more differences than similarities when they look at an oyster.
There are some surprising environmental justifications for oyster consumption as well. Some 95% of the oysters that make their way onto those round beds of ice in restaurants the world over are farm-raised.
And unlike the farms that spring up atop newly deforested land, or even the gigantic dairy farms that contribute enormous amounts of methane into the atmosphere, oyster farms are distinctly beneficial in nature. That’s because oysters are essentially living water purifiers.
A single oyster is able to filter five liters of water each hour. And it takes just an acre of underwater land to raise 750,000 of the little guys at a time.
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Entire non-profit organizations are even dedicated to the creation of additional oyster farms as a means of preserving acceptable water quality for other marine life to continue thriving under the increasing encroachment of the human world into the wild. No waterway-polluting fertilizer is used in oyster farms, and no land must be cleared to make space for them to grow.
In this way, the cultivation of oysters, fueled by commerce for the sake of eating them, is a net positive for the environment, if not the individual oysters themselves. Other bivalves – like clams, scallops and mussels – require the disruptive dredging of the sea floor in order to collect them.
Fresh oysters — Photo courtesy of iStock / UliU
The last major justification for dining upon oysters is that they are actually quite safe to consume. Because oysters are most frequently eaten raw, The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has published detailed instructions on oyster depuration that are widely followed wherever oysters are farmed.
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What is depuration, you ask? The removal of fecal matter from within the animal’s shell by way of a two-to-three day filtration process in vats of purified water. This ensures that oysters, unlike most animals that humans consume, are generally as close to sterile as you can get before they ever touch our tongues.
Still, not every critic is convinced that oysters are an appropriate fit for consumption, let alone by vegans. It wasn’t all that long ago that the great thinkers of the day argued that other mammals couldn’t feel pain in the way that humans do, or experience emotions. We now know that to be false.
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And even more recently, the same argument was made about amphibians and fish. And once more, in both cases, we’ve since learned that not to be true. So should oysters be eschewed by vegans? Only time and science will tell. | Oysters are okay to eat for some vegans – here's why
Animal protein isn’t quite as disqualifying as you might think when it comes to veganism. While the general consensus is that good and proper vegans should subsist entirely on a diet of plant-based foods, there are some outliers to this.
Advertisement
For example, honey is frequently excluded from lists of banned foods, owing to the fact that it is initially floral in origin, if by way of a little bee ingestion and regurgitation. And a growing number of vegans carve out a head-scratching exception to another type of food entirely: oysters.
How can a person committed to not eating animal products justify the consumption of oysters? Well, it all boils down to some long forgotten sixth grade science class lessons. Though oysters definitely fall somewhere within the animal kingdom (in the superfamily Ostreoidea, to be exact), some argue that they are more akin to plants.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Oysters on the half shell — Photo courtesy of iStock / Larry Zhou
Consider the sessile (immobile) nature of the oyster, for starters. And then there’s the fact that oysters lack a central nervous system, casting their ability to think and feel – at least in a manner that humans can make sense of – into doubt.
Even the famed ethicist Peter Singer has written in "Animal Liberation" that "One cannot with any confidence say that these creatures do feel pain, so one can equally have little confidence in saying that they do not feel pain." Oyster-eating vegans once again suggest that this makes the animals more plant-like than we otherwise assume.
While oysters might not have brains in the vertebrate sense, they do possess some comparable organs to humans. Chief among these are an oyster’s heart and its kidneys. Beyond that, things get questionable though, with ganglia and nerve cords rounding out the animal’s main organs. | yes |
Veganism | Can vegans eat Oysters? | yes_statement | "vegans" can "eat" "oysters".. "oysters" are permissible for "vegans". | https://plantbasednews.org/culture/ethics/are-oysters-vegan/ | Are Oysters Vegan? The Debate Explained | Should vegans eat oysters? And do they really not have a brain? Here’s everything you need to know
Whether oysters are sentient animals who feel pain is often subject to debate. At first glance, the answer to whether or not they are vegan would seem to be a simple “no.” However, a number of people in the plant-based community believe that they’re acceptable to eat.
One of these is Peter Singer, the author of the 1975 book Animal Liberation. The book, which is often credited as being key in kick-starting the animal rights movement, is being reissued next month. Singer was recently quoted in an interview as saying: “I think it’s unlikely that oysters feel pain. And even if you think they do, then because of the way they’re grown and harvested it might well be that you’re not responsible for more pain than if you eat plants. Because after all plants also have to be grown and often rodents are killed while plowing or harvesting.”
He added that we can’t be “100 percent sure,” but expressed his belief that eating oysters is “as pure as most foods we can get.”
Singer isn’t alone. His view is shared by many others who consider themselves vegan. Another is chef Alexis Gauthier, who has led kitchens at Michelin-starred restaurants, and went vegan on ethical grounds in 2016. “For me, a vegan diet is fundamentally about compassion,” he previously said, before adding that oysters are non-sentient beings and therefore acceptable to eat.
The question of oyster sentience is often put forward to vegans. Here’s everything you need to know about how to respond.
What are oysters?
Adobe Stock Oyster farming is big business in a number of countries across the world
“Oyster” is the name given to a number of invertebrate bivalve molluscs. They naturally live in the ocean, but are often raised on farms. Oyster farms are usually located in natural or human-made bodies of water. Oyster farming is considered by many to be sustainable, due largely to the fact that the animals filter the water while feeding. They are also capable of extracting carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in their shells.
Oysters are eaten all over the world. They are a hugely popular “seafood,” and can be eaten both raw and cooked. In 2022, the oyster market reached 7.11 million tons worldwide. They are often considered an aphrodisiac, and are commonly served still in their shell.
China is the world’s largest producer of oysters, and they are also popular in the US, France, Canada, Japan, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and the UK.
Are oysters vegan?
In short, the answer is no. Oysters are animals, and eating them is therefore not considered compatible with a vegan lifestyle. Yet many vegans are asked whether they consume them. At first glance this question can seem strange; oysters have long been part of the animal kingdom, why would anyone think they’re a reasonable part of a plant-based diet?
Part of this comes down to their experiences with pain and sentience.
Do oysters feel pain?
Adobe Stock Many people believe that oysters are incapable of feeling pain
Some people claim that oysters are vegan-friendly due to a belief that they are not sentient creatures capable of feeling pain.
Pain is a subjective experience and impossible to measure in any animal. However, most people will class an animal as capable of pain if they have a central nervous system and brain. Oysters have neither of these, which has led many to assume that they are not capable of such emotions. While it may be less likely they feel pain compared to animals like dogs, cats, fish, and insects, there is no scientific evidence that proves it.
Oysters do have a basic nervous system and a small heart and internal organs. Some scientists believe that, while they may not experience pain in the same way as us, they could still respond to negative stimuli. This may indicate that they are capable of something at least resembling pain. Other scientists state, however, that such responses are reflex, rather than pain-driven.
Should vegans eat oysters?
Adobe Stock Are oysters really an ethical choice?
We don’t know if oysters feel pain, but that doesn’t mean vegans should eat them. Humans have, over the years, wrongly believed that many animals aren’t sentient, only to later discover through scientific developments that they are.
Just because a being has a different physiological make-up to us, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are incapable of feelings that are similar or equivalent to those experienced by humankind.
Oysters are not an essential component of our diets. But luckily for “seafood” fans, there are plant-based alternatives.
Vegan alternatives to oysters
The vegan “seafood” market is growing, and it’s likely that we’ll see a number of plant-based “oysters” popping up in restaurants and supermarkets in the coming years.
One company, named Pearlita Foods, last year created a prototype of a cell-based oyster, which came in a biodegradable shell.
Vegan oyster sauce
One ingredient that many vegans may miss is oyster sauce, which is hugely popular in a number of Asian cuisines. The savory condiment is created by simmering oysters in water, and it’s often used in stir fries.
Thankfully, there are many vegan alternatives you can use. Cupboard-friendly options are soy sauce, hoisin sauce, mushroom sauce, teriyaki sauce, and tamari sauce. Some retailers also stock vegan oyster flavor sauces, which contain only plant-based ingredients.
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Oysters are eaten all over the world. They are a hugely popular “seafood,” and can be eaten both raw and cooked. In 2022, the oyster market reached 7.11 million tons worldwide. They are often considered an aphrodisiac, and are commonly served still in their shell.
China is the world’s largest producer of oysters, and they are also popular in the US, France, Canada, Japan, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and the UK.
Are oysters vegan?
In short, the answer is no. Oysters are animals, and eating them is therefore not considered compatible with a vegan lifestyle. Yet many vegans are asked whether they consume them. At first glance this question can seem strange; oysters have long been part of the animal kingdom, why would anyone think they’re a reasonable part of a plant-based diet?
Part of this comes down to their experiences with pain and sentience.
Do oysters feel pain?
Adobe Stock Many people believe that oysters are incapable of feeling pain
Some people claim that oysters are vegan-friendly due to a belief that they are not sentient creatures capable of feeling pain.
Pain is a subjective experience and impossible to measure in any animal. However, most people will class an animal as capable of pain if they have a central nervous system and brain. Oysters have neither of these, which has led many to assume that they are not capable of such emotions. While it may be less likely they feel pain compared to animals like dogs, cats, fish, and insects, there is no scientific evidence that proves it.
Oysters do have a basic nervous system and a small heart and internal organs. Some scientists believe that, while they may not experience pain in the same way as us, they could still respond to negative stimuli. This may indicate that they are capable of something at least resembling pain. Other scientists state, however, that such responses are reflex, rather than pain-driven.
Should vegans eat oysters?
Adobe Stock Are oysters really an ethical choice? | no |
Veganism | Can vegans eat Oysters? | yes_statement | "vegans" can "eat" "oysters".. "oysters" are permissible for "vegans". | https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/07/03/why-its-ok-for-vegans-to-eat-oysters-rich-barlow | The Case For Eating Oysters — Even If You're A Vegan | Cognoscenti | Support
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Commentary
The Case For Eating Oysters — Even If You're A Vegan
As a vegetarian, I pass on summer delicacies I enjoyed as a child. Burgers and hot dogs off the grill? Not on my Fourth of July menu. Chicken? Only if it’s made of soy. Freshly caught bluefish or salmon? Mouth-watering but verboten.
Of course, from juicy tomatoes to corn on the cob, I savor summer’s vegetable bounty with everyone else. And there’s another summer staple I eat without guilt: oysters.
What’s more, even vegans, whose diets forbid animals and animal products like cheese and honey (both of which I permit myself), should feel free to savor oysters “by the boatload.” That goes for mussels, too.
Technically, vegans who eat these simple shellfish are “ostrovegans.” Guzzling them isn’t culinary sacrilege, if your goal is to avoid inflicting suffering on animals — not just slaughter but also the fear and discomfort of industrial husbandry’s inhumane confinement. The belief that oysters and mussels can feel pain and discomfort is as rooted in science as the nostrum that you shouldn’t eat the former in months with an “r” in their names.
Biology suggests that both bivalves are the functional equivalent of plants, without the capacity for pain. They lack what would be considered a central nervous system and brain. Nor can they move on their own. Evolutionists point out that motion and a nervous system are nature’s tools for sensing and moving away from painful stimuli.
Of course, we can’t be 100 percent sure they don’t feel pain in some way we don’t understand. But as a Slate writer noted, the same is true of plants. And humans must eat something.
Vegan philosopher Peter Singer, founding guru of the animal welfare movement in the 1970s, initially endorsed eating oysters in his groundbreaking book "Animal Liberation." He later retracted that endorsement, on the grounds that the science of their freedom-from-pain is not a lead-pipe cinch.
But he doesn’t extend the same benefit of the doubt to insects. When that Slate writer pressed Singer, he admirably declined to take a hard-and-fast, one-size-fits-all-eaters approach to oysters.
It’s worth remembering that no diet, even vegan, avoids killing animals: Harvesting plants leads to deaths of small mammals from machinery and pesticides.
Some meat shunners, of course, have motives beyond humanity for their diets — their health or that of the planet. But there, too, oysters and mussels don’t violate any code.
The vast majority of oysters we eat are farmed, with negligible environmental harm, including little concern that we’ll overfish them. Health? Oysters have numerous nutrients and are among the government’s recommended fish for children and pregnant women trying to avoid mercury.
Mussels, too, are loaded with nutrition and are low in mercury. Sustainability is more of an issue with them, however, as they often are dredged from sea beds, a process that can damage the ecosystem. But shellfish dredging’s harm can be brief and mitigated, and, for eco-conscious eaters, mussels also can be grown on ropes in tanks.
In the end, Singer’s flexibility is wise. It’s a free country, full of people with different levels of risk aversion to uncertainty and different ethical lodestars. We each must choose our own diet. But you needn’t be shamed when hard-core vegans finger-wag over that plate of oysters you enjoy at your summer barbeque.
Perhaps someday we’ll be past this discussion. The late conservative (and meat-eating) columnist Charles Krauthammer forecast a future in which meat-eating and the animal cruelty it entails would seem as retrograde as slavery does to us.
Technology advances, he wrote, probably will produces veggie meat as succulent as the real thing. When meat-making capitalists put their dollars behind veggie burgers (Tyson Foods is but one), that future may be closer than even Krauthammer predicted.
And if they can make fake steer that tastes like the real thing, can fake oysters be far behind?
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It’s Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative emailThank you! You have been subscribed to WBUR Today.We were unable to subscribe you to WBUR Today. You can try subscribing here or try again later. | Support
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Commentary
The Case For Eating Oysters — Even If You're A Vegan
As a vegetarian, I pass on summer delicacies I enjoyed as a child. Burgers and hot dogs off the grill? Not on my Fourth of July menu. Chicken? Only if it’s made of soy. Freshly caught bluefish or salmon? Mouth-watering but verboten.
Of course, from juicy tomatoes to corn on the cob, I savor summer’s vegetable bounty with everyone else. And there’s another summer staple I eat without guilt: oysters.
What’s more, even vegans, whose diets forbid animals and animal products like cheese and honey (both of which I permit myself), should feel free to savor oysters “by the boatload.” That goes for mussels, too.
Technically, vegans who eat these simple shellfish are “ostrovegans.” Guzzling them isn’t culinary sacrilege, if your goal is to avoid inflicting suffering on animals — not just slaughter but also the fear and discomfort of industrial husbandry’s inhumane confinement. The belief that oysters and mussels can feel pain and discomfort is as rooted in science as the nostrum that you shouldn’t eat the former in months with an “r” in their names.
Biology suggests that both bivalves are the functional equivalent of plants, without the capacity for pain. They lack what would be considered a central nervous system and brain. Nor can they move on their own. Evolutionists point out that motion and a nervous system are nature’s tools for sensing and moving away from painful stimuli.
Of course, we can’t be 100 percent sure they don’t feel pain in some way we don’t understand. But as a Slate writer noted, the same is true of plants. And humans must eat something.
| yes |
Veganism | Can vegans eat Oysters? | yes_statement | "vegans" can "eat" "oysters".. "oysters" are permissible for "vegans". | https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vegans-shouldnt-eat-oyste_b_605786 | Vegans Shouldn't Eat Oysters, and If You Do You're Not Vegan, So ... | Vegans Shouldn't Eat Oysters, and If You Do You're Not Vegan, So...
Professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder; homepage: marcbekoff.com
Professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder; homepage: marcbekoff.com
Jun 10, 2010, 06:36 PM EDT
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Should vegans eat oysters? Should vegans eat any animals or animal products? No. However, Christopher Cox disagrees and tries to argue that even strict vegans should feel comfortable eating oysters by the boatload. Humans have come up with various terms to reflect their choices of who, not what, we choose to put in our mouth. And one thing is clear - the term "vegan" means no animals or animal products wind up there. So, if you choose to eat oysters, you're not a vegan, and we can close up shop and move on to other matters, because this isn't really a valid question. This isn't to be arrogant, some sort of idealistic zealot, or judgmental. Words need to mean something, so if you eat oysters you're not a vegetarian either. The last time I looked, oysters were animals not plants or byproducts.
Many people choose their diet based on ethical principles. Sentience, the capacity to feel pain and suffer, frequently is the main reason people "go vegetarian or vegan." In his essay, Cox writes, "Moreover, since oysters don't have a central nervous system, they're unlikely to experience pain in a way resembling ours--unlike a pig or a herring or even a lobster." However, we don't know this is so. And, it's not important if oyster pain or the pain felt by any other animal resembles ours. They have their own pain and their pain matters to them. People also vary in their pain thresholds and it would be wrong to conclude that someone doesn't feel pain because they don't express it in the usual way.
There are a number of issues that need to be considered in who we eat. Should pain be the hook on which we hang our decision to eat another animal? Should we simply not eat other animals because they exist - because they're alive - and we really don't need to eat them anyway? Factory farming without suffering isn't acceptable either.
We should give animals the benefit of the doubt. Cox sort of agrees, but not really, because he believes it's improbable that oysters feel pain so even vegans should go ahead and let some slide down their throat. I disagree, and if you're vegan you wouldn't eat oysters anyway. As with many ethical decisions, we can easily find ourselves on a slippery slope that conveniently expands the range of animals we eat because we don't know for sure they feel pain. The argument that we really don't know something is a bit too facile for my liking.
We need to be serious about our food choices and ask that our critics, even "the converted," also be serious about their tongue-in-cheek criticisms. We can easily reduce suffering and increase our "compassion footprint" by choosing a vegan diet. Each of us is responsible for the decisions we make. Vegans don't have to defend or apologize for our humane and ethical choices. If in the future we learn that some plants are sentient, we will have to change our ways. Right now I'm happy to be a vegan, and don't feel guilty for eating a non-protesting brussels sprout -- but no oysters for me. | Vegans Shouldn't Eat Oysters, and If You Do You're Not Vegan, So...
Professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder; homepage: marcbekoff.com
Professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder; homepage: marcbekoff.com
Jun 10, 2010, 06:36 PM EDT
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
Should vegans eat oysters? Should vegans eat any animals or animal products? No. However, Christopher Cox disagrees and tries to argue that even strict vegans should feel comfortable eating oysters by the boatload. Humans have come up with various terms to reflect their choices of who, not what, we choose to put in our mouth. And one thing is clear - the term "vegan" means no animals or animal products wind up there. So, if you choose to eat oysters, you're not a vegan, and we can close up shop and move on to other matters, because this isn't really a valid question. This isn't to be arrogant, some sort of idealistic zealot, or judgmental. Words need to mean something, so if you eat oysters you're not a vegetarian either. The last time I looked, oysters were animals not plants or byproducts.
Many people choose their diet based on ethical principles. Sentience, the capacity to feel pain and suffer, frequently is the main reason people "go vegetarian or vegan." In his essay, Cox writes, "Moreover, since oysters don't have a central nervous system, they're unlikely to experience pain in a way resembling ours--unlike a pig or a herring or even a lobster." However, we don't know this is so. And, it's not important if oyster pain or the pain felt by any other animal resembles ours. | no |
Veganism | Can vegans eat Oysters? | yes_statement | "vegans" can "eat" "oysters".. "oysters" are permissible for "vegans". | https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201006/vegans-and-oysters-if-you-eat-oysters-youre-not-vegan-so-why-the | Vegans and Oysters: If You Eat Oysters You're Not a Vegan So Why ... | Vegans and Oysters: If You Eat Oysters You're Not a Vegan So Why the Question?
Oysters are animals - if you eat them you're not vegan
Should vegans eat oysters? Should vegans eat any animals or animal products? No. However, Christopher Cox disagrees and tries to argue that even strict vegans should feel comfortable eating oysters by the boatload. Humans have come up with various terms to reflect their choices of who, not what, we choose to put in our mouth. And one thing is clear - the term "vegan" means no animals or animal products wind up there. So, if you choose to eat oysters, you're not a vegan, and we can close up shop and move on to other matters, because this isn't really a valid question. This isn't to be arrogant, some sort of idealistic zealot, or judgmental. Words need to mean something, so if you eat oysters you're not a vegetarian either. The last time I looked, oysters were animals, not plants or byproducts.
Many people choose their diet based on ethical principles. Sentience, the capacity to feel pain and suffer, frequently is the main reason people "go vegetarian or vegan." In his essay, Cox writes, "Moreover, since oysters don't have a central nervous system, they're unlikely to experience pain in a way resembling ours--unlike a pig or a herring or even a lobster." However, we don't know this is so. And, it's not important if oyster pain or the pain felt by any other animal resembles ours. They have their own pain and their pain matters to them. People also vary in their pain thresholds and it would be wrong to conclude that someone doesn't feel pain because they don't express it in the usual way.
There are a number of issues that need to be considered in who we eat. Should pain be the hook on which we hang our decision to eat another animal? Should we simply not eat other animals because they exist - because they're alive - and we really don't need to eat them anyway? Factory farming without suffering isn't acceptable either.
We should give animals the benefit of the doubt. Cox sort of agrees, but not really, because he believes it's improbable that oysters feel pain so even vegans should go ahead and let some slide down their throat. I disagree, and if you're vegan you wouldn't eat oysters anyway. As with many ethical decisions, we can easily find ourselves on a slippery slope that conveniently expands the range of animals we eat because we don't know for sure they feel pain. The argument that we really don't know something is a bit too facile for my liking.
We need to be serious about our food choices and ask that our critics, even "the converted," also be serious about their tongue-in-cheek criticisms. We can easily reduce suffering and increase our "compassion footprint" by choosing a vegan diet. Each of us is responsible for the decisions we make. Vegans don't have to defend or apologize for our humane and ethical choices. If in the future we learn that some plants are sentient, we will have to change our ways. Right now I'm happy to be a vegan, and don't feel guilty for eating a non-protesting brussels sprout -- but no oysters for me. | Vegans and Oysters: If You Eat Oysters You're Not a Vegan So Why the Question?
Oysters are animals - if you eat them you're not vegan
Should vegans eat oysters? Should vegans eat any animals or animal products? No. However, Christopher Cox disagrees and tries to argue that even strict vegans should feel comfortable eating oysters by the boatload. Humans have come up with various terms to reflect their choices of who, not what, we choose to put in our mouth. And one thing is clear - the term "vegan" means no animals or animal products wind up there. So, if you choose to eat oysters, you're not a vegan, and we can close up shop and move on to other matters, because this isn't really a valid question. This isn't to be arrogant, some sort of idealistic zealot, or judgmental. Words need to mean something, so if you eat oysters you're not a vegetarian either. The last time I looked, oysters were animals, not plants or byproducts.
Many people choose their diet based on ethical principles. Sentience, the capacity to feel pain and suffer, frequently is the main reason people "go vegetarian or vegan." In his essay, Cox writes, "Moreover, since oysters don't have a central nervous system, they're unlikely to experience pain in a way resembling ours--unlike a pig or a herring or even a lobster." However, we don't know this is so. And, it's not important if oyster pain or the pain felt by any other animal resembles ours. They have their own pain and their pain matters to them. People also vary in their pain thresholds and it would be wrong to conclude that someone doesn't feel pain because they don't express it in the usual way.
There are a number of issues that need to be considered in who we eat. Should pain be the hook on which we hang our decision to eat another animal? Should we simply not eat other animals because they exist - because they're alive - and we really don't need to eat them anyway? Factory farming without suffering isn't acceptable either.
| no |
Veganism | Can vegans eat Oysters? | yes_statement | "vegans" can "eat" "oysters".. "oysters" are permissible for "vegans". | https://medium.com/@jd.feliz/the-case-for-vegans-eating-oysters-mussels-other-invertebrates-961747367305 | The Case for Vegans Eating Oysters, Mussels, & Other Invertebrates ... | The Case for Vegans Eating Oysters, Mussels, & Other Invertebrates?
Between 900 to 1500 people read my writing weekly, a $1 donation per reader for my labor would help me to pay bills.
If you’ve reached this article, then you are well acquainted with the definition of veganism, which is a stance against the purposeful exploitation of animal species as is practical. It’s troubling to find numerous members in the vegan community supporting the exploitation of animal species based on articles unsupported by a single shred of evidence. More alarming is how these articles try to establish oysters, mussels, and even other animals in the vegan community as being akin to plants, rocks, and as one stated, “a disembodied finger.”
Modern molecular and taxonomic advances have led scientists to base classification of living beings in very specific ways. I won’t further delve into the subject, but I will say that oysters and other animal species are not comparable to plants. The plant and animal kingdom are separate for good reason regardless of what supporters of bivalve eating in the vegan community will have you believe. One of the most important differences is that plants do not have a nervous system while bivalves do.
The same bivalve eating individuals claim that mussels and oysters are not sentient because they do not have “brains,” and while it is true that mussels and oyster do not have a brain in the sense that you or I do, they do have ganglia. Ganglia, in simple terms, is basically their form of a brain — how they get their systems to function and respond when they need to. Yes, invertebrates have much simpler nervous systems than vertebrates, but they still have nervous systems. How developed their nervous system depends on the species. More importantly, their form of a nervous system allows them to respond to their living conditions and survive in them.
“Most, if not all, invertebrates have the capacity to detect and respond to noxious or aversive stimuli. That is, like vertebrates, they are capable of ‘nociception” (Smith 1991). Responses to negative stimuli, such as pain, which is very subjective depending on the individual, can indicate that something more than a simple nociceptive reflex is involved. Together, they may help the animal to recover from damage caused by the painful event and avoid being harmed in the future” (Smith 1991). While invertebrates probably do not feel pain in the same way humans do, Smith stated that, the issue isn’t closed. He further stated that, “Mather (1989) suggests, we should simply accept that these animals ‘are different from us, and wait for more data.’
It would be unreasonable to apply the same guidelines of pain that we apply to ourselves and other vertebrates to species that are completely different to us. Smith (1991) warned that, “pain might incorrectly be denied in certain invertebrates simply because they are so different from us and because we cannot imagine pain experienced in anything other than the vertebrate or, specifically, human sense.”
Unfortunately, “reports are notably lacking in sessile molluscs, primarily due to the difficulty of quantification of behaviours that occur in these generally small animals whose behaviour is characterized by minimal movement carried out over comparatively long time periods. Such movement may, however, be critical in survival and its quantification may provide insights into strategies and environmental conditions of consequence for this important animal group (Robson, Wilson, and Garcia de Leaniz 2007).”
Supporters of vegan bivalve eating claim mussels and oysters cannot respond to stimuli simply because their reaction to it doesn’t stem from a central nervous system while ignoring the fact that they do have a nervous system. However, if mussels and other bivalves are but barely living filtering rocks without the ability to respond to, well, anything, why do mussels, for example, have a need to detect and respond to predators, or even respond to stress at all?
As you may have noticed, I’ve taken most of my text from scientific literature. I am doing this on purpose to demonstrate that I am backing all my statements and thoughts on this subject with actual scientific evidence. To counter the misinformation being used to justify animal exploitation and to bring accurate science into the discussion, below, I attempt to set the science straight and provide examples that exemplify how those in support of eating these bivalves are erroneously advocating for unethical behavior in the vegan community. I also do not try to make the case (or not) for sentience because it just doesn’t make sense. You’ll see what I mean.
Mussels
“Scientifically accepted definitions of pain and nociception neatly distinguish these concepts (e.g., Merskey and Bogduk 1994), but drawing a line between the two can be difficult in practice. Furthermore, no experimental observation of nonverbal animals (nonhumans) can demonstrate conclusively whether a subject experiences conscious pain (Allen 2004). Suggestive evidence for painlike experiences in some animals is available, and nociceptive responses measured at the neural and behavioral levels in molluscs have provided evidence that is both consistent and inconsistent with painlike states and functions. Unfortunately, inferences drawn from the relatively small body of relevant data in molluscs are limited and prone to anthropocentrism. Identifying signs of pain becomes increasingly difficult as the behavior and associated neural structures and physiology diverge from familiar mammalian patterns of behavior, physiology, and anatomy, making interpretation of responses in molluscs particularly difficult.” This does not only refer to cephalopods though. This is a general statement inclusive of all mollusks.
Gartner & Litvaikis (2013) found that blue mussels “selectively alter byssal thread production and movement in the presence of injured conspecifics and potential predators.” In addition, Robson, Wilson, and Garcia de Leaniz (2007) found that “mussel response to predation is graded and complex and may well indicate animal-based assessments of the trade-off between effective feeding and the likelihood of predation.” Couldn’t this be considered a form of decision-making?
Opioid receptors have also been observed and studied in mussels (Aiello 1986; Cadet and Stefano 1999) AND to quote the biggest proponent of bivalve eating in the vegan community, the Sentientist herself, “Many animals have opiate receptors, indicating they are making painkillers and regulating pain within their own nervous system.”
Well, “investigations have shown that similar opiate systems may have a functional role in invertebrate nociception (Fiorito, 1986; Kavaliers, 1988). In addition, “Opiate binding sites, with properties similar to those of mammalian opiate receptors, have been shown to be present in the neural tissue of the marine mollusk Mytilus edulis (Kavaliers et al., 1985).” It should be noted that M. edulis is a species of mussel.
In summary, studies that show the opposite of what the bivalve eating supports claim exist. Mussels have responses to stimuli (Stephano 2002), including stress (Anestis et al. 2008), and as we have seen, may make decisions based on threats of predation ((Gartner & Litvaikis (2013); Robson, Wilson, and Garcia de Leaniz (2007)).
Oysters
Unlike plants, but like most other invertebrates, oysters do have nervous systems. How developed those systems are does not automatically reduce them to the level of plants. Because they have simple nervous systems does not mean that one can deduce that they are unable to respond to stimuli or have the inability to experience their own environment, particularly because we are incapable of truly understanding what pain and sentience are in other animals.
Carroll & Catapane (2007) stated that, “Bivalve molluscs [this includes oysters] have a relatively simple bilaterally symmetrical nervous system composed of paired cerebral, visceral and pedal ganglia, and several pairs of nerves. The cerebral ganglia (CG) are connected to the visceral ganglia (VG) by a paired cerebrovisceral connective and the VG innervate each gill via branchial nerves.”
Unfortunately, based on my review of the available data, there aren’t that many studies focused on oysters. And those that exist seem to have an interest in human application or farming. As of this date, I could not find a specific paper devoted to the examination of nociception in oysters per se. However, that is not conclusive proof that nociception does not exist in oysters.
Here’s why:
“The full length cDNA of a homologue of δ-opioid receptor (DOR) for [Met(5)]-enkaphalin was cloned from oyster Crassostrea gigas” by Liu et al (2015). These results, as outlined by Liu et al. (2015), “collectively suggested that CgDOR for [Met(5)]-enkephalin could modulate the haemocyte phagocytic and antibacterial functions through the second messengers Ca(2+) and cAMP, which might be requisite for pathogen elimination and homeostasis maintenance in oyster.” Varga et al. (2004) describe, “delta opioid receptor (DOR) agonists are attractive potential analgesics, since these compounds exhibit strong antinociceptive activity…” In addition, mu opioid receptors have been found in both blue mussels (Mantione et al. 2010) and oysters (Zhang 2012); these receptors are also antinociceptors. Opioid peptides have also been documented in oysters. Liu, Chen, & Xu’s (2008) described that, “The nervous and immune systems of invertebrates can exchange information through neuropeptides. Furthermore, some opioid peptides can function as endogenous immune system messengers and participate in the regulation of the immune responses.” Their study concluded that their “data strongly suggests an involvement of opioid peptides in the regulation of the antioxidant defence systems of the Pacific Oyster.” Endogenous opioid peptides have been described as inducing, “analgesia in humans and antinociception in animals. These peptides act in several regions of the CNS to mediate pain control, because antinociception is observed in animals whether endogenous opioid peptides are administered into the peripheral circulation; into spinal sites; or into various regions of the brain, such as the raphe nuclei, PAG region, or medial preoptic area. Many events or stimuli that are experienced as painful, stressful, or traumatic can induce the release of endogenous opioid peptides. These peptides then act to make humans and animals less sensitive to noxious events by inducing euphoria and analgesia or antinociception(Froehlich 1997).”
Why would oyters have any of these receptors or mechanism for antinociceptive activity? If they have antinociceptors, does that mean that they could have noticeptors as well? Regardless, it has been established above that opioid receptors have been found in oysters, and “opiate systems may have a functional role in invertebrate nociception” (Fiorito, 1986; Kavaliers, 1988). The following studies further show that oysters, although thought of as simplistic as plants by many, have nervous systems that are still complex and may use many of the same responses and regulations as other animal species. Harrison et al. (2008) found that their study confirmed and quantified, “histamine as an endogenous biogenic amine in C. virginica in the nervous system and innervated organs…Histamine is a biogenic amine found in a wide variety of invertebrates, where it has been found to be involved in local immune responses as well as regulating physiological function in the gut. It also functions as a neurotransmitter, especially for sensory systems1. Histamine has been well studied in arthropods and gastropods, but has been rarely reported to be present or have a function in bivalves other than the limited reports identifying it in ganglia and nerve fibers of the Baltic clam.” The authors further stated that, “Bivalves, including the oyster, Crassostrea virginica, contain dopamine, serotonin and other biogenic amines in their nervous system and peripheral tissues. These biogenic amines serve as neurotransmitters and neurohormones and are important in the physiological functioning of the animal.” They also stated that,”The mantle rim of bivalves is a sensory structure containing various sensory receptors. The involvement of histamine in sensory systems of invertebrates, particularly gastropods, coupled with our preliminary physiology research, strongly suggest histamine to be a sensory neurotransmitter in the mantle rim ofC. virginica.”
In addition, Park et al. (2007) were able to clone and characterize, “Lipopolysaccharide-induced TNF-alpha factor (LITAF) is an important transcription factor that mediates the expression of inflammatory cytokines” in the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas.” Interestingly,Zhang & An (2007) describe that, “there is significant evidence showing that certain cytokines/chemokines are involved in not only the initiation but also the persistence of pathologic pain by directly activating nociceptive sensory neurons.
Like in mussels, it has been shown that oysters control the beating of their cilia to draw in water, which they do as filter-feeders. Carroll & Catapane’s (2007) study demonstrated that there is a “reciprocal serotonergic-dopaminergic innervation of the lateral ciliated cells, similar to that of M. edulis, originating in the cerebral and visceral ganglia of the animal…” This, therefore, means that ganglia (their nervous system) regulates movement/behavior. Perhaps, like in mussels, oysters also have the ability to actively control, based on a form of decision-making, why they employ the types of ciliary movements they do.
Regarding predation, “Bivalves readily utilize chemical exudates that emanate from predators and from injured conspecifics to evaluate predation risk (Caro & Castilla 2004, Cheung et al. 2004, Smee & Weissburg 2006b) (Robinson et al. (2014). A study by Robinson et al. (2014) found that in the presence of predators, “oysters grew shells that required more force to crush and resultantly were afforded greater protection from crab predators.” This supports recent studies that “have shown that oysters react to gastropod and crustacean predators by producing thicker, heavier shells (Newell et al. 2007, Johnson & Smee 2012, Lord & Whitlatch 2012)”(Robinson 2014). Again, these are examples that oysters actively respond to their environment (predation in this case) as any other animal species would when threatened.
The studies that I’ve quoted above are only bits and pieces of a large body of data that is yet to be uncovered or even studied. What all this means when put together is yet unknown because few studies have been done. However, it shows that although oysters have simple, yet efficient nervous system to respond to the type of lifestyle that they live, they also have sensory structures and receptors like those found in other animal species. In essence, they are still nothing like plants regardless if they are sessile species. The fact that they are sessile still does not mean that they do not need to react to their environment if simply to protect themselves and carry out functions in order to survive.
Sea Urchins
The same supporters of mussel and oyster eating have begun to further open their menus to other animal species not categorized as bivalves because of similar reasoning. One such supporter claims that because they don’t have eyes or a brain like vertebrates, they must be fair game to the vegan community.
When it comes to sea urchins, no they do not have eyes in the sense that we and other animals have eyes, but “it looks like the entire surface of their bodies are acting as one big eye…” said researcher Sönke Johnsen, a marine biologist at Duke University.” Johnsen is further quoted by the same article saying, “We think of animals that have a head with centralized nervous systems and all their sense organs on top as being the ones capable of sophisticated behavior, but we’re finding more and more some animals can do pretty complex behaviors using a completely different style.” (Choi 2009) Blevins & Johnsen (2010) stated that their research study is the “first demonstration of spatial vision in an echinoderm sheds further light on the complex optical structures and photobehaviors found in this phylum.” “It appears that sea urchins may use the whole surface of their bodies as a compound eye, and the animals’ spines may shield their bodies from light coming from wide angles to enable them to pick out relatively fine visual detail….Some of the animals may interpret the object as a predator and flee, while others identify it as shelter and head towards it. What is more surprising is that the urchins’ vision is as good as Nautilus and horseshoe crab vision, which is quite impressive for an echinoid that has turned its whole body into an eye.” (Knight 2010)
And on the claim that they “do not have centralized nervous systems” as basis to decide it’s ok to eat them, the fact remains that sea urchins and all echinoderms, including sea urchins, have nervous systems:
Johnsen stated that, “Although sea urchins don’t have brains, “it could be their entire nervous system more or less acts as a brain,” Johnsen said. “In our case, we vertebrates have nervous systems that are more or less controlled by a central brain, but sea urchins have a pretty diffuse nerve net, where no region looks like a central processing unit as far as we can tell.” (Choi 2009)
“The adult echinoid nervous system is comprised of 5 radial nerve cords, which are joined at their base by commissures that form a ring surrounding the mouth (Cobb, 1970; Cavey and Markel, 1994)… Tube feet, spines and pedicellariae have ganglia and a complement of sensory and motor neurons…The arrangement of the nervous system in echinoderms is a feature that distinguishes them from other deuterostomes (chordates and hemichordates). Echinoderm nervous systems are dispersed, but they are not a simple nerve net. The adult is not cephalized, yet the radial nerves are segmentally organized (Burke et al 2006).”
Most importantly, Johnsen also states that, “We think of animals that have a head with centralized nervous systems and all their sense organs on top as being the ones capable of sophisticated behavior, but we’re finding more and more some animals can do pretty complex behaviors using a completely different style…In the beginning, people built robots like they would humans, with powerful central processing units, complex sensors and fairly complex rules for doing things…Now they’re finding it might be a lot better with a distributed system with many little processors and simpler sensors and simple rules, which end up creating fairly complicated behaviors as emergent properties, just as how a flock of birds can make intricate patterns without any one bird choosing these patterns.” (Choi 2009)
Thus, not having a nervous system with a brain does not mean you are a living plant-like rock creature incapable of experiencing the world. Plants don’t have nervous systems. Echinoderms (and Bivalves) do havenervous systems regardless of how simple one believes them to be.
Pain in Invertebrates
It is important to note that, “the clear distinction that once existed between the terms “pain” and “nociception” has become blurred recently, to the point that many neuroscientists and clinicians no longer make a distinction; that is, most accept that nociception is equivalent to pain.” (Sladky 2014)
In his essay examining pain and analgesia in fish and invertebrates, Dr. Sladky, from the University of Wisconsin, asks,“can we recognise pain in fish and invertebrates? Is the perception of pain by a fish or an invertebrate equivalent to that of a mammal? We will never be able to fully and objectively answer these questions, because the animals simply cannot tell us…Could it be that recognition of pain in fish and invertebrates is impeded by our inability to empathise with species that do not convey distress through facial expressions, do not vocalise in response to distress, and are not warm and fuzzy?”
Dr. Sladky states that “our limited understanding of pain and analgesia in fish and invertebrates should not obscure our clinical decisions, and we should err on the side of fish and invertebrate well-being by making the assumption that conditions considered painful in humans and other mammals should be assumed to be potentially painful across all other vertebrate and invertebrate species.”
“Although peripheral nociceptors have not been identified in cephalopods, there are no published reports that anyone has investigated peripheral nociception in cephalopods. On the other hand, nociceptors have been identified in anemones, sea cucumbers, leeches, nematodes, Drosophila, and many other insects (Kavaliers 1988; Tobin & Bargmann 2004; Xu, et al. 2006; Smith & Lewin 2009; Puri & Faulkes 2010)…Many invertebrate species (earthworms, roundworms, molluscs, Drosophila) possess endogenous opioid receptors (Dalton & Widdowson 1989; Tobin & Bargmann 2004). Immunohistochemical staining indicated the presence of endogenous opioid receptors in nematodes (Prior et al. 2007). Mussels possess benzodiazepine and opioid receptors in their nervous systems (Gagne et al. 2010). In addition, there is genetic and physiologic evidence that invertebrates and vertebrates may have similar capacities with respect to pain and analgesia…”(Sladky 2014)
Albeit slowly, science has shown us that invertebrate species are not as simple as we once thought. So I ask, what basis is there for not erring on the side that potentially oysters, and other invertebrates, that have yet to be studied in detail, also have the ability for these mechanisms and behaviors?
Would it not be unethical to apply standards to species that science has yet to fully study or understand?
Would it not be unethical and unfair to apply specific standards to species with completely different body forms that work in completely different ways than we could ever imagine? | The Case for Vegans Eating Oysters, Mussels, & Other Invertebrates?
Between 900 to 1500 people read my writing weekly, a $1 donation per reader for my labor would help me to pay bills.
If you’ve reached this article, then you are well acquainted with the definition of veganism, which is a stance against the purposeful exploitation of animal species as is practical. It’s troubling to find numerous members in the vegan community supporting the exploitation of animal species based on articles unsupported by a single shred of evidence. More alarming is how these articles try to establish oysters, mussels, and even other animals in the vegan community as being akin to plants, rocks, and as one stated, “a disembodied finger.”
Modern molecular and taxonomic advances have led scientists to base classification of living beings in very specific ways. I won’t further delve into the subject, but I will say that oysters and other animal species are not comparable to plants. The plant and animal kingdom are separate for good reason regardless of what supporters of bivalve eating in the vegan community will have you believe. One of the most important differences is that plants do not have a nervous system while bivalves do.
The same bivalve eating individuals claim that mussels and oysters are not sentient because they do not have “brains,” and while it is true that mussels and oyster do not have a brain in the sense that you or I do, they do have ganglia. Ganglia, in simple terms, is basically their form of a brain — how they get their systems to function and respond when they need to. Yes, invertebrates have much simpler nervous systems than vertebrates, but they still have nervous systems. How developed their nervous system depends on the species. More importantly, their form of a nervous system allows them to respond to their living conditions and survive in them.
“Most, if not all, invertebrates have the capacity to detect and respond to noxious or aversive stimuli. That is, like vertebrates, they are capable of ‘nociception” (Smith 1991). | no |
Veganism | Can vegans eat Oysters? | yes_statement | "vegans" can "eat" "oysters".. "oysters" are permissible for "vegans". | https://simplyhealthyvegan.com/is-shellfish-off-limits-for-vegans-the-answer-might-surprise-you/ | Is Shellfish Off-Limits For Vegans? The Answer Might Surprise You ... | Is Shellfish Off-Limits For Vegans? The Answer Might Surprise You
If you’re a vegan, you might be wondering if shellfish is off-limits. The answer is a bit complicated. While shellfish are technically not animals, they do contain cholesterol and are often high in saturated fat. This means that they might not be the best choice for vegans who are trying to eat a healthy diet. However, there are some shellfish that are lower in saturated fat, such as oysters and scallops. These can be a good option for vegans who want to include shellfish in their diet.
Shellfish are living organisms that cling to rocky outcrops and are classified as such. Some vegans believe oysters do not feel pain because they are biologically similar to plants and lack a central nervous system. Furthermore, I explain why some vegans oppose eating oysters and why others do not. It is one of the few shellfish with no developed nervous system. As a result, they are not as physically pained as fish. Shellfish have evolved into a central nervous system that is more sensitive to pain than the majority of humans. Scientists are only now beginning to investigate the nervous systems of shells and invertebrates.
People wonder why it is so difficult for vegans to eat fish after learning that oysters may be safe. The central nervous system of all fish species on the planet is important to this. They can, as a result, experience both pain and suffering, just as animals do. A pescatarian diet may appear far healthier than a carnivorous diet, but it is not ethically sound. When it comes to vegan diet, Y oysters are a bit of a gray area. Shellfish and seafood are only available in a small number of vegan options. Crab cakes made from chickpea, zucchini, and palm heart ingredients are common. Vegan fishless sticks have a lot in common with tofu nuggets.
What Seafood Is Technically Vegan?
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Vegetarian diets are one of the most popular types of diets because they require a complete avoidance of animal products. You can eat meat and poultry, as well as fish and shellfish, in this manner. Meat-free foods, such as honey, dairy products, and gelatin, are also avoided by vegans.
Despite the fact that seafood cannot be veganised easily, some businesses are investing in new technologies and customers to overcome this. There are now products available that mimic fish dishes such as fish and chips, unagi, canned tuna, and so on. The total amount of research and development on alternative seafood to date is $10 million to $20 million. In 2018, the UK became the first country to launch a vegan fish and chip shop, with the vegan menu now available at all of the chain’s London locations. It is critical for alternative seafood companies to invest in nutrition in order to expand their customer base. Concerns about the environment may help to boost sales of faux seafood. Shiok Meats of Singapore is working on creating crustacean products based on cell cultures.
Meat grown from cells has similar structural similarities to animal meat, but it is not required to be slaughtered. Cell-based meat is also known as lab-grown meat or clean meat. A single oyster with shrimp will set you back approximately $150 ($107, or $85). When compared to processed meat products, mock meat products are easier to produce in socially isolated settings. Since the start of lockdown, there has been an increase in demand for plant-based meats. It’s difficult to predict how the pandemic will affect innovative seafood companies in the long run. Capital and technology are flowing into this sector at a pace not seen in the past.
A vegan diet not only reduces your carbon footprints, promotes healthy eating habits, and lowers your risk of chronic diseases, but it also benefits your health. Vegans have been shown to reduce their risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and cancer, lower their cholesterol levels, and have a lower environmental impact. If you want to try a vegan lifestyle, there are numerous options available to you. Many restaurants now offer vegan options, as do many grocery stores, and vegan foods can be found in most supermarkets. If you are new to vegans, you can learn more by reading informative vegan blogs or purchasing vegan cookbooks. If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to contact a vegan friend or fellow vegan for assistance.
Is Shrimp Considered Vegan?
It is not possible to eat shrimp as a vegan. In general, shrimp and crustaceans are thought to be painless. The truth is that crustaceans are sensitive to pain. You would never eat shrimp if you were vegan because they are living creatures.
Is Pescatarian Vegan?
All vegetarian, vegan, and pescatarian diets include a lot of less meat and poultry. Animal products, including dairy and eggs, are not permitted in the vegetarian diet, whereas dairy products and eggs are not permitted in the vegan diet.
Can Plant-based Eat Seafood?
In a nutshell, vegans do not eat fish or seafood. No, vegetarians do not – if you want to cut out or reduce your dairy and meat consumption, you might want to learn more about the pescatarian diet.
Can Vegans Eat Mussels?
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There is no doubt that mussels are not vegan. Although eating mussels is not advised because they are an animal, a plant-based diet is advised.
When I stopped eating meat, mussells were one of my favorite foods. There is no way to distinguish between them technically because they are animal flesh. If you don’t eat meat for taste reasons, the conversation has almost certainly come to an end. If you’re a vegetarian or vegan, you’re probably feeling something similar, so we’re all going to have a heart-to-heart about it. Mussels, scallops, and oysters have all been mentioned in a vegan Facebook group. Despite the fact that there is little evidence that mussels are anything other than shells, they can defend themselves.
Although many people consider oysters to be a type of seafood, they are not vegan. It is an aquatic mollusc that feeds on crustaceans and other invertebrates. They are not raised in captivity because they are harvested from the wild. Although oyster consumption may be somewhat unappealing, it is not technically vegan. The oyster is still a living organism, so it is not a vegan food. Oysters are not vegan because they are considered seafood in many cultures. Small crustaceans and other invertebrates are eaten by oyster-eating aquatic molluscs.
Can Vegans Eat Seafood?
Fish, crustaceans, and shellfish are just a few examples of seafood that vegans are unable to consume. Algae is also known as seafood in the United States. As a result, vegans can eat seafood; however, they are limited to eating certain types of algae, also known as sea vegetables. Algae is a seafood species for a few reasons. The first distinction is that algae, as a photosynthetic species, convert sunlight into energy. As a result, algae are a component of the food chain, and they could be responsible for producing the food that animals consume. A second reason why algae is considered seafood is that it is consumed in combination with other food items. Because algae are commonly found in soups, salads, and other dishes, vegans do not have to limit themselves to a specific type of seafood. Because algae can be used as a substitute for seafood, it is no surprise that people regard it as seafood. Algae, for example, can be used to make vegan sushi. Vegans are able to consume algae because it is classified as part of the seafood family, which means it is technically seafood.
Why Can’t Vegans Eat Clams?
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It’s one of the simplest questions we’ve ever had to deal with because both are animals and thus cannot be vegan.
When you define vegans as those who do not believe in the suffering of animals, it may be considered a vegan. Clams are classified as a Bivalvia species, which is a subfamily of freshwater and marine organisms. It is impossible to imagine them thinking about pain because they can respond to it. A daily allowance of about 90 mg of vitamin C is recommended for male adults and about 75 mg for female adults, according to the Office of Dietary Supplements. With Clams, you can increase your intake to 84mcg in a 3oz serving. Omega-3 fatty acids can lower the risk of heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Oyster mushrooms have a minimal environmental impact and can be responsibly grown.
In the North Atlantic and Northwest Pacific, there are seaweeds that grow. Clams are generally safe to consume, but proper handling and preparation are required in order for them to be cooked properly. In 100 g of tofu, 9.41 grams of protein, 176 mg of calcium, 1.69 grams of iron, and no traces of sugar or cholesterol are present. There are numerous non-GMO products on the market, so you can rest assured that you are not consuming a harmful product.
An otherwise vegan diet includes bivalve mollusks such as clams, mussels, oysters, and scallops. These mollusks lack a central nervous system, which means they cannot perceive pain in the same way that other animals do, so they are not included in vegan diets. Because shrimp are crustaceans or shellfish, it is impossible to eat them as a vegan. Crabs, prawns, and lobsters are all members of this family. It is not possible to consume vegan products made from these animals, such as shrimp paste or prawn sauce.
Is Seafood Off-limits For Vegans?
If you’re vegan, you might be wondering if you can eat oysters and clams. They fall under the category of meat because they are both derived from animals, so they should be considered vegan. Meat, on the other hand, is defined by Orthodox believers as the presence of a backbone in all animals. Clams are considered to be meat, so vegans can eat them as well. There are also seafood options for vegans, such as scallops. Sea scallops, unlike other types of seafood, are derived from an animal, so they have a central nervous system. It means that some people may argue that vegans should be considered meat, but this is not something we care about.
Can You Eat Shrimp If Vegan?
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There is a common misconception that vegans do not eat seafood. This is not the case! While some vegans do not eat seafood for personal or ethical reasons, there are many vegans who do consume seafood. Shrimp is a type of seafood that is often enjoyed by vegans. While shrimp is not a plant-based food, it is a low-fat, low-calorie, and high-protein option that can be a part of a healthy vegan diet. If you are interested in trying shrimp, look for vegan shrimp options that are available at many supermarkets and health food stores.
Shrimp is a small marine decapods crustacean with an oblong body, a long tail, and many legs. A vegan diet does not consist of any animal at all. Some vegans believe that eating animals while they are being slaughtered is acceptable as long as they are not injured. Shrimp is not only harmful to animals, but it is also harmful to the environment. Shrimping is a highly destructive and inhumane activity. If you are concerned about your body’s dietary cholesterol levels, shrimp may be a bad choice. If you have shellfish allergies, you should avoid eating shrimp.
It is not possible to grow vegan shrimp in the lab because the shrimp cells are grown in algae and protein-based plant powder. As you might expect, the shrimp substitute’s texture is the same as that of the real thing and tastes just as good. Vegans can enjoy the crispiness and crunch of popcorn shrimp while also maintaining the freshness of a classic crispy summer roll. In contrast to the synthetic shrimp sold in stores, homemade vegan shrimp can be made with as little or as much food as you want. The only vegan ingredients used in the shrimp are those listed below. In this recipe, white flour, soy milk, apple cider vinegar, onion powder, and corn starch are all included. Sweet potato puree is a substitute for king oyster mushroom in some recipes.
A Few Types Of Vegetarians Eat Seafood
Vegetarians can be classified into four types. Vegetarians typically consume fish and crustaceans that they do not identify as seafood, but rather as plant-based products. Vegetarians, such as Pescetarians, consume seafood as part of their diet. A vegan diet does not include seafood, which is a type of animal product.
Vegan Shellfish Substitute
There are many vegan substitutes for shellfish, including: mushrooms, tofu, tempeh, seitan, and jackfruit. Each of these ingredients can mimic the texture and flavor of shellfish, making them perfect for vegan and vegetarian dishes. When choosing a vegan shellfish substitute, be sure to consider the flavors of the dish you are making and select an ingredient that will complement those flavors.
There are a number of vegan seafood substitutes that are quite close to the actual product. Crab cakes are the simplest vegan dish to prepare. Tuna and salmon, in particular, are excellent vegan fish substitutes. Jackfruit is the most versatile of the three because it can be used as a tuna substitute as well as other foods. I’ve been vegan for many years, and I strive to help others by sharing my knowledge. If you want to make a high-quality vegan fish fillet substitute, I recommend using store-bought Gardein fishless filets. There are a few vegan lobster substitutes, but there aren’t many.
What Is A Vegan Substitute For Shrimp?
Konjac, which is frequently substituted for gelatin in vegan cooking, is also used to make shrimp. Elephant yam is also known as elephant yam in Japanese. This vegetable is popular in Asian cooking, but it is now used in a broader range of dishes, including vegan shrimp and seafood dishes.
Seafood Substitutes For Shrimp
The use of seafood alternatives can be quite simple, in addition to shrimp substitutes. Substitute whole oysters for main courses or stir fries in a soup or stir fry. Other land animal products such as poultry, tofu, beans, and turtle meat can be used as substitutes. If a person is allergic to shellfish, it is possible to substitute shrimp with chicken or white fish. Fake shrimp, tofu, king oyster mushrooms, and sweet potatoes are also substitutes for shrimp.
Is There A Vegan Substitute For Crab Meat?
The second fruit is Jackfruit. There are many vegan pull-pork recipes that use this tree fruit, and it is also a good substitute for crab. This mild fruit is almost always flavorful. This product, which is available fresh or canned, can be used in a variety of vegan and vegetarian dishes.
Is Imitation Lobster Safe For Those With A Shellfish Allergy?
How do imitation lobsters come to be vegan? Imitation lobsters are not suitable for vegans. Because of the fact that the eggs in this seafood are in one or more forms, anyone who suffers from shellfish allergies is not advised to consume it. Additionally, imitation lobster contains significantly less king crab meat than regular crab, making it unsuitable for people who have shellfish allergies.
Can Vegans Eat Oysters
There is some debate over whether or not oysters are suitable for a vegan diet, as they are a type of seafood. Some vegans argue that oysters are animals, and therefore should not be eaten, while others claim that oysters are not sentient beings and therefore can be consumed. Ultimately, the decision of whether or not to eat oysters is a personal one.
Some vegans enjoy oysters, and here’s why. Consider the oyster’s sessile (immobile) nature, as well as the fact that oysters lack the ability to control their nervous system. If this happens, vegans believe that oysters have a more plant-like appearance than we would normally think. A single oyster can filter 5 liters of water per hour, and it takes only an acre of underwater land to raise 750,000 oysters in a year. Oyster farms do not use pollution-polluting fertilizer, and there is no need to clear land in order for them to grow.
Are Pearls Vegan? No, Pearls Are Not Vegan.
According to the information available, oysters and mussels are vegan, whereas pearls are not. Because they are wild animals, raw oysters are not vegan. Vegan seafood, according to a vegan seafood definition, is seafood that is not raised and slaughtered by animals.
Are Oysters Vegan Peta
Oysters are not vegan because they are animals. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is an organization that believes that animals should not be used for food, clothing, or entertainment.
Because oysters have lateral bodies compressed within a tightly packed shell, it’s known as bivalve mollusk. As animal consumption becomes more recognized, many people are converting to vegetarian and vegan diets. This mini guide will cover everything you need to know about oysters and explain whether they are vegan or not. Vegetarians and vegans are not permitted to consume Y oysters. Despite their lack of pain, they are members of the animal kingdom. Oysters do have Omega-3 fatty acids, which are beneficial for blood pressure control. In the world of vegans, there are numerous low-cost alternatives available.
The health of the sea ecosystem is greatly affected by oysters. A filter feeder consumes up to 50 gallons of water per day for oysters. This means that there are no toxic chemicals in the environment, which is ideal for seabed grasses and aquatic life. A PETA investigation concluded that oyster consumption is not permitted. A person does not experience pain as a result of their lack of a central nervous system. The mollusk is already being slaughtered by pearl farmers when you see an open oyster.
Are Oysters Vegan Peta?
Some vegans feel compelled to consume oysters due to the pain they experience when they do so. As a result, PETA has confirmed that oysters are not suitable for vegan consumption due to their status as an animal product.
Vegan-friendly Ways To Enjoy Pearls
Pearls, on the other hand, can be used in a variety of ways, such as jewelry, smoothies, or made into a vegan dessert.
Is An Oyster A Sentient Being?
A vegan diet, according to him, is all about compassion, and oysters, according to current research, are sensory animals without a brain or advanced central nervous system, which means they cannot feel pain.
Oysters And Mussels: Sentience Unknown
According to the text, oysters and mussels are not as intelligent as plants. Although the mechanisms of pain receptors are unknown, it is safe to assume they do not exist. They do not experience pain as a result of a lack of a central nervous system or brain, which means they cannot feel it as a result of pain. It is possible that they have a reaction to their environment, but it is unclear what caused their reaction or what causes it.
Hello! I’m Emily, the girl behind all these deliciously healthy, plant-based recipes. If you have no idea what to eat, what’s healthy & vegan or you don’t have time for meal prep, you’re in the right place.
About Author
Hello! I’m Emily, the girl behind all these deliciously healthy, plant-based recipes. If you have no idea what to eat, what’s healthy & vegan or you don’t have time for meal prep, you’re in the right place.
Simply Healthy Vegan is all about making veganism easy and accessible for everyone. We believe that veganism is a healthy and sustainable way of life, and our goal is to help more people adopt this lifestyle | As animal consumption becomes more recognized, many people are converting to vegetarian and vegan diets. This mini guide will cover everything you need to know about oysters and explain whether they are vegan or not. Vegetarians and vegans are not permitted to consume Y oysters. Despite their lack of pain, they are members of the animal kingdom. Oysters do have Omega-3 fatty acids, which are beneficial for blood pressure control. In the world of vegans, there are numerous low-cost alternatives available.
The health of the sea ecosystem is greatly affected by oysters. A filter feeder consumes up to 50 gallons of water per day for oysters. This means that there are no toxic chemicals in the environment, which is ideal for seabed grasses and aquatic life. A PETA investigation concluded that oyster consumption is not permitted. A person does not experience pain as a result of their lack of a central nervous system. The mollusk is already being slaughtered by pearl farmers when you see an open oyster.
Are Oysters Vegan Peta?
Some vegans feel compelled to consume oysters due to the pain they experience when they do so. As a result, PETA has confirmed that oysters are not suitable for vegan consumption due to their status as an animal product.
Vegan-friendly Ways To Enjoy Pearls
Pearls, on the other hand, can be used in a variety of ways, such as jewelry, smoothies, or made into a vegan dessert.
Is An Oyster A Sentient Being?
A vegan diet, according to him, is all about compassion, and oysters, according to current research, are sensory animals without a brain or advanced central nervous system, which means they cannot feel pain.
Oysters And Mussels: Sentience Unknown
According to the text, oysters and mussels are not as intelligent as plants. Although the mechanisms of pain receptors are unknown, it is safe to assume they do not exist. | no |
Veganism | Can vegans eat Oysters? | yes_statement | "vegans" can "eat" "oysters".. "oysters" are permissible for "vegans". | https://holypeas.com/ostrovegans-bivalvegans/ | Ostrovegans and Bivalvegans: Can Vegans Eat Oysters and ... | What Are Oysters?
Oysters, along with clams, scallops, and mussels, are bivalve invertebrate mollusks that inhabit salty or brackish water environments, where freshwater meets seawater.
They have a plump interior body without a skeletal structure and are wrapped in two hard outer shells held together by a strong ligament.
Oysters are members of the Mollusca phylum, which also contains snails, octopuses, and squids.
They are renowned for filtering contaminants from the water and sustaining the ecology. In addition, they combine, producing rocky reefs near the shores that serve as homes for other marine animals.
How Do Oysters Get Harvested?
Hand-collection and dredging are the two primary procedures that are utilized throughout the oyster harvest.
Dredging is the process of pulling a mound of oysters and collecting the oysters with a big machine.
This practice can cause harm to the bottom and frequently result mostly in the fatality of crabs, fish, and other unintended animals.
Oysters can also be harvested by hand, which is a practice that is considered to be friendlier to the environment. Utilizing a pair of tongs or a rake, oysters are collected from the bottom.
Collection by hand is typically employed in locations wherever dredging can be located prohibited or might be over regarding the planet.
After providing background on what an oyster is and how it is collected, we will examine why some vegans believe it is morally acceptable to devour oysters while others disagree.
What Does Ostrovegan or Bivalvegan Mean?
Vegan refers to a person who does not consume or utilize animal products, typically for ethical and/or nutritional reasons.
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The prefix “ostro” in ostrovegan is derived from the Latin word for oyster since ostrovegans are vegans who consume oysters.
Nearly all ostrovegans feel at ease when it comes to eating mussels, and a significant number of them also consume scallops and clams.
All of these basic creatures are bivalve mollusks, characterized by a two-part shell that hinges over a soft invertebrate body. Consequently, the majority of ostrovegans are also bivalvegans.
The rationale for becoming an ostrovegan is that bivalves lack a central nervous system and, as a result, are unlikely to understand pain as animals feel it.
Additionally, bivalves include elements that might be beneficial to a vegan diet, including vitamin B12, which is typically supplemented by vegans. This is the logic behind why they consume bivalves.
On the other hand, some vegans disagree with the ostrovegan movement with two arguments:
People assert that veganism involves not eating animal products and that bivalves are animals.
Because there isn’t enough evidence to know enough to be sure whether bivalves experience pain, we should exercise caution and refrain from consuming them.
Different Levels of Ostrovegans
Among the people that call themselves “ostrovegans,” there are still differences. Some ostrovegans will exclusively consume oysters and mussels, while others may also consume clams and scallops as part of their diet.
The primary difference between oysters, mussels, and clams and scallops is that oysters and mussels are immobile, while clams and scallops are somewhat more motile.
The contrast between sessile and motile animals is significant for ostrovegans since there is greater evidence that sessile creatures do not experience pain.
In any case, ostrovegans who only consume oysters and mussels may be uncomfortable with the name “bivalves” as it includes the motile bivalves (clams and scallops) that they also remove from their diet.
What Are The Reasons That Vegans Support Eating Oysters?
There are three reasons why vegans are permitted to consume oysters:
1. Oysters Do Not Experience Pain
Usually, animal consciousness is assessed by the capacity to experience agony and endure suffering.
The key justification for oysters being vegan is because of they do not suffer because they lack a brain and a basic nervous system. It is thus assumed that they’re unable to perceive or process similar suffering manner as other animals.
Vegans make the same case to explain their consumption of plants.
2. Oyster Farming Is Sustainable
Each year, billions of invertebrates that live in water are consumed. This is not just harmful to fish.
Diverse methods of fishing may result in tenfold more deaths and a complete upheaval of marine biological diversity.
That is another reason for vegans not to consume seafood but oysters are not harvested from the wilderness, along with their native population is not harmed.
Some may even argue for oyster farms contribute to the improvement of water quality. They perform a crucial function in water filtration and clarity improvement.
Consequently of their filtration, oysters also contribute to the improvement of marine animal habitats.
3. Nutritional Benefits
Oysters are rich in vitamins and minerals such as vitamin B12, iron, omega-3 fatty acids, Vitamin D, zinc, and selenium, which vegans do not get enough of regularly.
The protein content of one little oyster is 5 grams, whereas a large oyster contains 10 grams of protein.
Also, oysters are renowned for their aphrodisiac qualities.
What Are the Reasons Vegans Don’t Support Eating Oysters?
1. Oysters May Sense Pain
Some researchers suggest that mollusks are more likely than previously believed to possess some degree of consciousness.
Oysters do have intestines and cardiovascular organs, but no brain which is the counterargument to the central nervous system theory.
Ganglia is found in oysters, which process information without a brain, allowing them to sense their surroundings to some degree.
Oysters probably experience pain and misery when they are plucked from the ocean or when they are farmed.
Although there is not yet sufficient evidence to reach a conclusion based on scientific research, this issue must nonetheless be taken into consideration.
2. It Is a Type of Animal
Oysters are classified as animals, which is another frequent cause people feel they are not vegan.
Oysters are a member of the mollusks, which also include slugs, octopuses, snails, and many more species.
There are more than 120,000 mollusk species with identical genetic compositions. While some creatures have brains, others do not.
Others, such as oysters are less active and cannot move and make decisions consciously.
The similarity of oysters to many other animals is acceptable if scientists classify the species together.
Therefore, it may contradictory to claim that it is good to eat oysters, but harmful to eat other mollusks.
Word of Caution
While most people enjoy eating raw oysters today, even popular restaurants have raw oyster bars.
Consuming oysters and undercooked seafood may put you at risk of an infection called Vibriosis, caused by Vibrio bacteria.
These vibrio bacteria are found in oyster habitats, namely in coastal waters. Because oysters filter and feed the water, bacteria can concentrate in their tissues.
This intensity may cause the person to get sick due to viruses and bacteria that may occur by consuming raw or undercooked oysters.
Most Vibrio infections caused by the consumption of undercooked or raw oysters cause diarrhea and vomiting in the person.
In addition, it can cause serious infections, blood circulation, and severe skin lesions, such as those caused by Vibrio vulnificus, which can cause serious reactions in the body.
Most people infected with vulnificus require intensive care or limb amputation. Of these infections, 15% to 30% are fatal.
Conclusion
Oysters and other similar sorts of aquatic life have been the subject of a dispute regarding their vegan status for some time.
Strong opinions exist on both sides, and some argue that whether or not oysters are vegan depends on how you perceive them as creatures.
Ostrovegans are commonly used to describe vegans who still consume bivalve invertebrates such as oysters, clams, and scallops.
Because oysters lack both a brain and a basic nervous system, there is a possibility for them not to experience pain. This is the primary argument why oysters may be safely consumed way as other plants.
However, some research shows that the sensibility of other invertebrate mollusks, such as cephalopods, and the fact that oysters are related to snails and octopuses imply that oysters should not be considered nonsentient.
The second strong argument comes from whether oysters can be categorized as animals or not.
If the point of view you feel comfortable with is in the direction of consuming oysters, it is useful to keep in mind that consuming oysters can lead to the risk of an infection called Vibriosis.
Pollo pescetarian diet is another hot topic these days, so feel free to read our article covering it if you found this useful and interesting. | It is thus assumed that they’re unable to perceive or process similar suffering manner as other animals.
Vegans make the same case to explain their consumption of plants.
2. Oyster Farming Is Sustainable
Each year, billions of invertebrates that live in water are consumed. This is not just harmful to fish.
Diverse methods of fishing may result in tenfold more deaths and a complete upheaval of marine biological diversity.
That is another reason for vegans not to consume seafood but oysters are not harvested from the wilderness, along with their native population is not harmed.
Some may even argue for oyster farms contribute to the improvement of water quality. They perform a crucial function in water filtration and clarity improvement.
Consequently of their filtration, oysters also contribute to the improvement of marine animal habitats.
3. Nutritional Benefits
Oysters are rich in vitamins and minerals such as vitamin B12, iron, omega-3 fatty acids, Vitamin D, zinc, and selenium, which vegans do not get enough of regularly.
The protein content of one little oyster is 5 grams, whereas a large oyster contains 10 grams of protein.
Also, oysters are renowned for their aphrodisiac qualities.
What Are the Reasons Vegans Don’t Support Eating Oysters?
1. Oysters May Sense Pain
Some researchers suggest that mollusks are more likely than previously believed to possess some degree of consciousness.
Oysters do have intestines and cardiovascular organs, but no brain which is the counterargument to the central nervous system theory.
Ganglia is found in oysters, which process information without a brain, allowing them to sense their surroundings to some degree.
Oysters probably experience pain and misery when they are plucked from the ocean or when they are farmed.
| no |
Veganism | Can vegans eat Oysters? | yes_statement | "vegans" can "eat" "oysters".. "oysters" are permissible for "vegans". | https://www.iamgoingvegan.com/do-vegans-eat-seafood/ | Do Vegans Eat Seafood? - I Am Going Vegan | Do Vegans Eat Seafood?
A lot of people have confusion about fish when it comes to pescatarian, vegetarian, and vegan diets. It can be hard to keep straight all the terms and beliefs behind each of them.
So, do vegans eat seafood? Vegans do not eat seafood, as they do not eat any animal products. However, there are strains of veganism where certain types of seafood are allowed. For example, ostrovegans eat bivalves such as oysters, while seagans allow all seafood into an otherwise vegan diet.
In this post, I’ll explain why vegans don’t eat seafood, as well as the reasons that ostrovegans and seagans do. Stick around until the end of the post, too, because I’ll share some great recipes for vegan fish alternatives!
Why Vegans Don’t Eat Seafood
If you’re vegan or considering a switch to a vegan diet, it’s important to know the reasons behind the diet. This allows you to stay motivated in your own adherence, and potentially advocate the diet to others, as well.
1. Animal Rights / Animal Welfare
It’s commonly understood that most animals, including fish, feel pain. There has been plenty of research done to prove that fish have nociceptors, which are used to detect harm from a variety of factors, including heat or pressure.
Considering this, most vegans would argue that if you don’t believe in killing or harming land animals for food, you shouldn’t be okay with eating fish, either.
Notice that these reasons apply even to fishing locally, like a father and son would do.
Although commercial fishing can be extra cruel and unsustainable (as covered below), even killing individual fish with a single line causes pain and suffering to those fish. And considering that humans today don’t need fish to survive or be healthy, vegans find this ethically unacceptable.
* This belief can vary when it comes to bivalves such as oysters, since their biology differs in some critical ways and they likely do not feel pain. More on that below.
2. Environmental Impact
Commercial fishing wreaks havoc on the
ocean in more ways than one:
Fishing with a net causes bycatching, which is harmful to the biodiversity of the ocean. When commercial fishermen cast their nets into the ocean, they pick up extra animals that were never intended to be caught. This hurts biodiversity.
Bottom trawling sweeps away the life on the bottom of the ocean floor. This common commercial fishing practice sweeps away the bottom of the ocean floor, leading to disruption in the natural cycles of the sea.
The fact is that commercial fishing is hurting our oceans. It’s just like when you see forests being chopped down. So much lost habitat, lost life, lost beauty and diversity. Just because we can’t see it with our eyes doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
3. Health Concerns
While it’s true that fish have plenty of heart-healthy omega-3s, there is a downside to consuming these creatures, too: the overwhelming amount of mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
I think we all know the dangers of mercury—but a lot of people aren’t aware of PCBs and their effect on the human body. Well, they have been shown to cause cancer in humans while also being linked to birth defects.
Really, it’s easy to get vegan omega-3s without fish. Just take an omega-3 supplement made from algae. They make versions with preformed DHA and EPA for maximum bioavailability. I personally like this one (Amazon link)— it has a great dose size to take each day.
Vegans Don’t Eat Seafood—But Ostrovegans and Seagans Do.
It can be confusing to keep up with all the different names of diets out there. When it comes to the issue of vegans vs seafood, there are 3 labels to get clear on: vegan, ostrovegan, and seagan.
Vegan: No Seafood.
A vegan is someone who doesn’t consume any type of animal products. This includes not only dairy, eggs, and meat, but also any seafood that qualifies as “animals” (fish, oysters, crabs, lobster, etc).
Most vegans are motivated by animal rights and animal welfare. We see raising animals to kill them as exploitation. Most vegans avoid wearing any type of fur or leather and boycott places that exploit animals, such as zoos, aquariums, and circuses.
However, there are some vegans who purely go vegan for the health benefits. And that’s completely okay! There are a lot of health benefits when going vegan, and that’s something anyone can enjoy.
Ostrovegan: Will Eat Bivalves (like Oysters).
So what’s the deal with ostrovegans? You may have never heard this term. An ostrovegan is a vegan who eats oysters and other bivalves (like mussels, clams, and scallops).
Since bivalves, such as oysters, do not have pain receptors, ostrovegans argue that eating them is not cruel. This is a controversial topic among the vegan community and is not a viewpoint shared by most vegans.
Keep in mind, also, there are two types of ostrovegans: those who only eat oysters and mussels, versus those who include clams and scallops, as well. Why the difference?
Oysters and mussels are “sessile,” meaning they do not move. Therefore, there is more of a logical reason to believe they do not feel pain. (What would be the evolutionary function of pain in an organism that can’t move away?)
Clams and scallops are motile, meaning they move around. This means there would be more evolutionary function of them feeling pain. It’s still unclear to what degree they do feel pain, though.
Seagan: Will Eat Any Seafood.
“Seagan” might be a newer addition to the vegan community, but it is another term that should be acknowledged on this topic.
A seagan is maybe most related to a pescetarian. Basically, pescetarians are vegetarians who eat fish and seafood, while seagans are vegans who eat fish and seafood. So seagans don’t consume dairy and eggs, as a pescetarian would.
The driving force behind a seagan’s choice to add fish is the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids that come from fish. Most pure vegans will point out that many plant sources also have omega-3s, including:
Whatever kind of fish meal you want to replace, just Google it along with “vegan recipe” and you’ll find a vegan way to approximate it! You can veganize anything!
Second, if you’re mainly looking to get the protein you would get from fish, look to some of these other vegan protein sources:
Beans
Tempeh
Tofu
Seitan
Mock-meat
The frozen aisles of your local grocery store should be stocked with plenty of vegan substitutes, too. There are fishless filets you can buy that taste like the real deal, as well as yummy fish sticks at certain stores.
Should You Eat Seafood?
Traditionally, vegans definitely do not eat seafood, but ostrovegans and seagans do eat seafood on different levels. Whatever your belief is, there are others you can find who agree with you.
Personally I’m vegan—I don’t eat seafood, and that makes the most sense to me. I feel better not killing fish or shellfish. But you may feel differently. If so, be authentic to your own beliefs, and follow what you believe.
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Medical Disclaimer
The content on IAmGoingVegan.com is intended only for informational and educational purposes. It is not intended to give medical advice or replace your doctor or health practitioner. No content on this website is intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease or health condition. The publisher of this content does not take responsibility for possible health consequences of any persons applying the information in this educational content. Always consult your healthcare provider before making changes to your diet, lifestyle, or nutritional supplementation. | “animals” (fish, oysters, crabs, lobster, etc).
Most vegans are motivated by animal rights and animal welfare. We see raising animals to kill them as exploitation. Most vegans avoid wearing any type of fur or leather and boycott places that exploit animals, such as zoos, aquariums, and circuses.
However, there are some vegans who purely go vegan for the health benefits. And that’s completely okay! There are a lot of health benefits when going vegan, and that’s something anyone can enjoy.
Ostrovegan: Will Eat Bivalves (like Oysters).
So what’s the deal with ostrovegans? You may have never heard this term. An ostrovegan is a vegan who eats oysters and other bivalves (like mussels, clams, and scallops).
Since bivalves, such as oysters, do not have pain receptors, ostrovegans argue that eating them is not cruel. This is a controversial topic among the vegan community and is not a viewpoint shared by most vegans.
Keep in mind, also, there are two types of ostrovegans: those who only eat oysters and mussels, versus those who include clams and scallops, as well. Why the difference?
Oysters and mussels are “sessile,” meaning they do not move. Therefore, there is more of a logical reason to believe they do not feel pain. (What would be the evolutionary function of pain in an organism that can’t move away?)
Clams and scallops are motile, meaning they move around. This means there would be more evolutionary function of them feeling pain. It’s still unclear to what degree they do feel pain, though.
Seagan: Will Eat Any Seafood.
“Seagan” might be a newer addition to the vegan community, but it is another term that should be acknowledged on this topic.
A seagan is maybe most related to a pescetarian. Basically, pescetarians are vegetarians who eat fish and seafood, while seagans are vegans who eat fish and seafood. | yes |
Veganism | Can vegans eat Oysters? | no_statement | "vegans" cannot "eat" "oysters".. "oysters" are not suitable for a "vegan" diet. | https://allplants.com/blog/lifestyle/are-oysters-vegan | Are Oysters Vegan? - allplants | Lifestyle
2min read
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Are Oysters Vegan?
2min read
It may seem like an open-and-shut case, but the amount of people who consider themselves vegan but eat oysters might surprise you. So, are oysters vegan?
What are oysters, anyway?
Oysters are the common given name for bivalve molluscs, which are the same family as clams, cockles, and mussels. As you already know, they live in the ocean and are effectively headless, invertebrate creatures (they don’t have spinal columns).
But why do some people consider oysters to be vegan?
Oysters are living creatures, so the assumption would be that they’re not vegan. However, as oysters do not have a central nervous system, they are not believed to be sentient and so don’t feel pain. As a result, some vegans who turn to the diet for reasons of animal cruelty may make an exception knowing that ultimately oysters don’t feel anything. As well as this, 95% of oysters in the world are farmed, however, the farming is sustainable and actually doesn’t negatively affect the environment. Oysters purify the water they’re in, taking in CO2 and nitrogen from the atmosphere, meaning they can actually impact the environment positively. As lots of people go vegan for environmental reasons above all, some make an exception for oysters due to its sustainable and environmentally-friendly farming practices.
But are they really vegan?
By definition, no, oysters are not vegan; they are still living organisms which means they can’t be considered a vegan food. Given the facts, it’s not surprising that oysters draw mixed responses from vegans, but it is ultimately down to an individual whether they feel comfortable eating them.
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By Toni Olukiran
Toni is one of our lovely Content Marketing Assistants, and when she’s not writing posts about everything from Jamaican cooking to vegan champagne, she’s making a Spotify playlist (she was at 200, at her last count) or playing tennis in the park. | Lifestyle
2min read
Share
Are Oysters Vegan?
2min read
It may seem like an open-and-shut case, but the amount of people who consider themselves vegan but eat oysters might surprise you. So, are oysters vegan?
What are oysters, anyway?
Oysters are the common given name for bivalve molluscs, which are the same family as clams, cockles, and mussels. As you already know, they live in the ocean and are effectively headless, invertebrate creatures (they don’t have spinal columns).
But why do some people consider oysters to be vegan?
Oysters are living creatures, so the assumption would be that they’re not vegan. However, as oysters do not have a central nervous system, they are not believed to be sentient and so don’t feel pain. As a result, some vegans who turn to the diet for reasons of animal cruelty may make an exception knowing that ultimately oysters don’t feel anything. As well as this, 95% of oysters in the world are farmed, however, the farming is sustainable and actually doesn’t negatively affect the environment. Oysters purify the water they’re in, taking in CO2 and nitrogen from the atmosphere, meaning they can actually impact the environment positively. As lots of people go vegan for environmental reasons above all, some make an exception for oysters due to its sustainable and environmentally-friendly farming practices.
But are they really vegan?
By definition, no, oysters are not vegan; they are still living organisms which means they can’t be considered a vegan food. Given the facts, it’s not surprising that oysters draw mixed responses from vegans, but it is ultimately down to an individual whether they feel comfortable eating them.
| no |
Epistemology | Can we know anything beyond our minds? | yes_statement | we can "know" things beyond our "minds".. knowledge extends beyond our "minds". | https://theconversation.com/human-intelligence-have-we-reached-the-limit-of-knowledge-124819 | Human intelligence: have we reached the limit of knowledge? | Disclosure statement
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Despite huge advances in science over the past century, our understanding of nature is still far from complete. Not only have scientists failed to find the Holy Grail of physics – unifying the very large (general relativity) with the very small (quantum mechanics) – they still don’t know what the vast majority of the universe is made up of. The sought after Theory of Everything continues to elude us. And there are other outstanding puzzles, too, such as how consciousness arises from mere matter.
Will science ever be able to provide all the answers? Human brains are the product of blind and unguided evolution. They were designed to solve practical problems impinging on our survival and reproduction, not to unravel the fabric of the universe. This realisation has led some philosophers to embrace a curious form of pessimism, arguing there are bound to be things we will never understand. Human science will therefore one day hit a hard limit – and may already have done so.
Some questions may be doomed to remain what the American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomskycalled “mysteries”. If you think that humans alone have unlimited cognitive powers – setting us apart from all other animals – you have not fully digested Darwin’s insight that Homo Sapiens is very much part of the natural world.
But does this argument really hold up? Consider that human brains did not evolve to discover their own origins either. And yet somehow we managed to do just that. Perhaps the pessimists are missing something.
Similarly, the philosopher Colin McGinn has argued in a series of books and articles that all minds suffer from “cognitive closure” with respect to certain problems. Just as dogs or cats will never understand prime numbers, human brains must be closed off from some of the world’s wonders. McGinn suspects that the reason why philosophical conundrums such as the mind/body problem – how physical processes in our brain give rise to consciousness – prove to be intractable is that their true solutions are simply inaccessible to the human mind.
If McGinn is right that our brains are simply not equipped to solve certain problems, there is no point in even trying, as they will continue to baffle and bewilder us. McGinn himself is convinced that there is, in fact, a perfectly natural solution to the mind–body problem, but that human brains will never find it.
Even the psychologist Steven Pinker, someone who is often accused of scientific hubris himself, is sympathetic to the argument of the mysterians. If our ancestors had no need to understand the wider cosmos in order to spread their genes, he argues, why would natural selection have given us the brainpower to do so?
Mind-boggling theories
Mysterians typically present the question of cognitive limits in stark, black-or-white terms: either we can solve a problem, or it will forever defy us. Either we have cognitive access or we suffer from closure. At some point, human inquiry will suddenly slam into a metaphorical brick wall, after which we will be forever condemned to stare in blank incomprehension.
Another possibility, however, which mysterians often overlook, is one of slowly diminishing returns. Reaching the limits of inquiry might feel less like hitting a wall than getting bogged down in a quagmire. We keep slowing down, even as we exert more and more effort, and yet there is no discrete point beyond which any further progress at all becomes impossible.
There is another ambiguity in the thesis of the mysterians, which my colleague Michael Vlerick and I have pointed out in an academic paper. Are the mysterians claiming that we will never find the true scientific theory of some aspect of reality, or alternatively, that we may well find this theory but will never truly comprehend it?
In the science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, an alien civilisation builds a massive supercomputer to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. When the computer finally announces that the answer is “42”, no one has a clue what this means (in fact, they go on to construct an even bigger supercomputer to figure out precisely this).
Is a question still a “mystery” if you have arrived at the correct answer, but you have no idea what it means or cannot wrap your head around it? Mysterians often conflate those two possibilities.
In some places, McGinn suggests that the mind–body problem is inaccessible to human science, presumably meaning that we will never find the true scientific theory describing the mind–body nexus. At other moments, however, he writes that the problem will always remain “numbingly difficult to make sense of” for human beings, and that “the head spins in theoretical disarray” when we try to think about it.
This suggests that we may well arrive at the true scientific theory, but it will have a 42-like quality to it. But then again, some people would argue that this is already true of a theory like quantum mechanics. Even the quantum physicist Richard Feynman admitted, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
Would the mysterians say that we humans are “cognitively closed” to the quantum world? According to quantum mechanics, particles can be in two places at once, or randomly pop out of empty space. While this is extremely hard to make sense of, quantum theory leads to incredibly accurate predictions. The phenomena of “quantum weirdness” have been confirmed by several experimental tests, and scientists are now also creating applications based on the theory.
Mysterians also tend to forget how mindboggling some earlier scientific theories and concepts were when initially proposed. Nothing in our cognitive make-up prepared us for relativity theory, evolutionary biology or heliocentrism.
As the philosopher Robert McCauleywrites: “When first advanced, the suggestions that the Earth moves, that microscopic organisms can kill human beings, and that solid objects are mostly empty space were no less contrary to intuition and common sense than the most counterintuitive consequences of quantum mechanics have proved for us in the twentieth century.” McCauley’s astute observation provides reason for optimism, not pessimism.
Mind extensions
But can our puny brains really answer all conceivable questions and understand all problems? This depends on whether we are talking about bare, unaided brains or not. There’s a lot of things you can’t do with your naked brain. But Homo Sapiens is a tool-making species, and this includes a range of cognitive tools.
For example, our unaided sense organs cannot detect UV-light, ultrasound waves, X-rays or gravitational waves. But if you’re equipped with some fancy technology you can detect all those things. To overcome our perceptual limitations, scientists have developed a suite of tools and techniques: microscopes, X-ray film, Geiger counters, radio satellites detectors and so forth.
All these devices extend the reach of our minds by “translating” physical processes into some format that our sense organs can digest. So are we perceptually “closed” to UV light? In one sense, yes. But not if you take into account all our technological equipment and measuring devices.
In a similar way, we use physical objects (such as paper and pencil) to vastly increase the memory capacity of our naked brains. According to the British philosopher Andy Clark, our minds quite literally extend beyond our skins and skulls, in the form of notebooks, computers screens, maps and file drawers.
Mathematics is another fantastic mind-extension technology, which enables us to represent concepts that we couldn’t think of with our bare brains. For instance, no scientist could hope to form a mental representation of all the complex interlocking processes that make up our climate system. That’s exactly why we have constructed mathematical models and computers to do the heavy lifting for us.
Cumulative knowledge
Most importantly, we can extend our own minds to those of our fellow human beings. What makes our species unique is that we are capable of culture, in particular cumulative cultural knowledge. A population of human brains is much smarter than any individual brain in isolation.
And the collaborative enterprise par excellence is science. It goes without saying that no single scientist would be capable of unravelling the mysteries of the cosmos on her own. But collectively, they do. As Isaac Newton wrote, he could see further by “standing on the shoulders of giants”. By collaborating with their peers, scientists can extend the scope of their understanding, achieving much more than any of them would be capable of individually.
Today, fewer and fewer people understand what is going on at the cutting edge of theoretical physics – even physicists. The unification of quantum mechanics and relativity theory will undoubtedly be exceptionally daunting, or else scientists would have nailed it long ago already.
The same is true for our understanding of how the human brain gives rise to consciousness, meaning and intentionality. But is there any good reason to suppose that these problems will forever remain out of reach? Or that our sense of bafflement when thinking of them will never diminish?
In a public debate I moderated a few years ago, the philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out a very simple objection to the mysterians’ analogies with the minds of other animals: other animals cannot even understand the questions. Not only will a dog never figure out if there’s a largest prime, but it will never even understand the question. By contrast, human beings can pose questions to each other and to themselves, reflect on these questions, and in doing so come up with ever better and more refined versions.
Mysterians are inviting us to imagine the existence of a class of questions that are themselves perfectly comprehensible to humans, but the answers to which will forever remain out of reach. Is this notion really plausible (or even coherent)?
Alien anthropologists
To see how these arguments come together, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that some extraterrestrial “anthropologists” had visited our planet around 40,000 years ago to prepare a scientific report about the cognitive potential of our species. Would this strange, naked ape ever find out about the structure of its solar system, the curvature of space-time or even its own evolutionary origins?
At that moment in time, when our ancestors were living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, such an outcome may have seemed quite unlikely. Although humans possessed quite extensive knowledge about the animals and plants in their immediate environment, and knew enough about the physics of everyday objects to know their way around and come up with some clever tools, there was nothing resembling scientific activity.
There was no writing, no mathematics, no artificial devices for extending the range of our sense organs. As a consequence, almost all of the beliefs held by these people about the broader structure of the world were completely wrong. Human beings didn’t have a clue about the true causes of natural disaster, disease, heavenly bodies, the turn of the seasons or almost any other natural phenomenon.
Evolution has equipped this upright, walking ape with primitive sense organs to pick up some information that is locally relevant to them, such as vibrations in the air (caused by nearby objects and persons) and electromagnetic waves within the 400-700 nanometer range, as well as certain larger molecules dispersed in their atmosphere.
However, these creatures are completely oblivious to anything that falls outside their narrow perceptual range. Moreover, they can’t even see most of the single-cell life forms in their own environment, because these are simply too small for their eyes to detect. Likewise, their brains have evolved to think about the behaviour of medium-sized objects (mostly solid) under conditions of low gravity.
None of these earthlings has ever escaped the gravitational field of their planet to experience weightlessness, or been artificially accelerated so as to experience stronger gravitational forces. They can’t even conceive of space-time curvature, since evolution has hard-wired zero-curvature geometry of space into their puny brains.
In conclusion, we’re sorry to report that most of the cosmos is simply beyond their ken.
But those extraterrestrials would have been dead wrong. Biologically, we are no different than we were 40,000 years ago, but now we know about bacteria and viruses, DNA and molecules, supernovas and black holes, the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum and a wide array of other strange things.
We also know about non-Euclidean geometry and space-time curvature, courtesy of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Our minds have “reached out” to objects millions of light years away from our planet, and also to extremely tiny objects far below the perceptual limits of our sense organs. By using various tricks and tools, humans have vastly extended their grasp on the world.
The verdict: biology is not destiny
The thought experiment above should be a counsel against pessimism about human knowledge. Who knows what other mind-extending devices we will hit upon to overcome our biological limitations? Biology is not destiny. If you look at what we have already accomplished in the span of a few centuries, any rash pronouncements about cognitive closure seem highly premature.
Mysterians often pay lip service to the values of “humility” and “modesty”, but on closer examination, their position is far less restrained than it appears. Take McGinn’s confident pronouncement that the mind–body problem is “an ultimate mystery” that we will “never unravel”. In making such a claim, McGinn assumes knowledge of three things: the nature of the mind–body problem itself, the structure of the human mind, and the reason why never the twain shall meet. But McGinn offers only a superficial overview of the science of human cognition, and pays little or no attention to the various devices for mind extension.
I think it’s time to turn the tables on the mysterians. If you claim that some problem will forever elude human understanding, you have to show in some detail why no possible combination of mind extension devices will bring us any closer to a solution. That is a taller order than most mysterians have acknowledged.
Moreover, by spelling out exactly why some problems will remain mysterious, mysterians risk being hoisted by their own petard. As Dennett wrote in his latest book: “As soon as you frame a question that you claim we will never be able to answer, you set in motion the very process that might well prove you wrong: you raise a topic of investigation.”
In one of his infamous memorandum notes on Iraq, former US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, makes a distinction between two forms of ignorance: the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”. In the first category belong the things that we know we don’t know. We can frame the right questions, but we haven’t found the answers yet. And then there are the things that “we don’t know we don’t know”. For these unknown unknowns, we can’t even frame the questions yet.
It is quite true that we can never rule out the possibility that there are such unknown unknowns, and that some of them will forever remain unknown, because for some (unknown) reason human intelligence is not up to the task.
But the important thing to note about these unknown unknowns is that nothing can be said about them. To presume from the outset that some unknown unknowns will always remain unknown, as mysterians do, is not modesty – it’s arrogance. | Nothing in our cognitive make-up prepared us for relativity theory, evolutionary biology or heliocentrism.
As the philosopher Robert McCauleywrites: “When first advanced, the suggestions that the Earth moves, that microscopic organisms can kill human beings, and that solid objects are mostly empty space were no less contrary to intuition and common sense than the most counterintuitive consequences of quantum mechanics have proved for us in the twentieth century.” McCauley’s astute observation provides reason for optimism, not pessimism.
Mind extensions
But can our puny brains really answer all conceivable questions and understand all problems? This depends on whether we are talking about bare, unaided brains or not. There’s a lot of things you can’t do with your naked brain. But Homo Sapiens is a tool-making species, and this includes a range of cognitive tools.
For example, our unaided sense organs cannot detect UV-light, ultrasound waves, X-rays or gravitational waves. But if you’re equipped with some fancy technology you can detect all those things. To overcome our perceptual limitations, scientists have developed a suite of tools and techniques: microscopes, X-ray film, Geiger counters, radio satellites detectors and so forth.
All these devices extend the reach of our minds by “translating” physical processes into some format that our sense organs can digest. So are we perceptually “closed” to UV light? In one sense, yes. But not if you take into account all our technological equipment and measuring devices.
In a similar way, we use physical objects (such as paper and pencil) to vastly increase the memory capacity of our naked brains. According to the British philosopher Andy Clark, our minds quite literally extend beyond our skins and skulls, in the form of notebooks, computers screens, maps and file drawers.
Mathematics is another fantastic mind-extension technology, which enables us to represent concepts that we couldn’t think of with our bare brains. | yes |
Epistemology | Can we know anything beyond our minds? | yes_statement | we can "know" things beyond our "minds".. knowledge extends beyond our "minds". | https://anniemurphypaul.com/ | Annie Murphy Paul - The Extended Mind | About The Extended Mind
“Use your head.” That’s what we tell ourselves when facing a tricky problem or a difficult project. But a growing body of research indicates that we’ve got it exactly backwards. What we need to do, says acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul, is think outside the brain. A host of “extra-neural” resources—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of those around us—can help us focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively. In The Extended Mind, Paul delves into the research behind this exciting new vision of human ability, exploring the findings of neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists. She excavates the secret history of how artists, scientists, and authors have employed mental extensions to solve problems, make discoveries, and create new works. And she explains how readers can incorporate outside-the-brain thinking into their everyday lives. In the tradition of Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind or Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, The Extended Mind offers a dramatic new view of how our minds work, full of practical advice on how to think better.
About the Author
Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. She is the author of Origins, The Cult of Personality, and now The Extended Mind. | About The Extended Mind
“Use your head.” That’s what we tell ourselves when facing a tricky problem or a difficult project. But a growing body of research indicates that we’ve got it exactly backwards. What we need to do, says acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul, is think outside the brain. A host of “extra-neural” resources—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of those around us—can help us focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively. In The Extended Mind, Paul delves into the research behind this exciting new vision of human ability, exploring the findings of neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists. She excavates the secret history of how artists, scientists, and authors have employed mental extensions to solve problems, make discoveries, and create new works. And she explains how readers can incorporate outside-the-brain thinking into their everyday lives. In the tradition of Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind or Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, The Extended Mind offers a dramatic new view of how our minds work, full of practical advice on how to think better.
About the Author
Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. She is the author of Origins, The Cult of Personality, and now The Extended Mind. | yes |
Epistemology | Can we know anything beyond our minds? | yes_statement | we can "know" things beyond our "minds".. knowledge extends beyond our "minds". | https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-annie-murphy-paul.html | This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Thinking - The ... | This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Thinking
Modern work culture is built on a broken model of the mind.
Something I’ve been wrestling with lately, both in my head and then, of course, on the show, is what I’ve come to think of as productivity paradoxes, these things that look and feel to us like work, like productivity, that the culture tells us are work and productivity but turn out to be the opposite. They turn out to be distractions or they turn out to miss something profound about how we work or how we think or even how we live.
If you remember, for instance, my interview with Cal Newport from earlier this year, that was about one of these: the way constant communication on platforms like Slack and Teams and to some degree even email, it codes as work, it looks like work, and it’s often a distraction not just from work but from its fundamental precursor, focus. There are also, of course, distractions from life and leisure. When we’re not able to work well in productivity in the time we’re supposed to do it, it expands outward into everything else. So this isn’t just about work but about being able to balance work and the rest of life.
Then I began reading this new book, “The Extended Mind” by Annie Murphy Paul. Paul is a science writer, and her book, the work here, began as an inquiry into how we learn, but then it became something else. It became a book about how we think. Because what came to tie her research together was this 1998 article by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers called “The Extended Mind,” which argued that there was a, quote, “active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes,” end quote. That what you should think of as our mind, and certainly the way our mind worked, was extending out beyond our head and was intimately shaped, like actually intertwined, with tools, with people, with the environment, with the visual field. And subsequent research really, really bore this out. And the implications of it, I think, are profound.
A lot of this book is about recognizing that we have the intuitive metaphor of our minds, that they’re an analytical machine, a computer of sorts. And we’ve taken this broken metaphor of the mind and then built schools and workplaces and society on top of it, built the built environment on top of it. And the result is that our work and school lives are littered with these productivity paradoxes.
What so often feels and looks like productivity and efficiency to us are often the very activities and habits that stunt our thinking. And many of the habits and activities that look like leisure, sometimes even look like play, like if you’ve taken a walk in the middle of the day or a nap, those end up unlocking our thinking. If the question is, how can we be the most creative or come up with the most profound productive insights, you need to do that stuff.
And so if you read it correctly, in my view at least, this is a pretty radical book. It has radical implications not just for how we think about ourselves but for policy, for architecture, for our social lives, for schooling, for the economy. And I’ll say that it has stuck with me quite a bit. It has changed the way I structure a bunch of my days. I’m trying to work with my mind more and against it less. As always, my email for guest suggestions, reading recommendations, whatever, is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
Annie Murphy Paul, welcome to the show.
annie murphy paul
Thanks, Ezra. I’m really glad to be here.
ezra klein
You have a quote in the book that encapsulates kind of the whole of it for me, and you’re talking here about the limits of the brain as a computer, this analogy that we use all the time. And you write, quote, “When fed a chunk of information, a computer processes it in the same way on each occasion, whether it’s been at work for five minutes or five hours, whether it is located in a fluorescent lit office or positioned next to a sunny window, whether it’s near other computers or is the only computer in the room. This is how computers operate.
But the same doesn’t hold for human beings. The way we’re able to think about information is dramatically affected by the state we’re in when we encounter it.” End of the quote. Why is that true? Why doesn’t our brain work the same way in all contexts?
annie murphy paul
Well, it has to do with the fact that our brain is a biological organ and an evolved organ that’s very different from a computer. And the computer metaphor for the brain has been dominant since the emergence of cognitive science in the middle of the last century, and it really permeates the way we think and talk about the brain, and it places these sort of invisible limits on how we use the brain, how we regard other people’s brains, and it’s because that metaphor is so faulty it leads us to act and to make choices in ways that are not at all optimal.
And so in this book, I wanted to challenge the metaphor of the computer and point out that, no, actually the brain evolved in particular settings, mostly outside. It evolved to do things like sense and move the body to find its way through three dimensional landscapes, to engage in encounters in small groups of people. These are the things that the brain does effortlessly, naturally. The brain is not a computer. It never was, and its failures are particular to its own nature, and it has to be understood on its own terms.
ezra klein
You argue that a lot of thinking — I don’t know if you’re quite saying happens in the body, but it’s certainly picked up by the body as opposed to picked up by our mental ruminations. And the body can in some ways be even more rational than what we think of as a brain. What do you mean by that? Make that argument for me.
annie murphy paul
Well, as we go through our everyday lives, there’s way more information than we can process or retain consciously. It would just completely explode our mental bandwidth. But we are taking in that information, noting regularities and patterns, and storing them in the non-conscious mind so that it can be used later when we encounter a similar situation. Then the question becomes, well, if it’s non-conscious, how do we make use of that information?
And it’s because the body lets us know. I mean, that’s what we call a gut feeling or what psychologists, what scientists call interoception, which is the perception of internal sensations that arise from within the body. And people who are more attuned to those internal signals and cues are better able to draw on that wealth of information that we know but we don’t know. We possess it, but we don’t know it explicitly or consciously. So that’s what a gut feeling is. It’s sort of your body tugging at your mental sleeve and saying, hey, you’ve been here before. You’ve had this experience before. Here’s how you responded. It worked or it didn’t work. Here’s what is the right thing to do now.
But in our world where we are so brain bound, so focused on the cerebral and the things that go on in our head, we tend to push the body aside, to quash those feelings, to override them, even, in the service of getting our mental work done, when really we should be cultivating that ability, becoming more attuned and more sensitive to it, because it has all this accumulated experience and information to share with us.
ezra klein
You cite a study that just floored me by the psychologist Antonio Damasio, which looked at the body picking up some of these unconscious processes in a pattern recognition game. Can you describe that?
annie murphy paul
Yeah. So Damasio set up a kind of card game online on a computer where players were asked to turn over cards from one of four decks. And they could choose which cards they wanted to turn over. And they were given a starting purse. The object was to gain as much money as possible and lose as little money as possible, because each card came with an associated reward or took some money away. And so the experimenter said go. People started clicking on the decks and turning over cards.
And unbeknownst to them, two of the decks were good decks. They contained many more rewards than punishments. And two of the decks were bad decks. They contained many more punishments that took away money than rewards that granted money. And the interesting thing is that as the participants played this game, their skin conductance was being monitored. That’s a measure of our nervous system arousal. And as the game progressed and the players were turning over these cards, their skin conductance started to flare whenever they considered taking a card from the bad deck, indicating that their bodies, their physiology, was reacting to the presence of threat.
And yet consciously, the players had no idea that two decks were good and two decks were bad. He knows this because he asked them and they had no clue about the pattern that was present in the game. But they began to slowly but surely learn this pattern in an unconscious way and avoid those bad decks more and more as the game went on, showing that they were learning, in a sense. But again, this was all non-conscious. So those of us who are more in touch with our internal sensations, and this is an ability that can be deliberately cultivated, can make better use of that wisdom and experience that is stored in a sense within the body.
ezra klein
You also cite some studies of Wall Street traders who seem to make more money when they’re more interoceptively attuned, when they’re better at reading their own body signals. But let’s stop here and say this is weird. If you’ve grown up in this culture and you’re a human who has been taught to trust the cold, rational processes, at least theoretically, of your brain, whereas intuition, bodily intuition, it sounds woolly. It sounds fuzzy. I mean, I live in the Bay Area. I hear about it all the time. I’ve come to take it more seriously in part for reasons like this. But it’s not just that some of us are bad at picking up our bodily signals but that we are taught that that’s a dumb way to go through the world. What does your body know? So what do you think is happening here? How is the body picking up a pattern before the brain is? What is being listened to there?
annie murphy paul
Yeah. Well, I think the attitude that you mentioned that paying attention to the body is sort of silly and sort of foolish comes from a very old idea in Western culture that mind and body are separate and that mind is made of this sort of special spiritual stuff and the body is this grubby kind of animal creature that needs to be subdued and that is irrational and doesn’t have anything — certainly doesn’t have anything to contribute to intelligent decision making or intelligent thinking.
And I argue in the book that a lot of what we consider to be built-in heuristics and biases that are inevitable that come along with having a human brain only show themselves when we’re using the brain alone and when we’re not incorporating this other resource of the body and its source of information. So I think this idea that the brain is the be all end all of sort of rational thinking is wrong. And you’re right. It is a radical challenge to the way we’re used to thinking.
ezra klein
If the point is to listen to the body, and it is clearly true that the body sometimes tells us not to do things that we should do ... the body being afraid of an airplane strikes me as a very rational thing for the body to be afraid of. But you should get on airplanes. Now maybe that’s an obvious one, because of course airplanes are unnatural given the evolution of our species. We don’t have wings and things that are heavy tend to not fly. But there are a lot of other things in our lives where the body gives us bad information or just challenging information.
And so what I’m hearing from you is actually another brain- bound way of interpreting the body. That’s trying to reconstruct what my body’s telling me to match what my brain thinks I should believe about the situation. But I think what I’m asking is if the body has so much wisdom but also sometimes that wisdom fails, when should I be listening to the body and when should I be listening to my prefrontal cortex?
annie murphy paul
I would say that I think we need to become more skilled at determining when the body’s signals are steering us in the right direction. I write in the book about keeping what’s known as an interoceptive journal. And that means when you’re contemplating a choice or decision, pay attention to how your body feels and note that down. And then maybe after that decision has been made and you have a sense of whether it was a successful decision or not, go back and take a look at how you felt when you made it.
And over time, collect many of these kinds of vignettes and look for a pattern. Does your body steer you right in certain kinds of situations, certain kinds of decisions, and would it have steered you wrong in others? That’s the kind of thing where right now we’re using our gut feelings, our interoception in a kind of haphazard way and in a non-intentional way. And when we become more aware of it, we don’t always have to follow its promptings. That’s true. But we should be aware of them and we should be aware of what they’re telling us. And we should be skilled enough to know when to listen and when to ignore.
ezra klein
That strikes me is really important. And I’ll liberally sprinkle in some personal experiences throughout this conversation. Over the past 10 or 15 years, I’ve deepened my meditation practice quite a bit. And one of the things that did unexpectedly was made me much more attuned to how my body was feeling. And I remember realizing at a certain point, this was probably five or six years ago now or maybe even a bit more, that I had been telling myself for years I was stressed when what I was was tired. And that I had actually lost the ability to hear my body well, and I was just trying to put everything in a cognitive framework that made sense to me.
But then the second part of that that I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on is we do a lot to try to keep our cognitive performance high that makes it hard to hear our bodies. So particularly for meditation, I notice if I’ve had a lot of caffeine that day, my body is just totally weird feeling. But I think there’s a lot like that. A therapist once told me that looking at social media is a kind of stimulant because it’s fast moving, it gives you little bits of dopamine, and that made total sense to me, that I look at social media to wake back up. I’m curious if you’ve thought about that, beyond just meditation, what we do that makes our body easier to hear and what we do that makes it harder to hear.
annie murphy paul
Oh, so interesting. I mean, well, meditation is definitely one of those things that makes it easier to hear, as you’ve found in your own experience. I talk in the book about doing a particular exercise that often starts off a meditation session called a body scan, which is when you pay attention in succession to parts of your body in this open minded, nonjudgmental way. And I recommend that people do this periodically, not even in a formal way, but just sort of checking in with their body throughout the day so that they stay rooted in their body and they know what’s going on in their body and they get the sort of regular infusion of interoceptive awareness. Because we can go through our day. We’re so busy. We’re so stimulated. A lot of these stimulants, whether it’s social media or caffeine, they mask the body’s signals and cues so that we can’t perceive them quite so well. So yes, I think it’s important to tune into those signals not only so we know what’s going on with us inside our own bodies, but it’s also the key to understanding what’s going on in other people. And this was very moving to me, actually, this strand of research that I explored for the book, which is that we don’t have a direct connection to other people’s brains, to what’s going on inside their heads. It’s rather opaque to us.
And so it’s actually the body that provides the channel for understanding in a really visceral way what they’re feeling. And when we speak to someone face to face, and this is another reason why in person contact is so important, when we speak to someone face to face, we very subtly mimic their expressions, their posture, their demeanor, and then we kind of read off from our own bodies what that feels like, what emotion is being created within us.
And that’s how we know how other people are feeling. That’s kind of the basis of empathy and emotional intelligence. And again, studies suggest that people who are more introceptively aware are able to be more empathetic. They’re able to be more accurate in how they understand other people, because they’re using their own body as a conduit to connect with the feelings inside that other person.
ezra klein
I want to move to another space of working with the body. So we’ve been talking here about listening to the body, listening to the body as an almost thinking organ that is giving you information in terms of how it feels. But you talk a lot in the book about using the body to create contexts in which we think better. Can you tell me a bit about what we’ve learned in recent decades about the relationship between bodily movement and cognition?
annie murphy paul
Yeah. And here again we’re talking about reversing the causal arrow in a sense. The way we usually think about it is the brain has an idea and it directs the body to do something and the body executes it. And that’s a very brain- bound way of thinking, obviously. But there’s another way, which is that we induce the body to make certain movements or enter certain kinds of spaces, like the outdoors, or move our hands in a certain way in a gesture, and that influences the way we think. And this is often a more efficient and effective way of affecting our thinking than starting and ending often with the brain and having it all happen inside our heads.
So for example, ideas will come to us when we’re moving, when we’re walking rather than when we’re sitting at our desk. Which the brain- bound computer model says it shouldn’t matter, but it does matter. And so when we change our context, when we change the way our body is moving, we can change the way the brain operates.
ezra klein
So I think we know that, but we don’t, for the most part, do it. And this, to me, is a really, really, really important part of the book that I want to tag out here explicitly. I thought one of the most challenging ideas laced through the book is what I came to think of as the productivity paradox, which is: the things that we have been taught to think of and feel as being productive are often not the best way for us to be productive. And I’ll use taking a walk as an example.
When I am behind on a piece, when I am struggling with my work, when I am having trouble getting something done, what feels to me like the responsible thing to do is chain myself to my computer and my desk and keep banging away at it. That there is some static number of minutes between me and the completion of this task, and I just got to get through them.
And if I were to go take a long walk or go to a coffee shop and just sit there and drink a coffee just on my own and eat a pastry, or do all kinds of things that are I would think of them as restful. I would think of them as a form of leisure. But your argument is that’s wrong, that that’s probably the best thing you can do at that moment, because your brain is not a computer and it’s not just working on the problem. But there is a cultural barrier to doing it, because shouldn’t I be working given that I’m behind?
annie murphy paul
Right, right. Well, and another factor in our culture that we haven’t mentioned yet that reinforces that idea are ideas from popular psychology like grit and the growth mindset, both of which have at their core another metaphor. Not the metaphor of brain as computer, but the metaphor of brain as muscle.
And people start thinking that the brain actually is a muscle, which of course it isn’t. And even as a metaphor, it’s very powerful because it carries with it — there are all these assumptions embedded in it — that lead us to think, oh, if the brain’s a muscle, then the more I work it, the more tirelessly and exhaustively I work this muscle, the stronger it gets, and the better I’ll be able to think.
And again, because metaphors are so powerful and they shape the way we use the brain, I propose my own metaphor in the book for what the brain is like. I compare the brain to a magpie, one of these birds that plucks a twig here and a piece of string here but also more unusual things. I mean, the catalog of things that magpies have incorporated into their nests is amazing, but the point is that they build their nests from whatever is available in their immediate environment and that the brain is something like that. It’s assembling its thought processes from what’s available in its environment. And that means that thinking better is not about working the brain ever harder. It’s about creating a space and a set of capacities wherein you have more and better resources from which to assemble your thought processes.
ezra klein
I’m going to try to offer another metaphor that I’ve thought about over the past couple of years. And this actually came to me when I was on a meditation retreat and I couldn’t stop thinking about something. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be thinking about this thing. I didn’t rationally think it was important anymore. I didn’t think any good was coming of thinking it, but I couldn’t stop.
And I began on that retreat, sitting in endless silence just with myself and my annoying brain, to think about the brain as a big corporation, like a multinational corporation that has, in theory, some goals it is trying to achieve as a whole but all these different divisions, and they’re all doing different things. And some of them are getting attention and some of them are well run and some of them, what they do comes to the focus of the main office all the time. And then others are just there still working on problems that the rest of the corporation has long ago moved on from. But there’s this way in which there are all these different divisions.
And one of the difficult things for me about the brain, but one of the things that your book sort of helped clarify, is that a question about the context you’re putting yourself in is which divisions of the brain are getting attention and are getting the raw materials, I guess, in this metaphor, maybe simply the budget, to actually do their work? There’s a different division that is helped by going on a walk than by staring at my computer, a different division that has helped by going on a vacation, a different division that has helped by meditation, a different division that is — and so on and so forth.
But it’s this weird way in which it’s not one thing. Different things are happening. And sometimes just like in a big organization, it’s unclear why or by whose order or why people aren’t all on the same page anymore. But it’s an emergent property of a lot of different processes that sometimes seem to be, certainly in my head, to be at cross purposes with each other.
annie murphy paul
Mm-hmm. I would just want to add to your metaphor, Ezra, that I’d like to see some of those divisions offshored, like outside the head. I’d like to understand some of those divisions as maybe not being inside the brain.
ezra klein
They’re contractors.
annie murphy paul
Contractors, contractors, right. Yeah, I mean, and that reminds me of yet another metaphor, because you can never have too many metaphors, but another metaphor I use for the brain, which is we shouldn’t think of it as a workhorse that we just need to keep lashing until your assignment is done, for example, but rather more like an orchestra conductor. Obviously there’s still a role for the brain. I don’t ever want to be understood as saying that the brain isn’t important or isn’t a central locus for thinking.
But it’s the role that we expect the brain to play that I think should be altered. I mean, if we think of the brain not as a workhorse but as an orchestra conductor, then we see the brain playing this role of bringing in this resource here and bringing in that resource now and knowing, in a skillful way, which resources to use and when. And that’s the kind of intellectual facility that we should be developing, I think, in our students and employees and in ourselves.
ezra klein
But I want to come back to this productivity paradox. And I’m going to give an example that struck me, because it happened while I was reading your book and it seemed like a good example of it. So two weeks ago, I was having a day where I wasn’t being that productive. And I was stressed because I had a lot of errands I had to do, including bringing my dogs to the dog camp, I guess, because we were going to go away for a couple of days. And it was going to take me about an hour, hour and half to do it. I had to pick them up new food. We had to drive like 30 minutes in each direction. There was traffic at the time I was doing this. And I was behind on my work. And more profoundly, I did not have a column idea, and it was coming to the point where I really needed one. And so what I’d be doing that day is clicking around the internet, reading news sites, reading Twitter, reading the different information flows that I thought would spark something for me. And I got nowhere with it.
And then at a certain point, I had to take my dogs. And I was frustrated by this. But it’s actually a nice drive. I was going down the 1. And just at some point on that drive, with no conscious work of my own at that moment, a great column idea popped into my head, totally different than everything I’d been looking at already. Something I actually really was excited about. Interoceptively, I got excited about it.
And I want to ask two things about this. One is what happened there? What occurred? And two, to be a little mindful about this, who the hell was thinking? It’s such a weird — directed thought is a process that makes some sense to me. But the thing where just an idea pops into your head, like you just pulled down the lever on the slot machine and won a prize. Or maybe you didn’t even pull down the lever. You just won a prize. It’s really wild. I think about this a lot in meditation. Who thought that thought? And so what is happening? And then I guess this speaks to our metaphors conversation. Who is thinking?
annie murphy paul
Well, someone who’s focused on the brain would say that that was your default network in action, that that was this sort of more associative and relaxed kind of mode that our brain gets into when we’re not intensely focused on a task, like when you were making that drive with your dog. And that can be allowing that mode to emerge, often by taking a walk or by being outside, those are some of the best ways to do it. Or taking a shower. People always have their best ideas in the shower or in the bath.
But because I’m not so focused on the brain and I’m focused on mental extensions, I want to point to something that I think about a lot said by Andy Clark. And Andy Clark is the philosopher who originated the idea of the extended mind. And he talks about how we are intrinsically loopy creatures, we’re loopy, and that that’s something that makes us very different from computers. Because computers work in this very linear fashion. It’s input output. It’s all a straight line.
But humans, because of the way our brain evolved, we benefit from looping information and knowledge and ideas in and out of these different domains, bringing in the contribution of our body, or passing it through the brains of other people, or experiencing and thinking about our ideas in a new setting, a new physical setting.
And as Andy Clark points out, a computer would never have an idea printed out, have to read it with their eyes, make up lots of marks in the margins, and then pass it around to their colleagues and then have a whole new understanding of that idea. That’s not how computers work, but that’s how people work. And so when we think of ourselves as loopy creatures, we can kind of create those loops where we’re passing information and ideas in and out of these different domains — the body, spaces, other people’s minds — and then back through our own heads. And that’s a much more fertile and generative way of dealing with information than just always keeping it inside our own heads where it’s not going to be changed or altered or improved in any way.
ezra klein
So I’ve been talking a lot about this idea of looping with my colleague Roge Karma, who worked with me on preparing this episode. And this, again, I think goes to this productivity problem about the ways in which things that feel or have the aesthetic of productivity are often not the most productive way to do things.
So if you look at the way we prepared to have this conversation with you, I read the entire book. Roge they read the entire book. We had three conversations about the book. He did a prep document about a book I had already read. Then we talked about that prep document. Then we did questions. Then we talked about the questions again. Then I rewrote the questions.
And compared to what you might think of as the efficient way to do the preparation here, which is that one of us reads the book and writes questions and then I walk in and read you questions, that just seems a lot more efficient. It’s one step and then it’s two steps, and then I’m done. But we found over time that it is this constant passing of the books and the work and our ideas back and forth and the conversations we have about them that lead to great conversations. And it looks and in some ways feels very inefficient, but the show does really well and I think is pretty good. And so it’s obviously working.
But one of the problems, I think, with looping for people is that it feels inefficient. It feels, if you’re working on something to then go take a walk or go play basketball or then talk to your friend and then come back to it and then write some of it down on a piece of paper, it seems ridiculous. You’re adding all of these steps. But your point is that this is how the brain works, and working the way the brain works is what’s going to get you the best results, which in theory is what all this efficiency talk is meant to get you to.
annie murphy paul
Right. Well, let’s work with the brain as it really is instead of pretending that it’s something else and getting mad at it or feeling that it’s failing when it doesn’t act like a computer.
ezra klein
One of the pieces of this that I just want to make sure we touch on before we leave this section of the conversation is, and this is not going to sound like a big deal before I say it, so I implore the audience to think of it as a big deal, that sitting still imposes a greater cognitive burden on the brain than standing or walking. And I think that sounds normal enough, and then you realize how much time and energy and social structure and public money has gone into trying to get us to sit still most of the time. And it actually seems quite crazy. So could you talk about that finding?
annie murphy paul
Yeah. Yeah, that really strikes me too, so I’m glad that you brought it up. I talk about that in the context of research having to do with children who have an ADHD diagnosis, but it applies to all of us in the sense that, again, we are these biological evolved creatures who are meant to be moving. Being still is not necessarily our natural state, certainly not for long periods of time. And so when we have to be still in an office or in a classroom, we have to inhibit our natural urge to move. And that uses up some of the mental bandwidth that could otherwise be applied to our learning or our work.
And then, in the case of kids who have attention deficit disorder, it’s actually the case that they use physical activity as a kind of stimulant just the way an adult would drink a cup of coffee before they needed to focus. Kids with ADHD use movement to kind of get them into the right mental state where they can concentrate. So meanwhile, parents and teachers are trying to get them to sit still so they can think, when really these kids, and many of us, need to move in order to think.
And one strand of research that I just love that I included in this section is about fidgeting. Again, because of our brain- bound attitudes, we see fidgeting as sort of gauche or maybe almost shady, like why is this person — why can’t they be still? When actually fidgeting is this brilliant kind of very subtle way of adjusting on a moment by moment basis our arousal, our physiological state of alertness.
And so if we were more intentional about fidgeting, we could even develop, and psychologists are exploring this, different kinds of fidget objects that induce different kinds of mental states in us that really precisely calibrate our mental state through this “embodied self regulation,” which is the phrase that one of these gesture researchers used. So all these different kinds of movements from the macro to the micro we could be using in a much more thoughtful and intelligent way, intentional way, to modulate the way our brains work.
ezra klein
But I want to talk about the macro, because I’m all bought in on the fidget research. When I led Vox, my office was filled with fidget toys. And I think people thought that was a kooky stylistic decision, but it’s actually because I have a lot of trouble paying attention in meetings if I can’t do something with my hands. But the thing where maybe sitting is not the right way to think, and yet everything in our life forces us to sit in the built environment, is I think actually pretty profound, and all the more so because it seems so banal when you say it.
So I’ll give a very simple example from this podcast. Before coronavirus, I did this in studios. And studios are little rooms. You sit at a desk and there’s a microphone there and somebody is watching you and you got to sit there, and that’s how the conversation goes. Then we hit the pandemic and now, like a lot of people, I record from home, because my office isn’t open. And during this period, I got a standing desk because I have some back and neck issues. And I noticed at a certain point that if, instead of sitting when I did podcast conversations I stood, it was much easier for me to maintain attention.
And in fact, not just that, but one reason I turn the video off when we do this is because I walk around while you talk. So I am pacing the room while you give your answers, not to give people too much insight into this. Because again, it’s much easier for me to listen if I’m moving. And I don’t think I’m alone in this. But then if I’m not, the fact that we make kids sit all day in school, the fact that meetings, it would be seen as very gauche, as you were saying, to just stand up in the middle of a meeting and wander around the perimeter of the room ...
We have desks at our offices. It goes to this idea that because we have misunderstood the metaphor we use for the mind, we’ve actually built an entire environment which makes it hard to think even as the point of that environment, in many cases, like school or work, is to make it easy to think, at least in certain kinds of jobs. It just seems wild to me.
annie murphy paul
Yeah. Yeah, I would add too that it may be, Ezra, that when you’re standing, you’re freer to gesture. And research suggests that gesturing by the person who’s doing it actually makes their speech more fluent. So maybe your own speech has become even more fluent as you’ve been recording in your home studio because you’re able to use your hands much more freely when you stand and walk around.
ezra klein
I want to ask you about that structural piece of it. Because what you’re describing here is a phenomenal market failure, a phenomenal market failure, right? Putting all of the ways in which it would be better for our lives or better for our minds or more fun to move around aside, we have all these different businesses. They all want to get a leg up on the competition. A huge amount of the American economy now is built around work where people have to come in and think about problems. I mean, manual labor is somewhat different. And by the way, manual labor often has a lot more movement built into it.
And so what you’re saying is that a tremendous amount of the global economy, the global built economy, the global work structure, is just wrong. It’s not a good way for people to work. I mean, we’ll get into some other pieces of this, like open space offices. But just the simplest one, that everybody gets a desk and that it’s hard to stand and hard to move around. What the hell happened? If this research is solid, and I think it’s intuitive. Like if you watch people on the phone, they like to walk around and talk. Then what the hell happened? How did we forget all this when we built every office on the planet Earth, basically?
annie murphy paul
And every school. Yeah, I mean, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from reporting and researching psychology for 25 years is that we often don’t know what’s best for us, and so we cling very firmly to these practices that don’t serve us. And it takes a kind of paradigm- changing new view to make us think, oh, maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe the way we’ve been doing things isn’t so great.
And I actually think the pandemic might be that kind of disruption that changes some of the ways that we educate kids and that we go about our own work. I think a lot of us have spent the last 16 months as brains in front of screens, and a lot of us have been working from day till night without a chat around the water cooler, without even a commute, without a break. All we do is work. All we do is use our brains.
And if the brain as muscle metaphor were really accurate, we would all be superheroes at this point, and we’re not. In fact, many of us feel that we’re not thinking nearly as well as we used to or normally do. And that’s because the pandemic, for many of us, cut off many of the mental extensions that really support our thinking. And I’m hoping that in a way they’ve made the existence and the importance of those mental extensions visible to us in a way that they have not been before.
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ezra klein
Let’s talk a bit about how offices are designed more broadly. So years ago I worked at The Washington Post, and this was in their older building. They’ve moved since then. It was a pretty gray aesthetic, which is to say, a lot of desks. They all had little cubicle extensions on them. It didn’t look cool, but I got a lot of good work done there.
When I moved to Vox Media, and Vox Media was a media company with a heavy tech flavor, and it was super cool when I walked into that office. Exposed brick and exposed piping and it’s all open and everybody’s at these big, long tables together. Way cooler than cubicles. And within not long at all, I really yearned for a cubicle again. Can you talk a bit about open space offices, some of the ideas that have emerged about collaboration as kind of human collision, and what maybe we misunderstood there?
annie murphy paul
Yeah, I really think your anecdote just there tells us how important it is to be sensitive to the effect of physical context on how we work. And again, that brain as computer metaphor would say, well, you can work anywhere. You should be able to think just as well anywhere, but clearly that’s not the case. And so that should lead us to pay more attention to what it is about these environments that are not working for us, that are not supporting intelligent thought or allowing us to extend our minds. And yes, the open office is one of the biggest culprits.
I write in the book about how the open office was based on an idea, a vision, and that was the coffee shop where people are moving and bustling around and having spontaneous conversations and colliding with each other in serendipitous ways. And the notion was that this was the perfect model for how knowledge work should be done. And in fact, it’s turned out to be a disaster, because again, the brain is an evolved organ that did not evolve to sit in one place and focus on symbols and abstractions for long periods of time. That’s a really difficult thing for the brain to do. It’s not one of those things that comes naturally to the brain.
So it needs lots of external support to do that. And one of the key external supports that it can have are walls. Walls that protect us from seeing and coming into contact with all the things that distract us most, which are novelty movement, social interactions among people. These are the things that our attention is just irresistibly drawn to. We can’t help it. It’s literally biologically wired into us. And so to put a whole bunch of people in one room and say, OK, now work together on separate projects, these complex involved cognitive kind of work that we do these days.
I think most people who have worked in an open office can acknowledge how very difficult it is. When we’re talking to people all the time, we all sort of coalesce because we are a very social species that’s concerned with creating consensus. We all kind of coalesce around some OK ideas, not great, but medium quality ideas. And then people who are all alone, the people who are kind of out on the outskirts doing all their own thinking, they come up with some amazing ideas and also a whole lot of losers.
And the best results are produced by those people who have a kind of oscillation between talking with people, going back and having a private space and private time and quiet to think about their own ideas, and then it’s actually another kind of loop. They’re looping it through the minds of other people and then they’re looping it back inside the space of their own mind. And so I think the monks who have been living in this kind of hybrid space for hundreds and hundreds of years actually were onto intermittent collaboration long before the researchers got to it.
ezra klein
There’s a bit of a tension here between parts of your book that are all about movement and collaboration and thinking with other people’s minds, and then you need walls and you need things to be quiet and you want to be able to shut out distractions. Can you talk a bit about that? Because there’s a way of reading this stuff where every study on its own it’s like, this thing makes you more productive and also its opposite makes you more productive. How do you balance all of it?
annie murphy paul
Well, I did sit with all this material for a very long time. This is one of those books that took a while. And I really did choose those examples and offer those recommendations that had the weight of evidence behind them. And people are different. And so they’ll find that different things work for them. And in fact, on Twitter I’ve heard a lot of people who say, hey, I work really great in coffee shops, like the real thing, like coffee shops. And I think there’s probably some interesting reasons behind that.
But I also do think that psychology has landed on some pretty basic ideas and recommendations for how we work best. A couple that we haven’t mentioned yet are that we think best in spaces where we feel like we have a sense of ownership and control. It concerns me that so many offices that are coming back online now are adopting this hot desking or hoteling model where it’s like, you come in, you grab a desk. It wasn’t your desk yesterday. It’s not going to be your desk tomorrow. I think that’s probably not an ideal situation for supporting intelligent thought.
Likewise, we think better when we have cues of identity around us that remind us who we are and what we’re doing in that particular setting and cues of belonging that remind us of the meaningful groups to which we belong. And all those things are stripped away and gone when we’re just occupying a desk in a very temporary way, which seems to be the model that many offices are moving toward.
ezra klein
One of my hypotheses reading the book and thinking back on my own experience is also that maybe all of these things work, but they don’t work all at the same time. And that always struck me as the odd irony of open floor or open office plans. And you tap this in the book, that there’s some evidence that when companies move to being an open plan office, they often see a reduction in the amount of collaboration and conversation that happens. And when I used to do that, I had noise canceling headphones on all the time, and I was simultaneously always over socialized and a little under socialized, which is to say that I couldn’t get away from people. So it’s not like I was yearning for more people. But the interactions I was having were not deep and they were not interactions I often wanted. So at the same time, it wasn’t that I was getting my social needs met. And I thought back to other times when I’ve been in offices or in more cubicles when you’re working and you want to leave the office and talk to people. You want to move to that other modality, which I guess speaks to your idea of looping.
It seems to me there’s a need to actually fully change the modalities, and the problem is when you try to combine too many of them at once. So you’re in an open office where you’re around people and you’re also on Slack where you’re digitally around people, but you have noise canceling headphones in, so in theory you’re not. And you just kind of keep going like this and you’re stacking them all in tension with each other instead of moving one to the next to the next in a more intuitive way.
annie murphy paul
Well, one of my goals with this book was to give people alternatives to this reigning brain- bound model, which tends to be very rigid, and as we said, imagines that the good student or the good worker is someone who sits quietly and still and doesn’t talk and is just sitting there until the work gets done. And that we actually need to acquire a kind of second education. We have this education and training within the workplace that tells us how to use our brains. Our brains have been cultivated, but how to use these outside the brain resources in a skillful way to bring in the right resource at the right time.
That’s not something anyone’s ever taught us. We’ve had to teach ourselves to the extent that we know how to do it. And so I agree; it’s not as if you can just pile up one technique on top of another and presto, you’re a genius. It’s more like we need to develop the flexibility and the knowledge of when to use which tool when. I mean, there might be times when a brain- bound approach is really appropriate. I am myself a very brain bound person. And I think that in some ways, writers write what they need to hear. [LAUGHS]
ezra klein
There’s definitely something to that.
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Let me ask you about another of the techniques in here, or the spaces that you explore in here, which is offloading. Can you tell me a bit about offloading?
annie murphy paul
Yeah. So offloading, this is probably the technique that has made the biggest difference in my own work. We really as a culture — again, this brain bound ethos we have — we really valorize people who can do things in their head. If you think of the memory champions who can calculate however many digits of pi or chess grandmasters who can work out the whole game in their head. We think that’s so amazing. And it is an amazing human feat.
But really what produces effective work in our own daily lives often involves offloading our mental contents onto physical space, whether that’s a whiteboard or a set of post-it notes, which is my favorite tool, or onto multiple monitors so that we can start using this whole other suite of abilities that are built into the human organism. We have evolved to sort of effortlessly use these spatial and navigational capacities that our bodies have to use our spatial memory, to move through space in ways that allow us to get a new perspective on things, to manipulate tools. And when we can turn our ideas and pieces of information effectively into manipulable objects and into a 3D landscape that we can navigate through, we all of a sudden have access to all these embodied resources that are wasted when we’re just sitting there very still looking at a small screen.
ezra klein
Two questions on this. So one, why is the particular material or medium that we offload to so important? You just mentioned looking at a small screen. I was thinking as you said it that — so my version of offloading is my workstation is I have a computer and then I keep next to it two notebooks at all times. And one notebook is for any to do item that ever pops into my head.
Email this person. Call the doctor. Write a column. Whatever it might be. Just anything that is, it has to happen later, and then another just for notes and ideas. But I found over time I couldn’t do that on the computer. I have all kinds of to- do apps and note taking apps, but I had to move over to paper, which has a different feeling when I’m on it. So you talked about screens. Why do we think differently when looking at different things?
annie murphy paul
That’s really interesting. Well, the size of the screen matters. As I mentioned, there’s a lot of benefits to be gotten from having multiple or very large screens. And that’s because it consumes cognitive bandwidth to have to scroll and make things bigger or smaller or find where we filed something. All of that gets offloaded when it’s spread out in front of us and we can remember with our spatial memory, oh, that piece of information is over here on my right, rather than having to navigate with our electronic tools. And so it’s not necessarily that screens are the problem, because big screens can and do enhance our thinking.
On the other hand, I write a lot in the book about how artists and designers and people who swear by the pencil and the conversation that happens between pencil and hand and eye and paper that, again, it’s kind of a misunderstanding to think that the brain conceptualizes an idea or an image and then tells the hand how to execute it and then it’s done. That’s a very computer-like idea of how work happens. Instead, artists and designers find that it’s much more of an iterative process where they draw something. They make a mark, and then the mark reminds them of something. And they add another mark. And it’s a conversation, again, between hand and eye and paper and pencil. And I think the materials we use to do our thinking with, our external outside the brain thinking, can make a big difference in terms of what kinds of thoughts we’re able to have.
ezra klein
You don’t talk too much about why this might work worse on screens, but let me try something out on you, which is that screens also have a pretty intense conversation. So when I move to write something on my to do notebook, it just goes on the notebook and that’s all that really happens. If I go open up my app, it’s like my dock expands and I see notifications and all kinds of things begin to happen.
And so it’s a conversation not just between your eye and your pencil and your paper, but everything that your computer is doing. When I’m looking right now at the screen on which we’re recording, I’ve got all — I can see some tabs. I can see extensions. And if I’m thoughtful about it, I remember to get rid of that stuff before I try to get into a focused place. But every time I change a screen, a lot more comes up.
So is part of it simply that when you’re offloading, part of the danger is you don’t want to onboard new things? You’re actually trying to get things off. And computers, phones, et cetera, so many of the things are built to onboard new things in order to capture our attention for a little bit longer.
annie murphy paul
Yeah, no doubt. I mean, that makes me think of how ecological psychologists talk about how different tools have different affordances. We can do different things with them. We’re led to do different things with them. And part of the beauty of an old fashioned print book or a notebook that is just — or a sketchpad that just has a bunch of blank pages — is there’s not all those built in distractions that are just waiting to leap out at you.
And the idea of the extended mind actually originated not in thinking about how we extend our minds with the body or with spaces or with other people. Those kind of came in later, because the idea of the extended mind is so generative and can operate as this kind of umbrella concept. Originally the idea of the extended mind was looking at tools like a notebook, like a smartphone, and how they assume some of our mental functions for us and thereby extend our minds.
But I am really interested in the ways that many of our tools, especially our digital tools, don’t end up extending our minds at all. They actually contract them. I could write another book called the contracted mind. But I think we have to, again, be really intentional and really skillful in the way that we use our devices to make sure that they are extending our minds in the way that they can and not actually diminishing our thinking.
ezra klein
Well, let’s talk about the distinction you made right there between expanding and contracting the mind. Because a point you make in the book is that we often think about the demand side of our attention, which is to say, we think about what we want to devote our attention to and that we need to be tougher about being rigorous about where we put our attention. We need to work harder at devoting our attention. But you talk about working on the supply side of our attention, trying to expand the amount of attention we have, trying to replenish the attention we have. So how does using that framework change what you do? If I’m tired or I’m getting ready for a podcast, what do I do to expand the supply side of my attention?
annie murphy paul
Well, it helps to know that — I’m going to be a broken record with this — the human brain evolved in a very specific environment, and that environment was outside. And that’s how our forebears spent their time for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s a fairly recent development that we spend all this time, more than 90 percent of our time, inside buildings and inside cars and even when we’re outside in sort of urban, highly built up urban settings.
And the thing about the outdoors and the way that the human species evolved in the outdoors, all the information that we encounter, the sensory information that we encounter in nature, is processed really easily and effortlessly and efficiently by the brain. Our sensory faculties are kind of tuned to the kind of information and stimuli that we encounter in nature. And so this is, again, this is the scientific reason behind what everybody knows, which is that you feel more relaxed and more at ease when you take a walk outside and when you spend time in nature.
But what that has to do with attention is that that kind of diffuse attention that we’re able to spend in nature, where we’re not focusing very intently on anything but we’re just kind of allowing the gentle movements and the sort of soft contours of the things that we see outside just entertain our attention but in this very diffuse way, and the phrase psychologists use that I like is called soft fascination. It’s not a hard edged concentration. It’s a kind of soft fascination that you might experience when you’re looking at leaves rustling in the wind or watching waves on the ocean.
That state restores our attention. It kind of refills the tank in a sense. And so then we can return to our desk and we can return to that hard edged kind of concentration that we have to do to complete our studies or do our work. So I would say in your example that if you need to concentrate but you’re feeling frazzled, even a brief look out the window can have this kind of restorative effect. But ideally, a longer walk in nature would be good.
ezra klein
So I have two questions about that. And let me start with this one. There is this overwhelming amount of research that I’ve read in all these different books about how much better the mind works in nature and how nature replenishes our memory and it makes us more creative. And have somebody take a walk and then have them solve problems and their problem solving is better afterwards. And yet people are much more productive in cities.
The locus of economic and to some degree idea generation is going more and more towards agglomerations of people. It’s not like per person rural areas are wildly more productive than urban ones. And it seems to me there is some tension between how clear the research seems to be that nature is good for our minds and how clear the actual patterns of economic and creative growth are that being around a lot of other people in a concrete jungle is good for idea generation and human organization and economic organization. How do you reconcile those?
annie murphy paul
That’s an interesting point, Ezra. I mean, I would point out that even within cities and suburbs, there’s a really unequal distribution of access to green areas and green spaces. And your paper had an excellent article about this a couple of weeks ago, about how much more tree cover affluent areas have as opposed to poor areas. And so even within those urban environments, there’s often a chance to go out to a park or to encounter green space in some other way, a green roof, for example, or a garden planted within a building.
But that actually brings up for me a point that is very dear to my heart that emerged from this book. As I said, I felt sort of radicalized by this book. And one thing I realized as I was writing it is that there is a kind of inequality that we don’t really recognize, again, because our brain-bound society has this sort of blind spot for all the ways that we think outside the brain. There’s an extension inequality.
By that I mean that people don’t have equal access to the mental extensions that allow us to think well. And differential access to green space, I think, is an example of that. Some people are able to restore their attention in green spaces and return to their work refreshed and able to focus, and some people simply don’t have access to that kind of opportunity. And yet we don’t really see that as the kind of inequality that affects how well people can perform and how we judge them in terms of their performance.
ezra klein
So if all that’s true, why do so many people live in New York? Why is there so much creativity there? Why is there so much economic generation there? Why don’t these studies that seem very compelling one by one at the micro level ladder up to the macro patterns of our economy?
annie murphy paul
Well, people are complicated, I would say, and there’s all these different factors that we’re talking about, and we haven’t even really gotten to this idea of how we extend our minds with the minds of other people. And it may be that in the case of a place like New York, where there’s this intense creative activity going on, having access to a critical mass of these intelligent, creative, stimulating people is what really makes the difference.
I would also point out that just because you live in a rural area doesn’t mean you’re outside any more than the average urban dweller. Americans spend very little time outside, and that’s true across the kinds of places that people live. It’s just how we operate these days. It’s what modern life is like for all of us.
ezra klein
So then let’s move to this question of the inequality of it all. Because everything we’ve been talking about, from having control of your workplace to having greenery around you to, I mean, you talk about gestures, and there’s even an inequality in the gestures that poor kids and richer kids see growing up. There’s a tremendous amount of inequality in these mind extenders. And that’s a real problem that there is not, I think, an obvious agenda for fixing. So how did this make you look at inequality in cognitive development and then in the economy differently?
annie murphy paul
Well, it makes me think of an encounter I had. I live in New Haven, Connecticut, and I teach Yale students sometimes and I encounter them a lot. And I was describing this idea of the extended mind to a group of them recently, and I was especially interested to hear what they thought, because this is a generation that grew up extending their minds with their smartphones, that never didn’t have smartphones around. So I thought it would be really interesting to hear what they thought about it.
And many of them did seem excited by the idea or interested in the idea. But there was one young man who just looked more and more perturbed as I described the idea and its implications. And finally he burst out, this is a very dangerous idea. And I thought, why? I’m interested that you have that response. Why? And as he explained, it came to seem that this young man who, following the dictates of his culture and his particular subculture, had been striving his whole life for this kind of individual achievement and had been rewarded very handsomely for it. And the idea that actually maybe it wasn’t all his brain that did it was quite threatening.
And I think as the implications of my own research and reporting and writing were becoming clear to me, I too had to kind of wrestle with all these assumptions I’d made about what constitutes individual achievement and what intelligent thought is and where it happens and how to foster it. More than any book I’ve written, I would say it really kind of forced a reconsideration for me of many long held assumptions and beliefs.
ezra klein
Because here is my concern. And I get why that student said these are dangerous ideas. That as these ideas filter out, if they are true, and they seem true to me, they are going to be just one more generator of inequality as people come to understand them. That you will have rich kids being sent to schools where you can move around, which is already to some degree true, and poor kids in schools where you really got to sit your butt at your desk all day.
And it kind of goes all up and down the line, from trees to your office space to the kind of job you have, and even just having a more accurate conception of your own mind allows you to work with it differently. And that will filter first too. So that to me is the slightly scary thing about this whole set of ideas, which is that on the one hand, it’s a very structural way to me of thinking about cognitive capacity.
And it allows you to think about deficiencies in it and inequalities in it from a structural perspective, not just about insufficient willpower or stick-to-itness on the part of people. But on the other hand, it really implicates a lot of our society in ways that would be hard to change. So the people who will get to change them are the people who have the resources and the freedom and the employers who will make new accommodations and try to read the research. And so it just becomes one more way that we widen the chasms in our society.
annie murphy paul
Well, a more optimistic perspective, and it’s the one that I tend to take, is that the scariest situation of all would be not even seeing that these mental extensions exist and have an impact on how well we think, which is the state we’ve been in, I think, for a long time. So the first step would be to see and acknowledge the role of mental extensions in thinking and how people don’t have equitable access to mental extensions.
And then a second step might be starting to adjust our systems of assessment and judgement to take into account the kinds of mental extensions that students and workers have access to or don’t. And then the third and the most difficult step of all would be to try to actually in some ways redistribute mental extensions, equalize them, make sure that everyone has access to these basic goods, these raw materials of intelligent thought. And yes, that will be incredibly difficult.
But I think if we have that as a goal, that’s much better than this sort of benighted and blinkered state we’re in now where we think that all that matters is how big a lump of brain you have inside your skull, which is really such a constrained and impoverished idea of what intelligence is and where it comes from.
ezra klein
I think that’s a good place and an optimistic place to end. So let me ask you always our final question, which is, what are three books you would recommend people use to extend their minds with?
annie murphy paul
Well, the first is “Supersizing the Mind” by Andy Clark. He’s the originator of the extended mind theory. And although he’s an ivory tower philosopher, he writes like a dream. He’s so funny and clever, and I really enjoy his writing always. The second is “Mind in Motion” by Barbara Tversky. She’s a professor at Teachers College in New York. And that’s about how the body affects the way the mind operates, and it’s just a great primer on embodied cognition.
And then the third one, I thought it was going to be kind of a wild card out from left field, but actually we touched on it quite explicitly during this conversation, Ezra. It’s “Thoughts Without a Thinker” by Mark Epstein, who is a psychiatrist who practices Western psychotherapy but also is a scholar of Buddhism and integrates the two. And you were saying in our conversation earlier today, who is the one who’s thinking? Who is the person who’s having these thoughts? I really think Mark Epstein takes on those questions in a really interesting way.
ezra klein
Annie Murphy Paul, thank you very much.
annie murphy paul
Thank you, Ezra. [MUSIC PLAYING]
ezra klein
The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.
This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Thinking
Modern work culture is built on a broken model of the mind.
Something I’ve been wrestling with lately, both in my head and then, of course, on the show, is what I’ve come to think of as productivity paradoxes, these things that look and feel to us like work, like productivity, that the culture tells us are work and productivity but turn out to be the opposite. They turn out to be distractions or they turn out to miss something profound about how we work or how we think or even how we live.
If you remember, for instance, my interview with Cal Newport from earlier this year, that was about one of these: the way constant communication on platforms like Slack and Teams and to some degree even email, it codes as work, it looks like work, and it’s often a distraction not just from work but from its fundamental precursor, focus. There are also, of course, distractions from life and leisure. When we’re not able to work well in productivity in the time we’re supposed to do it, it expands outward into everything else. So this isn’t just about work but about being able to balance work and the rest of life.
Then I began reading this new book, “The Extended Mind” by Annie Murphy Paul. Paul is a science writer, and her book, the work here, began as an inquiry into how we learn, but then it became something else. It became a book about how we think. Because what came to tie her research together was this 1998 article by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers called “The Extended Mind,” which argued that there was a, quote, “active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes,” end quote. That what you should think of as our mind, and certainly the way our mind worked, was extending out beyond our head and was intimately shaped, like actually intertwined, with tools, with people, with the environment, with the visual field. And subsequent research really, really bore this out. And the implications of it, I think, are profound.
A lot of this book is about recognizing that we have the intuitive metaphor of our minds, that they’re an analytical machine, a computer of sorts. And we’ve taken this broken metaphor of the mind and then built schools and workplaces and society on top of it, built the built environment on top of it. And the result is that our work and school lives are littered with these productivity paradoxes.
What so often feels and looks like productivity and efficiency to us are often the very activities and habits that stunt our thinking. And many of the habits and activities that look like leisure, sometimes even look like play, like if you’ve taken a walk in the middle of the day or a nap, those end up unlocking our thinking. If the question is, how can we be the most creative or come up with the most profound productive insights, you need to do that stuff.
And so if you read it correctly, in my view at least, this is a pretty radical book. It has radical implications not just for how we think about ourselves but for policy, for architecture, for our social lives, for schooling, for the economy. And I’ll say that it has stuck with me quite a bit. It has changed the way I structure a bunch of my days. I’m trying to work with my mind more and against it less. As always, my email for guest suggestions, reading recommendations, whatever, is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
Annie Murphy Paul, welcome to the show.
annie murphy paul
Thanks, Ezra. I’m really glad to be here.
ezra klein
You have a quote in the book that encapsulates kind of the whole of it for me, and you’re talking here about the limits of the brain as a computer, this analogy that we use all the time. And you write, quote, “When fed a chunk of information, a computer processes it in the same way on each occasion, whether it’s been at work for five minutes or five hours, whether it is located in a fluorescent lit office or positioned next to a sunny window, whether it’s near other computers or is the only computer in the room. This is how computers operate.
But the same doesn’t hold for human beings. The way we’re able to think about information is dramatically affected by the state we’re in when we encounter it.” End of the quote. Why is that true? Why doesn’t our brain work the same way in all contexts?
annie murphy paul
Well, it has to do with the fact that our brain is a biological organ and an evolved organ that’s very different from a computer. And the computer metaphor for the brain has been dominant since the emergence of cognitive science in the middle of the last century, and it really permeates the way we think and talk about the brain, and it places these sort of invisible limits on how we use the brain, how we regard other people’s brains, and it’s because that metaphor is so faulty it leads us to act and to make choices in ways that are not at all optimal.
And so in this book, I wanted to challenge the metaphor of the computer and point out that, no, actually the brain evolved in particular settings, mostly outside. It evolved to do things like sense and move the body to find its way through three dimensional landscapes, to engage in encounters in small groups of people. These are the things that the brain does effortlessly, naturally. The brain is not a computer. It never was, and its failures are particular to its own nature, and it has to be understood on its own terms.
ezra klein
You argue that a lot of thinking — I don’t know if you’re quite saying happens in the body, but it’s certainly picked up by the body as opposed to picked up by our mental ruminations. And the body can in some ways be even more rational than what we think of as a brain. What do you mean by that? Make that argument for me.
annie murphy paul
Well, as we go through our everyday lives, there’s way more information than we can process or retain consciously. It would just completely explode our mental bandwidth. But we are taking in that information, noting regularities and patterns, and storing them in the non-conscious mind so that it can be used later when we encounter a similar situation. Then the question becomes, well, if it’s non-conscious, how do we make use of that information?
And it’s because the body lets us know. I mean, that’s what we call a gut feeling or what psychologists, what scientists call interoception, which is the perception of internal sensations that arise from within the body. And people who are more attuned to those internal signals and cues are better able to draw on that wealth of information that we know but we don’t know. We possess it, but we don’t know it explicitly or consciously. So that’s what a gut feeling is. It’s sort of your body tugging at your mental sleeve and saying, hey, you’ve been here before. You’ve had this experience before. Here’s how you responded. It worked or it didn’t work. Here’s what is the right thing to do now.
But in our world where we are so brain bound, so focused on the cerebral and the things that go on in our head, we tend to push the body aside, to quash those feelings, to override them, even, in the service of getting our mental work done, when really we should be cultivating that ability, becoming more attuned and more sensitive to it, because it has all this accumulated experience and information to share with us.
ezra klein
You cite a study that just floored me by the psychologist Antonio Damasio, which looked at the body picking up some of these unconscious processes in a pattern recognition game. Can you describe that?
annie murphy paul
Yeah. So Damasio set up a kind of card game online on a computer where players were asked to turn over cards from one of four decks. And they could choose which cards they wanted to turn over. And they were given a starting purse. The object was to gain as much money as possible and lose as little money as possible, because each card came with an associated reward or took some money away. And so the experimenter said go. People started clicking on the decks and turning over cards.
And unbeknownst to them, two of the decks were good decks. They contained many more rewards than punishments. And two of the decks were bad decks. They contained many more punishments that took away money than rewards that granted money. And the interesting thing is that as the participants played this game, their skin conductance was being monitored. That’s a measure of our nervous system arousal. And as the game progressed and the players were turning over these cards, their skin conductance started to flare whenever they considered taking a card from the bad deck, indicating that their bodies, their physiology, was reacting to the presence of threat.
And yet consciously, the players had no idea that two decks were good and two decks were bad. He knows this because he asked them and they had no clue about the pattern that was present in the game. But they began to slowly but surely learn this pattern in an unconscious way and avoid those bad decks more and more as the game went on, showing that they were learning, in a sense. But again, this was all non-conscious. So those of us who are more in touch with our internal sensations, and this is an ability that can be deliberately cultivated, can make better use of that wisdom and experience that is stored in a sense within the body.
ezra klein
You also cite some studies of Wall Street traders who seem to make more money when they’re more interoceptively attuned, when they’re better at reading their own body signals. But let’s stop here and say this is weird. If you’ve grown up in this culture and you’re a human who has been taught to trust the cold, rational processes, at least theoretically, of your brain, whereas intuition, bodily intuition, it sounds woolly. It sounds fuzzy. I mean, I live in the Bay Area. I hear about it all the time. I’ve come to take it more seriously in part for reasons like this. But it’s not just that some of us are bad at picking up our bodily signals but that we are taught that that’s a dumb way to go through the world. What does your body know? So what do you think is happening here? How is the body picking up a pattern before the brain is? What is being listened to there?
annie murphy paul
Yeah. Well, I think the attitude that you mentioned that paying attention to the body is sort of silly and sort of foolish comes from a very old idea in Western culture that mind and body are separate and that mind is made of this sort of special spiritual stuff and the body is this grubby kind of animal creature that needs to be subdued and that is irrational and doesn’t have anything — certainly doesn’t have anything to contribute to intelligent decision making or intelligent thinking.
And I argue in the book that a lot of what we consider to be built-in heuristics and biases that are inevitable that come along with having a human brain only show themselves when we’re using the brain alone and when we’re not incorporating this other resource of the body and its source of information. So I think this idea that the brain is the be all end all of sort of rational thinking is wrong. And you’re right. It is a radical challenge to the way we’re used to thinking.
ezra klein
If the point is to listen to the body, and it is clearly true that the body sometimes tells us not to do things that we should do ... the body being afraid of an airplane strikes me as a very rational thing for the body to be afraid of. But you should get on airplanes. Now maybe that’s an obvious one, because of course airplanes are unnatural given the evolution of our species. We don’t have wings and things that are heavy tend to not fly. But there are a lot of other things in our lives where the body gives us bad information or just challenging information.
And so what I’m hearing from you is actually another brain- bound way of interpreting the body. That’s trying to reconstruct what my body’s telling me to match what my brain thinks I should believe about the situation. But I think what I’m asking is if the body has so much wisdom but also sometimes that wisdom fails, when should I be listening to the body and when should I be listening to my prefrontal cortex?
annie murphy paul
I would say that I think we need to become more skilled at determining when the body’s signals are steering us in the right direction. I write in the book about keeping what’s known as an interoceptive journal. And that means when you’re contemplating a choice or decision, pay attention to how your body feels and note that down. And then maybe after that decision has been made and you have a sense of whether it was a successful decision or not, go back and take a look at how you felt when you made it.
And over time, collect many of these kinds of vignettes and look for a pattern. Does your body steer you right in certain kinds of situations, certain kinds of decisions, and would it have steered you wrong in others? That’s the kind of thing where right now we’re using our gut feelings, our interoception in a kind of haphazard way and in a non-intentional way. And when we become more aware of it, we don’t always have to follow its promptings. That’s true. But we should be aware of them and we should be aware of what they’re telling us. And we should be skilled enough to know when to listen and when to ignore.
ezra klein
That strikes me is really important. And I’ll liberally sprinkle in some personal experiences throughout this conversation. Over the past 10 or 15 years, I’ve deepened my meditation practice quite a bit. And one of the things that did unexpectedly was made me much more attuned to how my body was feeling. And I remember realizing at a certain point, this was probably five or six years ago now or maybe even a bit more, that I had been telling myself for years I was stressed when what I was was tired. And that I had actually lost the ability to hear my body well, and I was just trying to put everything in a cognitive framework that made sense to me.
But then the second part of that that I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on is we do a lot to try to keep our cognitive performance high that makes it hard to hear our bodies. So particularly for meditation, I notice if I’ve had a lot of caffeine that day, my body is just totally weird feeling. But I think there’s a lot like that. A therapist once told me that looking at social media is a kind of stimulant because it’s fast moving, it gives you little bits of dopamine, and that made total sense to me, that I look at social media to wake back up. I’m curious if you’ve thought about that, beyond just meditation, what we do that makes our body easier to hear and what we do that makes it harder to hear.
annie murphy paul
Oh, so interesting. I mean, well, meditation is definitely one of those things that makes it easier to hear, as you’ve found in your own experience. I talk in the book about doing a particular exercise that often starts off a meditation session called a body scan, which is when you pay attention in succession to parts of your body in this open minded, nonjudgmental way. And I recommend that people do this periodically, not even in a formal way, but just sort of checking in with their body throughout the day so that they stay rooted in their body and they know what’s going on in their body and they get the sort of regular infusion of interoceptive awareness. Because we can go through our day. We’re so busy. We’re so stimulated. A lot of these stimulants, whether it’s social media or caffeine, they mask the body’s signals and cues so that we can’t perceive them quite so well. So yes, I think it’s important to tune into those signals not only so we know what’s going on with us inside our own bodies, but it’s also the key to understanding what’s going on in other people. And this was very moving to me, actually, this strand of research that I explored for the book, which is that we don’t have a direct connection to other people’s brains, to what’s going on inside their heads. It’s rather opaque to us.
And so it’s actually the body that provides the channel for understanding in a really visceral way what they’re feeling. And when we speak to someone face to face, and this is another reason why in person contact is so important, when we speak to someone face to face, we very subtly mimic their expressions, their posture, their demeanor, and then we kind of read off from our own bodies what that feels like, what emotion is being created within us.
And that’s how we know how other people are feeling. That’s kind of the basis of empathy and emotional intelligence. And again, studies suggest that people who are more introceptively aware are able to be more empathetic. They’re able to be more accurate in how they understand other people, because they’re using their own body as a conduit to connect with the feelings inside that other person.
ezra klein
I want to move to another space of working with the body. So we’ve been talking here about listening to the body, listening to the body as an almost thinking organ that is giving you information in terms of how it feels. But you talk a lot in the book about using the body to create contexts in which we think better. Can you tell me a bit about what we’ve learned in recent decades about the relationship between bodily movement and cognition?
annie murphy paul
Yeah. And here again we’re talking about reversing the causal arrow in a sense. The way we usually think about it is the brain has an idea and it directs the body to do something and the body executes it. And that’s a very brain- bound way of thinking, obviously. But there’s another way, which is that we induce the body to make certain movements or enter certain kinds of spaces, like the outdoors, or move our hands in a certain way in a gesture, and that influences the way we think. And this is often a more efficient and effective way of affecting our thinking than starting and ending often with the brain and having it all happen inside our heads.
So for example, ideas will come to us when we’re moving, when we’re walking rather than when we’re sitting at our desk. Which the brain- bound computer model says it shouldn’t matter, but it does matter. And so when we change our context, when we change the way our body is moving, we can change the way the brain operates.
ezra klein
So I think we know that, but we don’t, for the most part, do it. And this, to me, is a really, really, really important part of the book that I want to tag out here explicitly. I thought one of the most challenging ideas laced through the book is what I came to think of as the productivity paradox, which is: the things that we have been taught to think of and feel as being productive are often not the best way for us to be productive. And I’ll use taking a walk as an example.
When I am behind on a piece, when I am struggling with my work, when I am having trouble getting something done, what feels to me like the responsible thing to do is chain myself to my computer and my desk and keep banging away at it. That there is some static number of minutes between me and the completion of this task, and I just got to get through them.
And if I were to go take a long walk or go to a coffee shop and just sit there and drink a coffee just on my own and eat a pastry, or do all kinds of things that are I would think of them as restful. I would think of them as a form of leisure. But your argument is that’s wrong, that that’s probably the best thing you can do at that moment, because your brain is not a computer and it’s not just working on the problem. But there is a cultural barrier to doing it, because shouldn’t I be working given that I’m behind?
annie murphy paul
Right, right. Well, and another factor in our culture that we haven’t mentioned yet that reinforces that idea are ideas from popular psychology like grit and the growth mindset, both of which have at their core another metaphor. Not the metaphor of brain as computer, but the metaphor of brain as muscle.
And people start thinking that the brain actually is a muscle, which of course it isn’t. And even as a metaphor, it’s very powerful because it carries with it — there are all these assumptions embedded in it — that lead us to think, oh, if the brain’s a muscle, then the more I work it, the more tirelessly and exhaustively I work this muscle, the stronger it gets, and the better I’ll be able to think.
And again, because metaphors are so powerful and they shape the way we use the brain, I propose my own metaphor in the book for what the brain is like. I compare the brain to a magpie, one of these birds that plucks a twig here and a piece of string here but also more unusual things. I mean, the catalog of things that magpies have incorporated into their nests is amazing, but the point is that they build their nests from whatever is available in their immediate environment and that the brain is something like that. It’s assembling its thought processes from what’s available in its environment. And that means that thinking better is not about working the brain ever harder. It’s about creating a space and a set of capacities wherein you have more and better resources from which to assemble your thought processes.
ezra klein
I’m going to try to offer another metaphor that I’ve thought about over the past couple of years. And this actually came to me when I was on a meditation retreat and I couldn’t stop thinking about something. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be thinking about this thing. I didn’t rationally think it was important anymore. I didn’t think any good was coming of thinking it, but I couldn’t stop.
And I began on that retreat, sitting in endless silence just with myself and my annoying brain, to think about the brain as a big corporation, like a multinational corporation that has, in theory, some goals it is trying to achieve as a whole but all these different divisions, and they’re all doing different things. And some of them are getting attention and some of them are well run and some of them, what they do comes to the focus of the main office all the time. And then others are just there still working on problems that the rest of the corporation has long ago moved on from. But there’s this way in which there are all these different divisions.
And one of the difficult things for me about the brain, but one of the things that your book sort of helped clarify, is that a question about the context you’re putting yourself in is which divisions of the brain are getting attention and are getting the raw materials, I guess, in this metaphor, maybe simply the budget, to actually do their work? There’s a different division that is helped by going on a walk than by staring at my computer, a different division that has helped by going on a vacation, a different division that has helped by meditation, a different division that is — and so on and so forth.
But it’s this weird way in which it’s not one thing. Different things are happening. And sometimes just like in a big organization, it’s unclear why or by whose order or why people aren’t all on the same page anymore. But it’s an emergent property of a lot of different processes that sometimes seem to be, certainly in my head, to be at cross purposes with each other.
annie murphy paul
Mm-hmm. I would just want to add to your metaphor, Ezra, that I’d like to see some of those divisions offshored, like outside the head. I’d like to understand some of those divisions as maybe not being inside the brain.
ezra klein
They’re contractors.
annie murphy paul
Contractors, contractors, right. Yeah, I mean, and that reminds me of yet another metaphor, because you can never have too many metaphors, but another metaphor I use for the brain, which is we shouldn’t think of it as a workhorse that we just need to keep lashing until your assignment is done, for example, but rather more like an orchestra conductor. Obviously there’s still a role for the brain. I don’t ever want to be understood as saying that the brain isn’t important or isn’t a central locus for thinking.
But it’s the role that we expect the brain to play that I think should be altered. I mean, if we think of the brain not as a workhorse but as an orchestra conductor, then we see the brain playing this role of bringing in this resource here and bringing in that resource now and knowing, in a skillful way, which resources to use and when. And that’s the kind of intellectual facility that we should be developing, I think, in our students and employees and in ourselves.
ezra klein
But I want to come back to this productivity paradox. And I’m going to give an example that struck me, because it happened while I was reading your book and it seemed like a good example of it. So two weeks ago, I was having a day where I wasn’t being that productive. And I was stressed because I had a lot of errands I had to do, including bringing my dogs to the dog camp, I guess, because we were going to go away for a couple of days. And it was going to take me about an hour, hour and half to do it. I had to pick them up new food. We had to drive like 30 minutes in each direction. There was traffic at the time I was doing this. And I was behind on my work. And more profoundly, I did not have a column idea, and it was coming to the point where I really needed one. And so what I’d be doing that day is clicking around the internet, reading news sites, reading Twitter, reading the different information flows that I thought would spark something for me. And I got nowhere with it.
And then at a certain point, I had to take my dogs. And I was frustrated by this. But it’s actually a nice drive. I was going down the 1. And just at some point on that drive, with no conscious work of my own at that moment, a great column idea popped into my head, totally different than everything I’d been looking at already. Something I actually really was excited about. Interoceptively, I got excited about it.
And I want to ask two things about this. One is what happened there? What occurred? And two, to be a little mindful about this, who the hell was thinking? It’s such a weird — directed thought is a process that makes some sense to me. But the thing where just an idea pops into your head, like you just pulled down the lever on the slot machine and won a prize. Or maybe you didn’t even pull down the lever. You just won a prize. It’s really wild. I think about this a lot in meditation. Who thought that thought? And so what is happening? And then I guess this speaks to our metaphors conversation. Who is thinking?
annie murphy paul
Well, someone who’s focused on the brain would say that that was your default network in action, that that was this sort of more associative and relaxed kind of mode that our brain gets into when we’re not intensely focused on a task, like when you were making that drive with your dog. And that can be allowing that mode to emerge, often by taking a walk or by being outside, those are some of the best ways to do it. Or taking a shower. People always have their best ideas in the shower or in the bath.
But because I’m not so focused on the brain and I’m focused on mental extensions, I want to point to something that I think about a lot said by Andy Clark. And Andy Clark is the philosopher who originated the idea of the extended mind. And he talks about how we are intrinsically loopy creatures, we’re loopy, and that that’s something that makes us very different from computers. Because computers work in this very linear fashion. It’s input output. It’s all a straight line.
But humans, because of the way our brain evolved, we benefit from looping information and knowledge and ideas in and out of these different domains, bringing in the contribution of our body, or passing it through the brains of other people, or experiencing and thinking about our ideas in a new setting, a new physical setting.
And as Andy Clark points out, a computer would never have an idea printed out, have to read it with their eyes, make up lots of marks in the margins, and then pass it around to their colleagues and then have a whole new understanding of that idea. That’s not how computers work, but that’s how people work. And so when we think of ourselves as loopy creatures, we can kind of create those loops where we’re passing information and ideas in and out of these different domains — the body, spaces, other people’s minds — and then back through our own heads. And that’s a much more fertile and generative way of dealing with information than just always keeping it inside our own heads where it’s not going to be changed or altered or improved in any way.
ezra klein
So I’ve been talking a lot about this idea of looping with my colleague Roge Karma, who worked with me on preparing this episode. And this, again, I think goes to this productivity problem about the ways in which things that feel or have the aesthetic of productivity are often not the most productive way to do things.
So if you look at the way we prepared to have this conversation with you, I read the entire book. Roge they read the entire book. We had three conversations about the book. He did a prep document about a book I had already read. Then we talked about that prep document. Then we did questions. Then we talked about the questions again. Then I rewrote the questions.
And compared to what you might think of as the efficient way to do the preparation here, which is that one of us reads the book and writes questions and then I walk in and read you questions, that just seems a lot more efficient. It’s one step and then it’s two steps, and then I’m done. But we found over time that it is this constant passing of the books and the work and our ideas back and forth and the conversations we have about them that lead to great conversations. And it looks and in some ways feels very inefficient, but the show does really well and I think is pretty good. And so it’s obviously working.
But one of the problems, I think, with looping for people is that it feels inefficient. It feels, if you’re working on something to then go take a walk or go play basketball or then talk to your friend and then come back to it and then write some of it down on a piece of paper, it seems ridiculous. You’re adding all of these steps. But your point is that this is how the brain works, and working the way the brain works is what’s going to get you the best results, which in theory is what all this efficiency talk is meant to get you to.
annie murphy paul
Right. Well, let’s work with the brain as it really is instead of pretending that it’s something else and getting mad at it or feeling that it’s failing when it doesn’t act like a computer.
ezra klein
One of the pieces of this that I just want to make sure we touch on before we leave this section of the conversation is, and this is not going to sound like a big deal before I say it, so I implore the audience to think of it as a big deal, that sitting still imposes a greater cognitive burden on the brain than standing or walking. And I think that sounds normal enough, and then you realize how much time and energy and social structure and public money has gone into trying to get us to sit still most of the time. And it actually seems quite crazy. So could you talk about that finding?
annie murphy paul
Yeah. Yeah, that really strikes me too, so I’m glad that you brought it up. I talk about that in the context of research having to do with children who have an ADHD diagnosis, but it applies to all of us in the sense that, again, we are these biological evolved creatures who are meant to be moving. Being still is not necessarily our natural state, certainly not for long periods of time. And so when we have to be still in an office or in a classroom, we have to inhibit our natural urge to move. And that uses up some of the mental bandwidth that could otherwise be applied to our learning or our work.
And then, in the case of kids who have attention deficit disorder, it’s actually the case that they use physical activity as a kind of stimulant just the way an adult would drink a cup of coffee before they needed to focus. Kids with ADHD use movement to kind of get them into the right mental state where they can concentrate. So meanwhile, parents and teachers are trying to get them to sit still so they can think, when really these kids, and many of us, need to move in order to think.
And one strand of research that I just love that I included in this section is about fidgeting. Again, because of our brain- bound attitudes, we see fidgeting as sort of gauche or maybe almost shady, like why is this person — why can’t they be still? When actually fidgeting is this brilliant kind of very subtle way of adjusting on a moment by moment basis our arousal, our physiological state of alertness.
And so if we were more intentional about fidgeting, we could even develop, and psychologists are exploring this, different kinds of fidget objects that induce different kinds of mental states in us that really precisely calibrate our mental state through this “embodied self regulation,” which is the phrase that one of these gesture researchers used. So all these different kinds of movements from the macro to the micro we could be using in a much more thoughtful and intelligent way, intentional way, to modulate the way our brains work.
ezra klein
But I want to talk about the macro, because I’m all bought in on the fidget research. When I led Vox, my office was filled with fidget toys. And I think people thought that was a kooky stylistic decision, but it’s actually because I have a lot of trouble paying attention in meetings if I can’t do something with my hands. But the thing where maybe sitting is not the right way to think, and yet everything in our life forces us to sit in the built environment, is I think actually pretty profound, and all the more so because it seems so banal when you say it.
So I’ll give a very simple example from this podcast. Before coronavirus, I did this in studios. And studios are little rooms. You sit at a desk and there’s a microphone there and somebody is watching you and you got to sit there, and that’s how the conversation goes. Then we hit the pandemic and now, like a lot of people, I record from home, because my office isn’t open. And during this period, I got a standing desk because I have some back and neck issues. And I noticed at a certain point that if, instead of sitting when I did podcast conversations I stood, it was much easier for me to maintain attention.
And in fact, not just that, but one reason I turn the video off when we do this is because I walk around while you talk. So I am pacing the room while you give your answers, not to give people too much insight into this. Because again, it’s much easier for me to listen if I’m moving. And I don’t think I’m alone in this. But then if I’m not, the fact that we make kids sit all day in school, the fact that meetings, it would be seen as very gauche, as you were saying, to just stand up in the middle of a meeting and wander around the perimeter of the room ...
We have desks at our offices. It goes to this idea that because we have misunderstood the metaphor we use for the mind, we’ve actually built an entire environment which makes it hard to think even as the point of that environment, in many cases, like school or work, is to make it easy to think, at least in certain kinds of jobs. It just seems wild to me.
annie murphy paul
Yeah. Yeah, I would add too that it may be, Ezra, that when you’re standing, you’re freer to gesture. And research suggests that gesturing by the person who’s doing it actually makes their speech more fluent. So maybe your own speech has become even more fluent as you’ve been recording in your home studio because you’re able to use your hands much more freely when you stand and walk around.
ezra klein
I want to ask you about that structural piece of it. Because what you’re describing here is a phenomenal market failure, a phenomenal market failure, right? Putting all of the ways in which it would be better for our lives or better for our minds or more fun to move around aside, we have all these different businesses. They all want to get a leg up on the competition. A huge amount of the American economy now is built around work where people have to come in and think about problems. I mean, manual labor is somewhat different. And by the way, manual labor often has a lot more movement built into it.
And so what you’re saying is that a tremendous amount of the global economy, the global built economy, the global work structure, is just wrong. It’s not a good way for people to work. I mean, we’ll get into some other pieces of this, like open space offices. But just the simplest one, that everybody gets a desk and that it’s hard to stand and hard to move around. What the hell happened? If this research is solid, and I think it’s intuitive. Like if you watch people on the phone, they like to walk around and talk. Then what the hell happened? How did we forget all this when we built every office on the planet Earth, basically?
annie murphy paul
And every school. Yeah, I mean, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from reporting and researching psychology for 25 years is that we often don’t know what’s best for us, and so we cling very firmly to these practices that don’t serve us. And it takes a kind of paradigm- changing new view to make us think, oh, maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe the way we’ve been doing things isn’t so great.
And I actually think the pandemic might be that kind of disruption that changes some of the ways that we educate kids and that we go about our own work. I think a lot of us have spent the last 16 months as brains in front of screens, and a lot of us have been working from day till night without a chat around the water cooler, without even a commute, without a break. All we do is work. All we do is use our brains.
And if the brain as muscle metaphor were really accurate, we would all be superheroes at this point, and we’re not. In fact, many of us feel that we’re not thinking nearly as well as we used to or normally do. And that’s because the pandemic, for many of us, cut off many of the mental extensions that really support our thinking. And I’m hoping that in a way they’ve made the existence and the importance of those mental extensions visible to us in a way that they have not been before.
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ezra klein
Let’s talk a bit about how offices are designed more broadly. So years ago I worked at The Washington Post, and this was in their older building. They’ve moved since then. It was a pretty gray aesthetic, which is to say, a lot of desks. They all had little cubicle extensions on them. It didn’t look cool, but I got a lot of good work done there.
When I moved to Vox Media, and Vox Media was a media company with a heavy tech flavor, and it was super cool when I walked into that office. Exposed brick and exposed piping and it’s all open and everybody’s at these big, long tables together. Way cooler than cubicles. And within not long at all, I really yearned for a cubicle again. Can you talk a bit about open space offices, some of the ideas that have emerged about collaboration as kind of human collision, and what maybe we misunderstood there?
annie murphy paul
Yeah, I really think your anecdote just there tells us how important it is to be sensitive to the effect of physical context on how we work. And again, that brain as computer metaphor would say, well, you can work anywhere. You should be able to think just as well anywhere, but clearly that’s not the case. And so that should lead us to pay more attention to what it is about these environments that are not working for us, that are not supporting intelligent thought or allowing us to extend our minds. And yes, the open office is one of the biggest culprits.
I write in the book about how the open office was based on an idea, a vision, and that was the coffee shop where people are moving and bustling around and having spontaneous conversations and colliding with each other in serendipitous ways. And the notion was that this was the perfect model for how knowledge work should be done. And in fact, it’s turned out to be a disaster, because again, the brain is an evolved organ that did not evolve to sit in one place and focus on symbols and abstractions for long periods of time. That’s a really difficult thing for the brain to do. It’s not one of those things that comes naturally to the brain.
So it needs lots of external support to do that. And one of the key external supports that it can have are walls. Walls that protect us from seeing and coming into contact with all the things that distract us most, which are novelty movement, social interactions among people. These are the things that our attention is just irresistibly drawn to. We can’t help it. It’s literally biologically wired into us. And so to put a whole bunch of people in one room and say, OK, now work together on separate projects, these complex involved cognitive kind of work that we do these days.
I think most people who have worked in an open office can acknowledge how very difficult it is. When we’re talking to people all the time, we all sort of coalesce because we are a very social species that’s concerned with creating consensus. We all kind of coalesce around some OK ideas, not great, but medium quality ideas. And then people who are all alone, the people who are kind of out on the outskirts doing all their own thinking, they come up with some amazing ideas and also a whole lot of losers.
And the best results are produced by those people who have a kind of oscillation between talking with people, going back and having a private space and private time and quiet to think about their own ideas, and then it’s actually another kind of loop. They’re looping it through the minds of other people and then they’re looping it back inside the space of their own mind. And so I think the monks who have been living in this kind of hybrid space for hundreds and hundreds of years actually were onto intermittent collaboration long before the researchers got to it.
ezra klein
There’s a bit of a tension here between parts of your book that are all about movement and collaboration and thinking with other people’s minds, and then you need walls and you need things to be quiet and you want to be able to shut out distractions. Can you talk a bit about that? Because there’s a way of reading this stuff where every study on its own it’s like, this thing makes you more productive and also its opposite makes you more productive. How do you balance all of it?
annie murphy paul
Well, I did sit with all this material for a very long time. This is one of those books that took a while. And I really did choose those examples and offer those recommendations that had the weight of evidence behind them. And people are different. And so they’ll find that different things work for them. And in fact, on Twitter I’ve heard a lot of people who say, hey, I work really great in coffee shops, like the real thing, like coffee shops. And I think there’s probably some interesting reasons behind that.
But I also do think that psychology has landed on some pretty basic ideas and recommendations for how we work best. A couple that we haven’t mentioned yet are that we think best in spaces where we feel like we have a sense of ownership and control. It concerns me that so many offices that are coming back online now are adopting this hot desking or hoteling model where it’s like, you come in, you grab a desk. It wasn’t your desk yesterday. It’s not going to be your desk tomorrow. I think that’s probably not an ideal situation for supporting intelligent thought.
Likewise, we think better when we have cues of identity around us that remind us who we are and what we’re doing in that particular setting and cues of belonging that remind us of the meaningful groups to which we belong. And all those things are stripped away and gone when we’re just occupying a desk in a very temporary way, which seems to be the model that many offices are moving toward.
ezra klein
One of my hypotheses reading the book and thinking back on my own experience is also that maybe all of these things work, but they don’t work all at the same time. And that always struck me as the odd irony of open floor or open office plans. And you tap this in the book, that there’s some evidence that when companies move to being an open plan office, they often see a reduction in the amount of collaboration and conversation that happens. And when I used to do that, I had noise canceling headphones on all the time, and I was simultaneously always over socialized and a little under socialized, which is to say that I couldn’t get away from people. So it’s not like I was yearning for more people. But the interactions I was having were not deep and they were not interactions I often wanted. So at the same time, it wasn’t that I was getting my social needs met. And I thought back to other times when I’ve been in offices or in more cubicles when you’re working and you want to leave the office and talk to people. You want to move to that other modality, which I guess speaks to your idea of looping.
It seems to me there’s a need to actually fully change the modalities, and the problem is when you try to combine too many of them at once. So you’re in an open office where you’re around people and you’re also on Slack where you’re digitally around people, but you have noise canceling headphones in, so in theory you’re not. And you just kind of keep going like this and you’re stacking them all in tension with each other instead of moving one to the next to the next in a more intuitive way.
annie murphy paul
Well, one of my goals with this book was to give people alternatives to this reigning brain- bound model, which tends to be very rigid, and as we said, imagines that the good student or the good worker is someone who sits quietly and still and doesn’t talk and is just sitting there until the work gets done. And that we actually need to acquire a kind of second education. We have this education and training within the workplace that tells us how to use our brains. Our brains have been cultivated, but how to use these outside the brain resources in a skillful way to bring in the right resource at the right time.
That’s not something anyone’s ever taught us. We’ve had to teach ourselves to the extent that we know how to do it. And so I agree; it’s not as if you can just pile up one technique on top of another and presto, you’re a genius. It’s more like we need to develop the flexibility and the knowledge of when to use which tool when. I mean, there might be times when a brain- bound approach is really appropriate. I am myself a very brain bound person. And I think that in some ways, writers write what they need to hear. [LAUGHS]
ezra klein
There’s definitely something to that.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Let me ask you about another of the techniques in here, or the spaces that you explore in here, which is offloading. Can you tell me a bit about offloading?
annie murphy paul
Yeah. So offloading, this is probably the technique that has made the biggest difference in my own work. We really as a culture — again, this brain bound ethos we have — we really valorize people who can do things in their head. If you think of the memory champions who can calculate however many digits of pi or chess grandmasters who can work out the whole game in their head. We think that’s so amazing. And it is an amazing human feat.
But really what produces effective work in our own daily lives often involves offloading our mental contents onto physical space, whether that’s a whiteboard or a set of post-it notes, which is my favorite tool, or onto multiple monitors so that we can start using this whole other suite of abilities that are built into the human organism. We have evolved to sort of effortlessly use these spatial and navigational capacities that our bodies have to use our spatial memory, to move through space in ways that allow us to get a new perspective on things, to manipulate tools. And when we can turn our ideas and pieces of information effectively into manipulable objects and into a 3D landscape that we can navigate through, we all of a sudden have access to all these embodied resources that are wasted when we’re just sitting there very still looking at a small screen.
ezra klein
Two questions on this. So one, why is the particular material or medium that we offload to so important? You just mentioned looking at a small screen. I was thinking as you said it that — so my version of offloading is my workstation is I have a computer and then I keep next to it two notebooks at all times. And one notebook is for any to do item that ever pops into my head.
Email this person. Call the doctor. Write a column. Whatever it might be. Just anything that is, it has to happen later, and then another just for notes and ideas. But I found over time I couldn’t do that on the computer. I have all kinds of to- do apps and note taking apps, but I had to move over to paper, which has a different feeling when I’m on it. So you talked about screens. Why do we think differently when looking at different things?
annie murphy paul
That’s really interesting. Well, the size of the screen matters. As I mentioned, there’s a lot of benefits to be gotten from having multiple or very large screens. And that’s because it consumes cognitive bandwidth to have to scroll and make things bigger or smaller or find where we filed something. All of that gets offloaded when it’s spread out in front of us and we can remember with our spatial memory, oh, that piece of information is over here on my right, rather than having to navigate with our electronic tools. And so it’s not necessarily that screens are the problem, because big screens can and do enhance our thinking.
On the other hand, I write a lot in the book about how artists and designers and people who swear by the pencil and the conversation that happens between pencil and hand and eye and paper that, again, it’s kind of a misunderstanding to think that the brain conceptualizes an idea or an image and then tells the hand how to execute it and then it’s done. That’s a very computer-like idea of how work happens. Instead, artists and designers find that it’s much more of an iterative process where they draw something. They make a mark, and then the mark reminds them of something. And they add another mark. And it’s a conversation, again, between hand and eye and paper and pencil. And I think the materials we use to do our thinking with, our external outside the brain thinking, can make a big difference in terms of what kinds of thoughts we’re able to have.
ezra klein
You don’t talk too much about why this might work worse on screens, but let me try something out on you, which is that screens also have a pretty intense conversation. So when I move to write something on my to do notebook, it just goes on the notebook and that’s all that really happens. If I go open up my app, it’s like my dock expands and I see notifications and all kinds of things begin to happen.
And so it’s a conversation not just between your eye and your pencil and your paper, but everything that your computer is doing. When I’m looking right now at the screen on which we’re recording, I’ve got all — I can see some tabs. I can see extensions. And if I’m thoughtful about it, I remember to get rid of that stuff before I try to get into a focused place. But every time I change a screen, a lot more comes up.
So is part of it simply that when you’re offloading, part of the danger is you don’t want to onboard new things? You’re actually trying to get things off. And computers, phones, et cetera, so many of the things are built to onboard new things in order to capture our attention for a little bit longer.
annie murphy paul
Yeah, no doubt. I mean, that makes me think of how ecological psychologists talk about how different tools have different affordances. We can do different things with them. We’re led to do different things with them. And part of the beauty of an old fashioned print book or a notebook that is just — or a sketchpad that just has a bunch of blank pages — is there’s not all those built in distractions that are just waiting to leap out at you.
And the idea of the extended mind actually originated not in thinking about how we extend our minds with the body or with spaces or with other people. Those kind of came in later, because the idea of the extended mind is so generative and can operate as this kind of umbrella concept. Originally the idea of the extended mind was looking at tools like a notebook, like a smartphone, and how they assume some of our mental functions for us and thereby extend our minds.
But I am really interested in the ways that many of our tools, especially our digital tools, don’t end up extending our minds at all. They actually contract them. I could write another book called the contracted mind. But I think we have to, again, be really intentional and really skillful in the way that we use our devices to make sure that they are extending our minds in the way that they can and not actually diminishing our thinking.
ezra klein
Well, let’s talk about the distinction you made right there between expanding and contracting the mind. Because a point you make in the book is that we often think about the demand side of our attention, which is to say, we think about what we want to devote our attention to and that we need to be tougher about being rigorous about where we put our attention. We need to work harder at devoting our attention. But you talk about working on the supply side of our attention, trying to expand the amount of attention we have, trying to replenish the attention we have. So how does using that framework change what you do? If I’m tired or I’m getting ready for a podcast, what do I do to expand the supply side of my attention?
annie murphy paul
Well, it helps to know that — I’m going to be a broken record with this — the human brain evolved in a very specific environment, and that environment was outside. And that’s how our forebears spent their time for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s a fairly recent development that we spend all this time, more than 90 percent of our time, inside buildings and inside cars and even when we’re outside in sort of urban, highly built up urban settings.
And the thing about the outdoors and the way that the human species evolved in the outdoors, all the information that we encounter, the sensory information that we encounter in nature, is processed really easily and effortlessly and efficiently by the brain. Our sensory faculties are kind of tuned to the kind of information and stimuli that we encounter in nature. And so this is, again, this is the scientific reason behind what everybody knows, which is that you feel more relaxed and more at ease when you take a walk outside and when you spend time in nature.
But what that has to do with attention is that that kind of diffuse attention that we’re able to spend in nature, where we’re not focusing very intently on anything but we’re just kind of allowing the gentle movements and the sort of soft contours of the things that we see outside just entertain our attention but in this very diffuse way, and the phrase psychologists use that I like is called soft fascination. It’s not a hard edged concentration. It’s a kind of soft fascination that you might experience when you’re looking at leaves rustling in the wind or watching waves on the ocean.
That state restores our attention. It kind of refills the tank in a sense. And so then we can return to our desk and we can return to that hard edged kind of concentration that we have to do to complete our studies or do our work. So I would say in your example that if you need to concentrate but you’re feeling frazzled, even a brief look out the window can have this kind of restorative effect. But ideally, a longer walk in nature would be good.
ezra klein
So I have two questions about that. And let me start with this one. There is this overwhelming amount of research that I’ve read in all these different books about how much better the mind works in nature and how nature replenishes our memory and it makes us more creative. And have somebody take a walk and then have them solve problems and their problem solving is better afterwards. And yet people are much more productive in cities.
The locus of economic and to some degree idea generation is going more and more towards agglomerations of people. It’s not like per person rural areas are wildly more productive than urban ones. And it seems to me there is some tension between how clear the research seems to be that nature is good for our minds and how clear the actual patterns of economic and creative growth are that being around a lot of other people in a concrete jungle is good for idea generation and human organization and economic organization. How do you reconcile those?
annie murphy paul
That’s an interesting point, Ezra. I mean, I would point out that even within cities and suburbs, there’s a really unequal distribution of access to green areas and green spaces. And your paper had an excellent article about this a couple of weeks ago, about how much more tree cover affluent areas have as opposed to poor areas. And so even within those urban environments, there’s often a chance to go out to a park or to encounter green space in some other way, a green roof, for example, or a garden planted within a building.
But that actually brings up for me a point that is very dear to my heart that emerged from this book. As I said, I felt sort of radicalized by this book. And one thing I realized as I was writing it is that there is a kind of inequality that we don’t really recognize, again, because our brain-bound society has this sort of blind spot for all the ways that we think outside the brain. There’s an extension inequality.
By that I mean that people don’t have equal access to the mental extensions that allow us to think well. And differential access to green space, I think, is an example of that. Some people are able to restore their attention in green spaces and return to their work refreshed and able to focus, and some people simply don’t have access to that kind of opportunity. And yet we don’t really see that as the kind of inequality that affects how well people can perform and how we judge them in terms of their performance.
ezra klein
So if all that’s true, why do so many people live in New York? Why is there so much creativity there? Why is there so much economic generation there? Why don’t these studies that seem very compelling one by one at the micro level ladder up to the macro patterns of our economy?
annie murphy paul
Well, people are complicated, I would say, and there’s all these different factors that we’re talking about, and we haven’t even really gotten to this idea of how we extend our minds with the minds of other people. And it may be that in the case of a place like New York, where there’s this intense creative activity going on, having access to a critical mass of these intelligent, creative, stimulating people is what really makes the difference.
I would also point out that just because you live in a rural area doesn’t mean you’re outside any more than the average urban dweller. Americans spend very little time outside, and that’s true across the kinds of places that people live. It’s just how we operate these days. It’s what modern life is like for all of us.
ezra klein
So then let’s move to this question of the inequality of it all. Because everything we’ve been talking about, from having control of your workplace to having greenery around you to, I mean, you talk about gestures, and there’s even an inequality in the gestures that poor kids and richer kids see growing up. There’s a tremendous amount of inequality in these mind extenders. And that’s a real problem that there is not, I think, an obvious agenda for fixing. So how did this make you look at inequality in cognitive development and then in the economy differently?
annie murphy paul
Well, it makes me think of an encounter I had. I live in New Haven, Connecticut, and I teach Yale students sometimes and I encounter them a lot. And I was describing this idea of the extended mind to a group of them recently, and I was especially interested to hear what they thought, because this is a generation that grew up extending their minds with their smartphones, that never didn’t have smartphones around. So I thought it would be really interesting to hear what they thought about it.
And many of them did seem excited by the idea or interested in the idea. But there was one young man who just looked more and more perturbed as I described the idea and its implications. And finally he burst out, this is a very dangerous idea. And I thought, why? I’m interested that you have that response. Why? And as he explained, it came to seem that this young man who, following the dictates of his culture and his particular subculture, had been striving his whole life for this kind of individual achievement and had been rewarded very handsomely for it. And the idea that actually maybe it wasn’t all his brain that did it was quite threatening.
And I think as the implications of my own research and reporting and writing were becoming clear to me, I too had to kind of wrestle with all these assumptions I’d made about what constitutes individual achievement and what intelligent thought is and where it happens and how to foster it. More than any book I’ve written, I would say it really kind of forced a reconsideration for me of many long held assumptions and beliefs.
ezra klein
Because here is my concern. And I get why that student said these are dangerous ideas. That as these ideas filter out, if they are true, and they seem true to me, they are going to be just one more generator of inequality as people come to understand them. That you will have rich kids being sent to schools where you can move around, which is already to some degree true, and poor kids in schools where you really got to sit your butt at your desk all day.
And it kind of goes all up and down the line, from trees to your office space to the kind of job you have, and even just having a more accurate conception of your own mind allows you to work with it differently. And that will filter first too. So that to me is the slightly scary thing about this whole set of ideas, which is that on the one hand, it’s a very structural way to me of thinking about cognitive capacity.
And it allows you to think about deficiencies in it and inequalities in it from a structural perspective, not just about insufficient willpower or stick-to-itness on the part of people. But on the other hand, it really implicates a lot of our society in ways that would be hard to change. So the people who will get to change them are the people who have the resources and the freedom and the employers who will make new accommodations and try to read the research. And so it just becomes one more way that we widen the chasms in our society.
annie murphy paul
Well, a more optimistic perspective, and it’s the one that I tend to take, is that the scariest situation of all would be not even seeing that these mental extensions exist and have an impact on how well we think, which is the state we’ve been in, I think, for a long time. So the first step would be to see and acknowledge the role of mental extensions in thinking and how people don’t have equitable access to mental extensions.
And then a second step might be starting to adjust our systems of assessment and judgement to take into account the kinds of mental extensions that students and workers have access to or don’t. And then the third and the most difficult step of all would be to try to actually in some ways redistribute mental extensions, equalize them, make sure that everyone has access to these basic goods, these raw materials of intelligent thought. And yes, that will be incredibly difficult.
But I think if we have that as a goal, that’s much better than this sort of benighted and blinkered state we’re in now where we think that all that matters is how big a lump of brain you have inside your skull, which is really such a constrained and impoverished idea of what intelligence is and where it comes from.
ezra klein
I think that’s a good place and an optimistic place to end. So let me ask you always our final question, which is, what are three books you would recommend people use to extend their minds with?
annie murphy paul
Well, the first is “Supersizing the Mind” by Andy Clark. He’s the originator of the extended mind theory. And although he’s an ivory tower philosopher, he writes like a dream. He’s so funny and clever, and I really enjoy his writing always. The second is “Mind in Motion” by Barbara Tversky. She’s a professor at Teachers College in New York. And that’s about how the body affects the way the mind operates, and it’s just a great primer on embodied cognition.
And then the third one, I thought it was going to be kind of a wild card out from left field, but actually we touched on it quite explicitly during this conversation, Ezra. It’s “Thoughts Without a Thinker” by Mark Epstein, who is a psychiatrist who practices Western psychotherapy but also is a scholar of Buddhism and integrates the two. And you were saying in our conversation earlier today, who is the one who’s thinking? Who is the person who’s having these thoughts? I really think Mark Epstein takes on those questions in a really interesting way.
ezra klein
Annie Murphy Paul, thank you very much.
annie murphy paul
Thank you, Ezra. [MUSIC PLAYING]
ezra klein
The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.
For decades, our society’s dominant metaphor for the mind has been a computer. A machine that operates the exact same way whether it’s in a dark room or next to a sunny window, whether it’s been working for 30 seconds or three hours, whether it’s near other computers or completely alone.
But that’s wrong. Annie Murphy Paul’s “The Extended Mind” argues, convincingly, that the human mind is contextual. It works differently in different environments, with different tools, amid different bodily states, among other minds.
Here’s the problem: Our schools, our workplaces, our society are built atop that bad metaphor. Activities and habits that we’ve been taught to associate with creativity and efficiency often stunt our thinking, and so much that we’ve been taught to dismiss — activities that look like leisure, play or rest — are crucial to thinking (and living!) well.
Paul’s book, read correctly, is a radical critique of not just how we think about thinking, but how we’ve constructed much of our society. In this conversation, we discuss how the body can pick up on patterns before the conscious mind knows what it’s seen, why forcing kids (and adults) to “sit still” makes it harder for them to think clearly, the connection between physical movement and creativity, why efficiency is often the enemy of productivity, the restorative power of exposure to the natural world, the dystopian implications of massive cognitive inequality, why open-plan offices were a terrible idea and much more.
Credit...Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Stephanie Anestis
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin. | And this was very moving to me, actually, this strand of research that I explored for the book, which is that we don’t have a direct connection to other people’s brains, to what’s going on inside their heads. It’s rather opaque to us.
And so it’s actually the body that provides the channel for understanding in a really visceral way what they’re feeling. And when we speak to someone face to face, and this is another reason why in person contact is so important, when we speak to someone face to face, we very subtly mimic their expressions, their posture, their demeanor, and then we kind of read off from our own bodies what that feels like, what emotion is being created within us.
And that’s how we know how other people are feeling. That’s kind of the basis of empathy and emotional intelligence. And again, studies suggest that people who are more introceptively aware are able to be more empathetic. They’re able to be more accurate in how they understand other people, because they’re using their own body as a conduit to connect with the feelings inside that other person.
ezra klein
I want to move to another space of working with the body. So we’ve been talking here about listening to the body, listening to the body as an almost thinking organ that is giving you information in terms of how it feels. But you talk a lot in the book about using the body to create contexts in which we think better. Can you tell me a bit about what we’ve learned in recent decades about the relationship between bodily movement and cognition?
annie murphy paul
Yeah. And here again we’re talking about reversing the causal arrow in a sense. The way we usually think about it is the brain has an idea and it directs the body to do something and the body executes it. And that’s a very brain- bound way of thinking, obviously. But there’s another way, which is that we induce the body to make certain movements or enter certain kinds of spaces, like the outdoors, or move our hands in a certain way in a gesture, and that influences the way we think. | yes |
Epistemology | Can we know anything beyond our minds? | yes_statement | we can "know" things beyond our "minds".. knowledge extends beyond our "minds". | https://neurosciencenews.com/physics-consciousness-21222/ | A New Theory in Physics Claims to Solve the Mystery of ... | A New Theory in Physics Claims to Solve the Mystery of Consciousness
Summary: Consciousness can not simply be reduced to neural activity alone, researchers say. A novel study reports the dynamics of consciousness may be understood by a newly developed conceptual and mathematical framework.
Source: Bar-Ilan University
How do 1.4 kg of brain tissue create thoughts, feelings, mental images, and an inner world?
The ability of the brain to create consciousness has baffled some for millennia. The mystery of consciousness lies in the fact that each of us has subjectivity, something that is like to sense, feel and think.
In contrast to being under anesthesia or in a dreamless deep sleep, while we’re awake we don’t “live in the dark” — we experience the world and ourselves. But how the brain creates the conscious experience and what area of the brain is responsible for this remains a mystery.
According to Dr. Nir Lahav, a physicist from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, “This is quite a mystery since it seems that our conscious experience cannot arise from the brain, and in fact, cannot arise from any physical process.”
As strange as it sounds, the conscious experience in our brain, cannot be found or reduced to some neural activity.
“Think about it this way,” says Dr. Zakaria Neemeh, a philosopher from the University of Memphis, “when I feel happiness, my brain will create a distinctive pattern of complex neural activity. This neural pattern will perfectly correlate with my conscious feeling of happiness, but it is not my actual feeling. It is just a neural pattern that represents my happiness. That’s why a scientist looking at my brain and seeing this pattern should ask me what I feel, because the pattern is not the feeling itself, just a representation of it.”
As a result, we can’t reduce the conscious experience of what we sense, feel and think to any brain activity. We can just find correlations to these experiences.
After more than 100 years of neuroscience we have very good evidence that the brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities. So how could it be that these conscious experiences can’t be found anywhere in the brain (or in the body) and can’t be reduced to any neural complex activity?
This mystery is known as the hard problem of consciousness. It is such a difficult problem that until a couple of decades ago only philosophers discussed it and even today, although we have made huge progress in our understanding of the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, still there is no adequate theory that explains what consciousness is and how to solve this hard problem.
Dr. Lahav and Dr. Neemeh recently published a new physical theory in the journal Frontiers in Psychology that claims to solve the hard problem of consciousness in a purely physical way.
According to the authors, when we change our assumption about consciousness and assume that it is a relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves. In the paper the researchers developed a conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view.
According to Dr. Lahav, the lead author of the paper, “consciousness should be investigated with the same mathematical tools that physicists use for other known relativistic phenomena.”
To understand how relativity dissolves the hard problem, think about a different relativistic phenomenon, constant velocity. Let’s choose two observers, Alice and Bob, where Bob is on a train that moves with constant velocity and Alice watches him from the platform. there is no absolute physical answer to the question what the velocity of Bob is.
The answer is dependent on the frame of reference of the observer.
From Bob’s frame of reference, he will measure that he is stationary and Alice, with the rest of the world, is moving backwards. But from Alice’s frame Bob is the one that’s moving and she is stationary.
Although they have opposite measurements, both of them are correct, just from different frames of reference.
Because, according to the theory, consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, we find the same situation in the case of consciousness.
Now Alice and Bob are in different cognitive frames of reference. Bob will measure that he has conscious experience, but Alice just has brain activity with no sign of the actual conscious experience, while Alice will measure that she is the one that has consciousness and Bob has just neural activity with no clue of its conscious experience.
Just like in the case of velocity, although they have opposite measurements, both of them are correct, but from different cognitive frames of reference.
As a result, because of the relativistic point of view, there is no problem with the fact that we measure different properties from different frames of reference.
The fact that we cannot find the actual conscious experience while measuring brain activity is because we’re measuring from the wrong cognitive frame of reference.
According to the new theory, the brain doesn’t create our conscious experience, at least not through computations. The reason that we have conscious experience is because of the process of physical measurement.
In a nutshell, different physical measurements in different frames of reference manifest different physical properties in these frames of reference although these frames measure the same phenomenon.
For example, suppose that Bob measures Alice’s brain in the lab while she’s feeling happiness. Although they observe different properties, they actually measure the same phenomenon from different points of view. Because of their different kinds of measurements, different kinds of properties have been manifested in their cognitive frames of reference.
For Bob to observe brain activity in the lab, he needs to use measurements of his sensory organs like his eyes. This kind of sensory measurement manifests the substrate that causes brain activity – the neurons.
After more than 100 years of neuroscience we have very good evidence that the brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities. Image is in the public domain
Consequently, in his cognitive frame Alice has only neural activity that represents her consciousness, but no sign of her actual conscious experience itself. But, for Alice to measure her own neural activity as happiness, she uses different kind of measurements. She doesn’t use sensory organs, she measures her neural representations directly by interaction between one part of her brain with other parts. She measures her neural representations according to their relations to other neural representations.
This is a completely different measurement than what our sensory system does and, as a result, this kind of direct measurement manifests a different kind of physical property. We call this property conscious experience.
As a result, from her cognitive frame of reference, Alice measures her neural activity as conscious experience.
Using the mathematical tools that describe relativistic phenomena in physics, the theory shows that if the dynamics of Bob’s neural activity could be changed to be like the dynamics of Alice’s neural activity, then both will be in the same cognitive frame of reference and would have the exact same conscious experience as the other.
Now the authors want to continue to examine the exact minimal measurements that any cognitive system needs in order to create consciousness.
The implications of such a theory are huge. It can be applied to determine which animal was the first animal in the evolutionary process to have consciousness, when a fetus or baby begins to be conscious, which patients with consciousness disorders are conscious, and which AI systems already today have a low degree (if any) of consciousness.
In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this elusive phenomenon. Yet, despite critical development in our understanding of the functional side of consciousness, we still lack a fundamental theory regarding its phenomenal aspect.
There is an “explanatory gap” between our scientific knowledge of functional consciousness and its “subjective,” phenomenal aspects, referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness. The phenomenal aspect of consciousness is the first-person answer to “what it’s like” question, and it has thus far proved recalcitrant to direct scientific investigation.
Naturalistic dualists argue that it is composed of a primitive, private, non-reductive element of reality that is independent from the functional and physical aspects of consciousness. Illusionists, on the other hand, argue that it is merely a cognitive illusion, and that all that exists are ultimately physical, non-phenomenal properties.
We contend that both the dualist and illusionist positions are flawed because they tacitly assume consciousness to be an absolute property that doesn’t depend on the observer.
We develop a conceptual and a mathematical argument for a relativistic theory of consciousness in which a system either has or doesn’t have phenomenal consciousness with respect to some observer.
Phenomenal consciousness is neither private nor delusional, just relativistic. In the frame of reference of the cognitive system, it will be observable (first-person perspective) and in other frame of reference it will not (third-person perspective). These two cognitive frames of reference are both correct, just as in the case of an observer that claims to be at rest while another will claim that the observer has constant velocity.
Given that consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, neither observer position can be privileged, as they both describe the same underlying reality. Based on relativistic phenomena in physics we developed a mathematical formalization for consciousness which bridges the explanatory gap and dissolves the hard problem.
Given that the first-person cognitive frame of reference also offers legitimate observations on consciousness, we conclude by arguing that philosophers can usefully contribute to the science of consciousness by collaborating with neuroscientists to explore the neural basis of phenomenal structures.
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162 Comments
Trying to explain consciousness while avoiding God’s existence won’t ever give a satisfactory explanation, if we consider our brains as an “input/output interface” between inmaterial and material world it will solve a lot of question ( but not all of course) it’s my humble opinion.
Can someone tell me if I’m understanding relatively too, well, simply? Einsteins whole bit was about the fact that two experiences can coexist and be different and both be right, depending on where you’re standing or who’s shoes youre in? This might be like way too – broad.. if we’re all just balls of energy a rock made up mostly of water, the rest of it is something else and something else makes us harden into the shape of a person or whatever ( i think this is the part we cant quite explain? What’s the fight about??) .. when wax is warm it has the energy and freedom to be malleable but being solid is also a thing and also real. every religion seems to have the same utopia happily ever land before time green leafy place but it’s just light in my eyes.. happily ever after kind of image ..(and you have to do good things to get there and some made up rules that no longer apply but it’s too malleable and it was taken too literal when its just like- be nice and do good things and try not to be vain but also don’t be too selfless and find the balance. Walk the tight rope if you can*. and try to teach each other things without needing to be right all the time.. and dont kill people.. unless they do like terrible things to kids. Because nothing is absolute? Idk I dont get religion either, it just seems like the same thing to everyone but no one can agree. Which you can pretty much apply to any situation. And “heaven”.. is just the space filled with the energy of the light balls of the ones your light ball danced with and you get to reconnect and dance again and it teaches us. There’s something significant about the rays of light that break through the trees and something about rainbows and something about the way that we feel when we meet someone and feel like we’ve known them forever. Its all relative. Its all related to attachment. And its all valid… Which.. hahah i think i’m way over geralizing this.
Is heaven maybe just.. is just light and reconnecting with the harmonious vibrations of the energies. And its still all the things that the Bible says and the quaran and Buddhism.. they’re all right if everyone is invited and valid.. ?
Is maybe autism … someone who might be sensitive to the perceived energy of others, but it’s like Horton hears a who?
And does it make sense to anyone else? The worlds on the dandelion seeds? And who’s right anyway? Is it about saying its okay to just be okay with learning to live? If light is associated with. life… death, every waking morning, meditation.. and water is at birth and death and is connected and so is the air and the earth and ….. maybe its phasing through all of them like a video game and it’s all one big simulation. you have to learn to move the way the elements do to get it and it seems like each religion is focused on the best way to get to utopia and we’re all fighting instead of like being like hey, youre valid and i am too and if we put it all together its like that silly cartoon with all our elements combined. Maybe fire is hell? But the devil was you all along. And you were looking for something bigger to blame but it was so much more simple. Complex. But it’s breathing, its such an instant reflex. But it all lines up like a string that isn’t linear but could be based on perspective. But its all relative anyways isn’t it? Maybe string theory is simply attachment style and tying the knot and cutting other ties and then tying it all together into the bigger picture which is to hold on to yourself. You can sew yourself back up and its all anyone needs? And maybe the autistic spectrum isn’t a disorder and its a group of people who feel all the energies and can’t quite make sense of it and are so smart that they design their own pattern based off of what they see and they hold the key out. A disorder feels like something is wrong with me.. but I feel like I feel it all, and it makes me feel better to know that there’s something that is familiar but typical isn’t natural. and I feel things that I can’t explain and I feel like that’s all it is is a lot of energy to feel. And not understand. Because it’s all relative, and ct universe is such a big thing to feel when you feel that.. thing. I feel the light balls of energy of the ones I love who have “left” but.. energy isn’t destroyed. It’s complex. And as simple as a string and your place on it and then vibrating it makes the whole thing come to life. And no one’s wrong. And everything holds energy so its what gives the earth its whole importance and gave it its gravity. Because it all holds weight. And we can all adjust to a new perspective. We could find a new rock but its the same thing. Same lessons. Same patterns. But we’re all valid and we should just have fun while we’re here instead of yelling so loudly. It all matters. And none of it?
Or maybe I’m bipolar and suuuper manic right now. But it feels like the only thing that has ever made calm. Because it means that all we need is validation. So just go out and validate others and yourself, because you’re both just light balls on a rock and youre both right and if I’m wrong then I’ll be happier anyway.
Anyone want to share your perspective and see what we might be able to up with? To relate to? It all seems like a funny pun that is so obvious that its like is this it? Is this the whole thing? Hahaha it all seems like a joke now. Is this physics? Just a really big joke and sometimes its not funny (learn to find the humor? And appreciate the sad, and all of the pieces and points of views?) but somehow we got stuck on key words or bits along the way. But no one’s wrong and everyone’s right.. and we’re arguing over the punchline or something or just testing the elements. I would be okay with the crazy but I have a daughter now and she… is magical. Her energy is so bright and i already see her dimming it. Its what life does. Sends one of those, and calls it an angel or a sign or the answer or the reason. But now i care more. And i dont want her to think I’m crazy for seeing her as magical for simply seeing how quickly she dimmed her light, and I had something to do with that too. I didn’t mean to. Which is i thiiiiiink what the whole healing generational trauma thing is? Your parents (well. I can only speak for mine. They did the best they could and they did better. But we are all human and make mistakes and just need a safe place to land and gravity to hold us together sometimes because we’ll fall apart if we think about it too much. )
And theres got to be some sort of significance with the stars. The constellations.. Roe v wade and the female divine energy feeling stronger. The pandemic… i think something’s coming. Another wake up call?
So, thoughts? Time for some grippy socks or – a nice deep breath and maybe online college?
Consciousness is not a phenomenon that comes from physics (as it is conceived but how to conceive it otherwise?) Consciousness is a metaphysical substance. It is the mystery of what is being as opposed to what is thing. But physics can only study things. To claim to formulate a physics of consciousness or of being is to reduce consciousness to a thing responding to the laws that apply to things. Let’s take an example though from a very different area. We say nothing can go faster than light. This is undoubtedly true in the observable physical world, that of energy matter and its space-time. But there are undoubtedly other realities than those of the observable physical world of other equally real spaces located on planes of objectification inaccessible to our senses, to any current means of observation, and even to any other theoretical conceptualization. “intuitive” and where the laws of materialistic physics are obsolete. We have a tiny glimpse of it in quantum physics. Entanglement for example. It has proven though condescendingly relegated to the realm of belief and myth that great mystics were seen in two places simultaneously. phenomenon called bilocation. Other equally strange phenomena (ghosts, telepathy, telekinesis, etc.) and deemed impossible have been identified and duly documented in the most serious manner. However, physics for the most part and officially is not interested in this and rightly announces that it is not its responsibility. (There are however some dissidents called charlatans by the others) Well I say that consciousness is also not his responsibility unless he invents a “spiritual physics” which is almost an oxymoron, probably impossible at our current human level.
There is no consciousness as such, so people are looking for something that doesn’t really exist.
It’s like how there’s no light of a lamp as such.
What is the light of a lamp? It is an emergent phenomenon of the merging of the lamp, the wiring, with a source of electricity.
Note how there’s no light in any of the merged elements, yet when they merge, light emerges.You can look for the light in the elements (lamp, wiring, electricity) all your life and you will never find any.
So the same goes for consciousness. Where does consciousness come from?
It starts with the merging of a sense organ & its object, called contact; when there is contact, there emerges sensation – something is sensed. (Note that this is as close to reality as we can get; from here, everything is interpretation.)
When there is sensation, there emerges perception; When there is perception, there emerges mental fabrication; and finally when there is mental fabrication, there emerged consciousness.
Next sensation – – – next consciousness.
So like with the light example: you can look all your life for consciousness in the body with its organs, in its senses, in the contact- perception – mental fabrication — yet you will never find it.
——-
So what is the name of the Law of Nature which explains this phenomenon, that whatever we look at we find that it is an emergent phenomenon of the merging of *something else*, and every *something else* is of the same (empty) nature?
It is called Idappaccayata in the language if Buddha Dhamma – Pali.
It is illustrated by the following popular formulation:
This arising – that arises; Rhis ceasing – that ceases; When this is present – that is present; When this is absent – that is absent.
And it applies to absolutely e v e ry t h i n g in the universe, universe included.
Conscious experience, a subjective term for the subjective state of perceiving emotions, consciousness, and perceptions, comes from measuring senses, and determining the relative relations to the disparate also subjective entities that involve measurement. This sure feels like gobbledygook. Read it twice. Needs something else. Perhaps you are leaving things unsaid implied in your math? A rabbit hole with no substance as it stands. A subjective perception of consciousness exists because of the relative states of subjective things/perceptions within a person’s thought? Nope, just can’t get it.
So how do we keep language out of the tent? Two conscious people, both subjectively identifying/experiencing consciousness. Consciousness and concepts. Like God being present when there are two rabbis talking, consciousness is created by the action/interaction. Sorry, still confused, but its my first go at this. I’ll look closer later. Thanks for introducing a new concept.
Feelings! I understand, possibly, the task of ascertaining positively the extent to which my Casta Diva feeling does correlate or not with a distinctive pattern of complex neural activity. But I am not interested in that, at all. It seems to me a futile task, sure useful for other extremely important and really huge purposes, which however I don’t care. What I wonder is whether we actually realize what – which reality – the very Casta Diva feeling is. Simply that. And the obvious answer is that it is Casta Diva itself. That is what one feels, what one listens to. I do not listen to anything else inside me. We are listening to the music outside: neither in one’s head nor in my ear or feet or anywhere mysterious. When the music ceases I might (perhaps) say one is listening to its soundless or aphonus representation. When Alice and Bob are listening to Casta Diva they are listening to the same emotion – sense – out there that is played and sung in the theater: physically, materially of course. (Do you feel what I feel?) Of course we presume they both are skilled to understand music. They are not pigeons in a theater. Or chimpanzees. They are not listening to their own inaccessible souls. If they were inaccessible then the whole matter we are talking about has lost any possible meaning from the beginning. We don’t know what we are talking about. Internal feelings are a mess, a tangle, in case they are not precisely the music itself, namely its sense, its reality when we do receive and grasp it. And: by “it” we mean it. Not some effect into us. The effect would be of no relevant interest. For it would be something else on its own, something which the music is not. The effect – if it has got that music’s full sense – is rather the music. That’s what we listen to and – in the happy case – receive, catch, understand. Now, if this famous hard problem is how can the neurologist know Alice’s feeling of Casta Diva, it is not such a strange problem. He should just know the normal facts of music and talk with Alice, see her visage and so on. What else? The inner feeling of Alice with her music inside, is a big, unnecessary busillis. I don’t really know what it would ever mean. The music is listened to, out of us. Not inside. One sometimes would say it is inside, but if so, obviously it is a fluent recollection of it. It is not the actual Casta Diva. Another obvious thing is that I am the only one who is feeling my feeling of Casta Diva, which is though either a merely tautological truth, when it is not plainly false. It is tautological that I am feeling my own feeling (I have my feelings) but it is false that one cannot share the audience’s feeling. It all is just a rather “important nonsense” and doesn’t imply that I should “guess” blindly what Alice listens to in herself. She has in her nothing but Casta Diva out there (there is not a special ethereal Casta Diva doubled out of the physical one) and I can see whether she understands this aria or fails. I feel her feeling when we are two different people; should I feel exactly what she feels cent per cent, then I would not be me anymore, I would be not different from being her; but this doesn’t make any clear sense. We both would be one? When a doctor is looking at her brain and seeing a certain pattern in there and asks her what she feels, it is not “because the pattern is not the feeling itself”; indeed, it is a normal way to know what she feels. “Knowing” is a verb such that must always imply that one may be wrong after all. She might be lying. On the other hand, this scientist may have a formidable method of a more direct inspection into Alice’s feeling Casta Diva. The simple fact that you are you and she is she, cannot be bypassed in any great experimental way. It is metaphysics.
“We prove in the paper that a specific kind of neural representation is equal to phenomenal consciousness in the cognitive frame of reference of the zombie and not every neural representation”.
How could one ever prove this, or anything like this? You can’t even demonstrate correlation, let alone causation or identity between neural states and first person experience. The best anyone can manage is a correlation between reports of experience and certain neural events. The reports are not the experience. If your escape route is something like Dennett’s heterophenomenology then that’s just reheated linguistic behaviourism. If not, then you can only work from your own case – which is not reproducible as there is no guarantee that ones own case is the same as someone else’s case. To claim, as you appear to do, that similar biology guarantees similar qualia, just assumes the conclusion as a premise.
Let us consider the axioms and theorems of any mathematical field.The axioms correspond to self-evident certainities and theorems correspond to reference-frame.Analogous to this,the cognitive reference-frame is supposed to accomodate special frame within it,which special cognitive frame is phenomenal consciousness ( as per presentation and my understanding ). My reading here suggested that phenomenal consciousness is equated to the experienced certainity of a self-evident axiom. I think that perceptual consciousness is much more than that though conceptual consciousness may equal.
“The reason that we have conscious experience is because of the process of physical measurement”.
Yes, ok. Inner and outer. The me and the not me is a form of measurement and essentially physical. Language has been honed to do this, and the most accurate language being mathematics.
But still this process has not been able to describe what the describer is BEFORE the description. The description, in terms of time, always follows observation and it is the observing mind that might be the answer, not the description of it. The observing mind finds a way to describe itself or others after the fact of existing.
There might be two possible answers (I’m sure there are more but it’s 4am in the morning). 1 is that the describing mind as a process is all that there is in consciousness or 2 that the describing part (the measuring) of consciousness, is only a function of a deeper process called observing.
I have found, in meditation that is (not the self hypnotic kind), that it is possible to observe the describing mind as a process that ceases to be measuring, or descriptive. One can observe thoughts as when left without interference as garbage when not located in context (physical). When observed in this fashion thoughts, measuring, description cease to exist. Now the interesting point is this. When in a mind the processes of measurement cease, is there consciousness? If by measurement cessation inner and outer also cease, where am I? I am not here or there or described. Is there anything left? Tentatively I’d say there is, but it’s certainly not “me”, nor is it god, or other forms of consciousness. It’s something else entirely.
A response of the author to the critics about the relativistic theory of consciousness ——————————————————————-
Thank you for your comments everybody! I would like to address a couple of critics that people wrote about my theory. In general it is always better to go to the original paper than to trust just the popular science piece. The goal of the theory is to show that consciousness is a physical phenomenon and that there is a physical solution for the hard problem of consciousness.The hard problem of consciousness is a bit of a controversial subject. Some philosophers and scientists agree that there is a hard problem and others don’t. The fact that there is no agreement about whether there is a hard problem or not is part of the philosophical and scientific debate. There are good arguments for both sides and all of them need to be addressed. I think that there are good arguments about why the hard problem is real and we cannot ignore them. For this reason I decided to show that even if there is a hard problem still we can find a physical solution for that.I hope that supporting one side of this philosophical and scientific debate doesn’t automatically mean for people from the other side, that this theory is pseudoscience. Because this is not the kind of attitude that is proper in order to discuss and discover the truth.
Now we can move on to the actual theory:First of all let me be very clear, The relativistic theory of consciousness is not about special relativity or general relativity. It is not about space time or gravity. Rather, it uses the relativistic principle. This is the basic principle that led Einstein to develop his theories.The relativistic principle states that the equations describing the laws of physics have the same form in all admissible frames of reference. In other words there is nothing above and beyond the observer and when two observers from two different physical systems conduct measurements and have the same results it means that the same physical laws are in force in their systems. As a result, their systems are equivalent to each other. In the theory I use a well known argument in consciousness studies named the zombie argument and the relativistic principle to show that zombies can’t exist and actually they must have consciousness as well just like humans. From this equivalence between zombies and conscious humans we show that in the cognitive frame of reference of the zombie, phenomenal consciousness is equal to a specific kind of neural representations called phenomenal judgments.
Let me stress out, in the theory relativity is not just an analogy. We try to show mathematically that consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, that is, consciousness satisfies all the requirements of the relativistic principle. To satisfy the mathematical requirements of the relativistic principle means that there is a transformation between different frames of reference and this transformation preserves the form of the equations that describe the system. As a result, in order to show that consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon and not just an analogy, we need to show that we can create a transformation term that transforms phenomenal consciousness from one cognitive frame of reference to the other while preserving the form of the equation. This is exactly what we developed in the paper. We started from simple equations that describe the dynamics of a cognitive system and in the end of the process we presented the proper transformation from one cognitive frame of reference to the other that preserves the transformation equation.
Another critic was how exactly the relativistic approach dissolves the hard problem.First let’s define measurement as an interaction between two elements. The elements can be any physical system, from particles to cognitive systems. In the heart of the hard problem there is the issue that we cannot find the actual conscious experience in neural patterns and thus we cannot reduce conscious experience to the dynamics of the brain. But now with the relativistic approach we see that we don’t need to reduce conscious experience to some complex neural dynamics. Instead, we just need to realize that different frames of reference describe the same physical phenomenon from different points of view, each with its own physical properties. different observers create different measurements and those measurements manifest different physical properties for each frame of reference. In analogy, you can think of a coin. We can see only one side of the coin or we can move and see the other side of the coin. So, we describe the same physical phenomenon, the coin, from two different frames of reference each of them observe different physical properties, that is, different sides of the coin. The same is going on with consciousness, because Bob is using his sensory system, his measurements manifest the physical properties of the neural substrate of the brain. On the other hand, because Alice is using different parts of her cognitive system to measure her own neural patterns, consciousness is manifested with different physical properties. Essentially, her measurements are according to the role and relations between her neural representations. We call the physical property that is manifested from this kind of measurements, phenomenal consciousness. Think about a conscious experience of an apple, for example. According to the theory it is manifested as a result of a measurement of all the relations between relevant neural representations, like the relations between neural representations of the shape, color and texture of the apple. Such relations are, for example, Is the apple red or green? How round is it? and so on.
This is a relational theory, meaning that relations between physical properties manifest new physical properties. It might seem weird for us because we are so used to think in absolute terms where every physical property shouldn’t be dependent on the measurements of The observers. But this might not be the case. It is still an open problem, for example, what is happening during the process of a quantum measurement. It seems that this process is very contextual, meaning that the particle doesn’t have a property like spin until the actual process of measurement. The point here is that again, there is an open debate of what exactly is the measurement process and is it relational or not. Just like before, I hope that choosing one side in the debate does not automatically mean to the other side that it is all just pseudoscience..
Just to make it clear, I don’t claim that quantum measurement is somehow related to consciousness. Quantum measurement is just an example to show why it makes sense to think about reality in a relational way.
Another issue is the question of whether we can validate the theory in an experiment. This is a very important issue because in science we have to make predictions that we can check in an experiment in order to validate or disprove a theory.The answer is yes, we can create a prediction and test it in an experiment. Admittedly not with the technology that we have today, but in principle it can be done. According to the theory, a cognitive frame of reference is defined by the dynamics of the cognitive system. We can think of a futuristic machine that Alice and Bob will use. The machine will check the dynamic of the neural representations of Alice and Bob. Then the machine will create the proper transformation from the cognitive frame of reference of Alice to the cognitive frame of reference of Bob. In other words it will change the dynamics of Alice’s brain to be exactly like the Dynamics of bob’s brain. The theory predicts that in this case Alice will measure the phenomenal consciousness of Bob (She will experience the conscious experiences of Bob).
I would like to stress another misunderstanding of the theory. It is not the case that according to the theory every neural activity is conscious. As I wrote above, in the paper we describe equivalence between a conscious human and a zombie. Because a zombie has the same cognitive system and the same representations as a human, all the results of the theory until now are just valid for humans and similar to humans cognitive systems . We prove in the paper that a specific kind of neural representation is equal to phenomenal consciousness in the cognitive frame of reference of the zombie and not every neural representation. Now, The Next step is to examine in a more detailed way, what exactly are the minimal conditions from a measurement in order to manifest phenomenal consciousness. For that, stay tuned for the next paper!
I hope this long explanation helps a bit to understand the relativity theory of consciousness and how we tried to extend physics in order to explain consciousness. Thank you Nir Lahav
Just read this. Initial thoughts of getting my head around this, the theory describes the relativistic explaniation of consciousness. This seems to me more about perspective ie frame of reference like the theory of relativity (Einstein). In some ways it reminds of Susan Blackmore’s storyboarding idea of consciousness. The relativistic experience in my opinion doesnt create counciousness, it doesn’t create the ‘I’, the self, it seems to me that this feeds into whatever consciousness is rather then creating it. Otherwise AI systems possibly could become self-aware.
“because the pattern is not the feeling itself, just a representation of it.” It is so simple. It to me is a memory of the feeling which includes all of our body, its neural feedback, the hormones excreted during this experience added to memories of similar experiences, and the sensations elicited in various organ systems throughout the body. We are not separate from our “meat bodies” lol, (please don’t think of Scientology, or any media entertainment fiction here). Yes this could theoretically be translated in that memory of that experience as a pattern perhaps as that seems to be how our brains work, but it would of course still involve numerous neurotransmitters, hormones, chemicals, organ systems, etc. And so this would all have to be reproduced in another “hardware”/human body/replicator that could be connected to another human for someone else to experience it.
The claim that mental events are physical events is hardly new. The idea that mental events have different properties to the physical events they presumably supervene upon can be found in people as diverse as Davidson and Kim. describing this relation using the language of relativity is tempting but misleading for several reasons. First there is the issue of the privacy of the mental, aka the problem of other minds. When one set of phenomena are visible to everyone as biocomputation and the other set of phenomena are only visible to the person (or system) having them as qualia, then that isn’t relativity as it isn’t two equivalent reference frames, it’s just two incommensurable experiences. This is thus a category error as the experiences from the inside are not in the same category as those on the outside.
Consciousness/Awareness/Thought/word is the conservation of a formless living energy that flows into forms from a void, a sea of emptiness, deep deep down and far far within the very fabric of existence itself – TJ ……………………………………………
The first law of thermodynamics, also known as Law of Conservation of Energy, states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; energy can only be transferred or changed from one form to another.
Early in the 20th century the unquestioned assumption that the physical universe is actually physical lead to a scientific search for the elementary “point particle” upon which all life is built, which would prove that reality was not an illusion. But as soon as scientists began smashing electrons and other particles in enormous accelerators, they quickly realized the foundations of the physical world weren’t physical at all—that everything is energy.
We even cannot create life from only artficial elements Til now we always needed a part of an already living object to ‘create artificial life'(on fact not more as sort of recreating or exchange of parts, like an artf. Knee)
I think he means the problem is understanding the origin of consciousness and how it all works, not consciousness itself. Hey, they managed to figure out that energy cannot be created or destroyed, maybe they’ll figure this one out, too. At that point, say hi to God for me!
The ‘problem of consciousness’ is that human vanity demands the existence of a magical component. Consciousness is merely the modern version of what previous generations called ‘the soul’. We do not need a magical component in our minds to explain brain activity.
I like how, in an attempt to appear intellectually humble and to distance themselves from any hint of arrogance or anthropocentrism, people will scornfully shoot down any suggestion that there may be some concepts pertaining to human experience (e.g. consciousness) that elude our grasp as signs of “human vanity”.
It’s interesting because it relies on the assumption that we have already attained such a vast and profound understanding of the universe that anything outside this framework is merely a vainglorious search for a “magical component”. The assumption we can dismiss as nonsense anything that doesn’t fit the corpus of knowledge that we’ve amassed in a few centuries of scientific thinking and research is, ironically enough, a symptom of “human vanity”.
The irony is double when you term this “human vanity” because consciousness isn’t restricted to humans. Animals have consciousness; recent studies suggest that even plants have some degree of consciousness. Physicist Freeman Dyson once speculated that atoms may have some degree of consciousness, however low. To say that our acknowledgement that there may be some things that we have yet to figure out and maybe even won’t figure out with the scientific method in its current form is “human vanity” is irony and misconstruction at its finest.
For an enlightening discussion of the hard problem of consciousness and a potential solution check out, One unbounded ocean of consciousness: Simple answers to the big questions in life by Dr. Tony Nader, a top neuroscientist. His related books give a good background in this area, as do his recent YouTube discussions with thought leaders in AI, science and philosophy.
No kidding, I’ve never read so much confused rubbish before. Obviously masquerading as a feeble attempt to suggest that there might be something else going on; like a personal soul spirit. The entire piece is full of contradictory statements.
That’s too funny. Academic-speak is not for everyone. In some ways, we need these people, and in some ways, they can’t see the forest for the trees. Ugh. It must be difficult being in their big brains, loaded with the same consciousness as the rest of us. Repeat, repeat, repeat, detour, reset, repeat.
Consciousness in my view is something like the soul that might never be able to be described, yet I think that it is fair to say that the same way that thoughts and faith can influence the outcome of a physical manifestation this is a clear evidence that consciousness is something real for it is the basic foundation of thoughts and faith. However it is a real that belongs to a different reality that we recognized as what is normally “real” for us. For that we will never be able to understand it coming from a perspective of the reality that we experience for that is not the same reality of the nature of it.
It is for no reason that people that are experts in meditation or transcendental experiences often state that what one experience while in trance can not be explained in words nether be understood mentally or intellectually and the reason for that is that these phenomena is not something that comes from our common reality but instead it comes from what we describe as a divine experience for that is the only way to settle what our brain would otherwise never settle. 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️
I agree with your statement, but knowing that psychedelics cause a state of “ego dissolution” or “ego death” we can infer that our subjective experience on this place we call earth can only be attributed to the lack of coherence in our brain. It might be possible to understand this in time but as we can see no one seems interested in using these compounds for scientific reasearch.
I agree with your statement, but knowing that psychedelics cause a state of “ego dissolution” or “ego death” we can infer that our subjective experience on this place we call earth can only be attributed to the lack of coherence in our brain. It might be possible to understand this in time but as we can see no one seems interested in using these compounds for scientific research.
I don’t know about the stupid monkey part, but I think anyone of any belief at any level can agree that love, for example, exists, yet we cannot see it or measure it by any known means. Only the results on the brain can be measured. The same applies to what we call the soul, consciousness, intuition, imagination, and the like. At one time it was believed that the earth was flat. Now we know differently. We may yet learn that there is indeed a grand scheme, or find out that we are God personified. For the moment at least.
What predictive power this theory has? Let’s have a thought experiment: Alice looks at a real-time MRI which doctors says it is from the brain of her good friend Bob. If (by using this new theory) she can discover that she is looking at her own MRI (which is the truth) than we have predictive power of this theory.
What about when people have flatlined and brain activity halts..yet people are still recording memories..are concious of thier surroundings?..check out Dr. Bruce greyson..he has been doing research on this type of thing for decades..very compelling stuff
I don’t buy into the so-called hard problem of consciousness, which assumes an answer that C could possibly be explained mathematically/discursively. Said explanation would always be incomplete and out of time, whereas consciousness is experienced in the moment. A better problem would be how to create consciousness (but then it would still be impossible to verify its existence).
Very interesting, Fairstein. So what you’re saying is that in an observer-created world, which lives moment to moment and which we create, without the continual reel of the subconscious telling it what’s real, that the existence of consciousness cannot be verified because it has existed and has passed, and it has yet to exist both at the same time. We are therefore unaware of it completely until the subconscious plays it back, whether valid or not, and whether any experience actually happened or we just imagined it. In this way, we can imagine anything and make it real, at least to the mind.
I have to agree with others that this seems like a fairly silly use of the word “relativistic” and a pretty absurd thesis altogether.
The article mentions how Bob and Alice “measure” her happiness in different ways. What does this mean? What they’re trying to say is that her experience of happiness is different from his observation of her neural activity while happy, but claiming that her experience is her “measuring” anything doesn’t make sense. She can reflect on the fact that she’s happy, which might be a kind of measurement (“I seem happier right now than I was an hour ago”) but that’s not the experience of happiness. Further, if she really did measure her happiness the way Bob did, that is, look at scans of her neural activity, she would indeed measure it the same way he did.
It’s just a jumble of illogical claims, at least the way the article is written, but I suspect that reflects the actual theory.
If any of this “relativity” were what constituted consciousness, then in fact the same could be said of artificial intelligence, which contradicts the whole theory here. An artificial neural network would experience its own connections completely differently from how you would when measuring or observing them. Would that mean it was conscious? According to this theory, the answer should be yes. That means the theory ends up contradicting its underlying assumption that there’s something intrinsic about human brains that’s required for consciousness.
There might be or might not be, but saying “things look different to us from how they look to the thing we’re measuring” says nothing at all about the subject. Of course they do.
Subjective relativism. The typical over used excuse used in philosophy which really translates to “I don’t know”. Lol. Consciousness only exists to the person observing. Lol. Gimme a break. The hard problem will never be solved. It can’t be.
@ Foster: I suspect that “relativity” is just that. “Further, if she really did measure her happiness the way Bob did, that is, look at scans of her neural activity, she would indeed measure it the same way he did.” In basic theory, perhaps, but how do we measure the way her brain measures against what’s looked at in brain scans? Her brain may have a greater or lesser capacity to “accept” or register happiness, or it may how up in different ways, so if two people eat an ice cream cone, would they be equally happy, assuming all other factors are the same? It’s just too simplistic, and mankind has not yet been able to fully explore this vast horizon – the human brain.
As a physicist, and long time follower Chalmers, I think I can fairly saw of the original article that: while a good proof of the “no-zombies” theory, this write has to represent on of the most misplaced uses of mathematical precepts from a legitimate field (relativity) to another that I have ever witnessed by degreed/accredited authors in a very long time. I struggle to maintain an open mind to fresh notions in the struggle to crack open the “hard-problem”, but this pointless exuberance in writing functional/variable expressions to somehow stand for cognitive ‘aspects’ claimed by fiat to represent quale experienced just looks like silly bravado to mark out some intellectual territory. It feels a lot like some of the worst Continental philosophy of the postmodern movement ( esp Derida) . Not sorry- D Barillari
It’s a theory of perspective, not consciousness. Anyway, NONE of this is new. If anyone ever has the chance to read the 2008 cult novel “Nothing To Say”, written by a 19 year old autistic boy, it covers all this, only more so, and isn’t presented in such a ridiculously pretentious way. It isn’t a scientific break through, it’s just common sense. Philosophy more than anything. Get over yourselves.
I think consciousness is a chemical reaction in the heart gut and brain and these work 2gether to create our conscious experiences and no 2 people goes through same conscious experience as its down to individuals body how it produces those chemical reactions
My kitty cat purrs showing her happiness while I pet her. Her happiness makes me happy also. We are both happy but at different levels. Many animals on “our” planet are self aware. I often wonder if the cells that make up my body are self aware. Is the universe a living entity. Is it also self aware and the expansion is just that it is just growing.
Agreed. I think a wholesale dismissal of the history of philosophical thought on the topic is partly to blame for these alleged “breakthroughs” in respect of the hard problem. It is laughable when something Spinoza thought centuries ago, and subsequent philosophers picked up on and developed further in numerous ways, gets repackaged as an original breakthrough on the topic, through a obsfuscating rhetorical employment of the language of relativity theory (“See, relativity theory! We’re doing science! Not philosophy! No, no! Never philosophy!”)
That’s right. My reading of the article was that this so called ‘theory’ was the product of a couple of philosophers, not scientists. In other words, thinking and language have produced it, not controlled experiments, testing, trials, objective observation etc. As is so often the case, philosophy students and teachers seem to think they have some kind of privileged view of everything, wheras a lot of it is just a bit of extended thinking that many people are capable of if they could be bothered.
I do not dispute this description, but I do think it is not quite my concept. I see a conscious mind as the feedback between two halves of our brain observing each other and the feedback between the two halves recorded as memory. And this can be modeled in terms of relativity. Perhaps the math works better that way. It may not be halves, but two brain centers- as my medical knowledge is not exact. But that is a good place to start. There have been other works on the “bicameral brain.”
So, about 2 years ago on a neuroscience subreddit I asked the question…is there any organic agent that is capable of creating anything that is intangible, has no mass, has no measurable properties, and can defy all known laws of physics?
The only response I got other than crickets was assuming this was a troll question.
Yet, this is precisely what science, neuroscience, expects us to accept…that the brain, a biological physical organ is capable of such a feat creating something called consciousness, which is intangible, invisible, has no mass, cannot be measured, and defies all known laws of physics.
Basically, a physical organ can create magic.
The evidence suggested that the brain creates consciousness will inevitably be demonstrably proven false. The more probable explanation is that consciousness is going to be something more akin to the universal power source of energy that fundamentally powers everything.
While the biological body requires food to convert to energy to power the brain and body, the consciousness is what gives rise to Self, soul, spirit, all of that connective source that the entirety of humanity understands intuitively.
Science can claim the brain creates consciousness in as much as it creates states or levels of awareness but the consciousness the rest of the planet is referring to is no about levels of awareness…it’s about what differentiates us from a box of hammers.
If science is going to insist the brain creates magic then it needs to expand that arena and revisit a whole lot of other topics with seriousness and sincerity. Or get dismissed and ridiculed for suggesting a physical organ can create magic.
I agree! I believe our brain is more like a receiver/transmitter. Quantum entanglement between particles that make up the brain and the coinciding particle somewhere else but where? This is also the way I view child birth and development in the womb. Are we expected to believe that such information is simply a natural reaction turning the female body into a 3D printer?😂 I’m not convinced DNA and nature alone makes this amazing feat possibly
I agree! I believe our brain is more like a receiver/transmitter. Quantum entanglement between particles that make up the brain and the coinciding particle somewhere else but where? This is also the way I view child birth and development in the womb. Are we expected to believe that such information is simply a natural reaction turning the female body into a 3D printer?😂 I’m not convinced DNA and nature alone makes this amazing feat possible
@ Taylor: “… intangible, invisible, has no mass, cannot be measured, and defies all known laws of physics.” What you’ve just described is the phenomenon we call love, with its myriad faces, and which we may yet discover is the source of everything. And it will be inexplicable then as it is now. One of the problems with a reasoning mind is that it’s always trying to reason.
Miracles. An awful lot of people seem to love the idea of miracles. But miracles need causes and and if their causes are invisible, miracle lovers need something non-physical to account for them. They need a dualistic outlook. Blame Descartes. He’s the goat (in the Peanuts comic strip sense) who put the wrench in the works.
I have known the answer to this question for nearly 5 decades. I personally found the answer in a series of magazine articles. The scientific portion of this article was written by Dr Robert Lawrence Kuhn PhD. The initial article started with the title of: “Can Human Brain Explain Human Mind?” Among other subtopics, one proposal was that the lowland gorilla had a brain virtually identical to the human brain with the exception of the frontal cortex was, on average, 20% larger than a human being. And of course we share 98% of DNA with gorillas and chimpanzees. So here is the big question. Why is a gorilla not at least 80% as smart as the average human being, which it is not? In essence, the article clearly demonstrates that human brain alone cannot explain the incredible abilities that a human being has. The article goes on to speak about a concept called the spirit in man and how that human beings have unique qualities that no other species in the animal kingdom possesses. I am condensing the general consensus of the article.
this is what happens when physicists deal with life when otherwise they should only be concerned with dead matter. Life is made up of dead building blocks, and life is the way these dead building blocks work together. Consciousness is this way, so the structure of the dead bricks. So the secret of consciousness is structure – if you look at it from the outside. You can’t look at it from the inside, because then you would need the subjective code of what’s being looked at. And the observer does not know it himself – he only feels it. To ask how matter becomes sensation is as nonsensical as to ask why the universe exists. And that cannot be solved with relativistic equations either.
I don’t see how this resolves the hard problem. It just explains that two observers observing one neuronal activity will have different conscious experiences: which we kind of already know.I still don’t see how the qualia of conscious experience is anymore explainable than it was before. It also recreates a Cartesian theatre where “Alice” sits at a centre seat and observes her own neuronal activity: whereas the physical brain doesn’t have any such centre seat which offers the subject to sit and observe the rest of it.
Consciousness is trying to find out what consciousness is..once it finds out which actually is through experience it can share or express mathematically or logically to anyone who does not have the experience. Going In is the only way out. Observer has to become the observed and kill the enquiry.
Consciousness has myriad states experienced from individual to universal state. The first observer being God is observing and experiencing everything from outside to inside and nothing exists outside him or her. However the rest is myriad individual singularities that have developed boundaries or shells around them and are observers inside to outside and are mesmerized at their own ignorance.
Is no one going to talk about the example of Bob and Alice’s observations (when Bob is on the train and Alice is watching) both being correct, is actually an incorrect conclusion? Alice’s is factually correct. It’s honestly a ridiculous conclusion to say otherwise. I get what they’re trying to do but honestly, knowing that’s their train of thought (no pun intended)just throws all credibility to the wind and made it hard for me to take anything else that was written very seriously. I get that Bob’s pov was also “correct” according to the researchers, because it was his observation. And partially he was indeed right because he was stationary. But the train was moving, he was also moving. In reality he was moving because the train was. And the world was not moving backwards as he saw it. So no, Bob was not correct in his observation. One might even say it’s his very pov that made it flawed. Ultimately his preception of his physical reality in that moment was flawed. Therefore how the heck can u use that as a comparison? Or maybe that’s a perfect comparison for the topic of consciousness. It shows me we’re still back at square one and probably will be for quite some time. I didn’t explain every detail and i certainly didn’t explain it liked I’d imagined, but such is the curse of being an INFJ. Everything makes sense in our heads but as soon as we try to get it to make sense to the world, we end up looking like complete idiots. Such as in this instance. I bid the farewell.
Consciousness isn’t the reactions in the brain any more than information is the processes of a computer. It’s simply facilities what is always be there. Treat everything as if it were a fluid even space.
Absolute garbage. A complete waste of time. Utter nonsense. It seems like it was written by an AI trying in vain to understand the human experience. None of this is even remotely close to explaining the qualia of our senses and internal self awareness even in complete sensory deprivation. You can read everything about chocolate ice cream and study the subject for years and get a PhD in culinary chemistry but if you never actually experience the sensation of eating and tasting it from your own first hand perspective, then you will know absolutely nothing of value about chocolate ice cream. You can learn hundreds of songs and poems about love and watch all the romantic movies and study sociology and psychology but if you never actually fall in love with someone genuinely then you will know nothing at all of what true love is. You have to experience it for yourself. Just like this article doesn’t come anywhere remotely to explain what consciousness actually is. In fact it is so far away from the truth that it is offensive to me personally. It makes me feel sad and angry to read something that is so very very wrong and misguided, that causes only more confusion. It makes me wonder if my personal experience is really that different that they can’t even come in the same universe as what it really feels like to exist as a fully self aware living human being. I honestly think this is either fake or some kind of joke. It seems like something an NPC would write out of futile desperation to grasp an inkling of an understanding of what the first person experience actually is. From mPERSPECTIVE, this is a giant
What if we’re in a virtual reality like in the movie The Matrix and unlike the 13th Floor, we have real bodies somewhere else. We’re not simulated programs, but real people in virtual reality. If so, then consciousness comes from our real bodies. The “brain” here is an computational interface or illusion to the overall virtual reality experience. Sleep, meanwhile, may be the interface taking a toll on our real bodies so it needs to be partially removed for a time period to keep it from frying our real brains/minds. Perhaps our real bodies don’t require sleep. Perhaps we’re in a cryo-prison and this is a rehabilitation program designed to demonstrate how bad things can get when free will is allowed to run rampant. Perhaps “god” represents the ruler of the actual real world and we were bad and sent to prison here.
Is that any crazier than the nutty things both religious and non-religious people create to explain why they can’t explain things like gravity properly? Dark Matter? Dark Energy? We invent things like the Big Bang without considering EVERYTHING could be an illusion like the Gnostics believed. If you can’t wake up from the dream, how could you tell the dream world from the real world? Perhaps the lack of a source of consciousness IS THE PROOF. We are not here. We are there. Here is mostly empty space because the computers can only compute so much data. It all starts to make more sense than everything coming from nothing or some singularity that is ill defined or a missing creator god that had to die to save us from himself….
There is no need to do complicated research. By that the answers will remain hidden. If one wants to understand the science of consciousness you can find it in “Bhagavad Gita as it is” by h d g a c bhaktivedanta swami prabhupad. You will find the answer from the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna.
Speaking as a cognitive applied linguist, the formulation of this exciting theory of consciousness cross fertilizes my language learning work in code switching, speaker perspective recognition (esp. to teach modal verbs and tense/aspect), and even about redefining “language” breaking through the limiting frontier of “communication”. While this perspective might seem “off topic”, I see once again the unity among various disciplines studying cognitive creation, and especially the categorization of expressive domains. Perhaps encouraging more cross-disciplinary fertilization can create useful synergic sparks to push forth consciousness research in non-competing scientific sectors.
This seems like functionalism to me. Functionalism is the theory that consciousness is an algorithm, and that any system that instantiates that algorithm is conscious. However, functionalism fails the smell test because of a similar relativism: the same process can look like different algorithms to different observers. That means that there is no truth to any conscious experience, though as conscious beings we intrinsically know that there is a truth to our experience, which is to say that it is self-identical.
The chicken or the egg? Which came first? You ever thought that brain arises out of Consciousness and not the other way around. Lol Consciousness doesn’t need thought to exist but thought does need Consciousness.
Our conscious experiences are sufficiently different for the same setting from others that we sometimes detect when we are on the same ‘wavelength’ as others and our experiencing consciousness that appear very similar. It is said that fear can save our lives. We learn fear through our experiences, but like consciousness evolution appears critical in our ability to use fear to prolong our lives.
I agree with the relativiness of conciense fenomena. To clarify we need also a common definitional frame. To become concious, a lot of other functions need to be running. And the constant analyse of this flux with special incidence (attention) on the relevant parts demand a lot of funtions and processing power, memories and preprogrammed routines. In essence, the analises of this constant resume, filtered off by all other functions of neuronal routines, processing all sensorial information from internal and external fenomena, plus the the resume of all other mental functions that activated or signaling enough priority to be read with enough attention by this main process. This process (conscience) made a registration in diferent memory’s of diverse persistence, according to his attributed importance.
I agree with the relativiness of conciense fenomena. To clarify we need also a common definitional frame. To become concious, a lot of other functions need to be running. And the constant analyse of this flux with special incidence (attention) on the relevant parts demand a lot of funtions and processing power, memories and preprogrammed routines. In essence, the analises of this constant resume, filtered off by all other functions of neuronal routines, processing all sensorial information from internal and external fenomena, plus the resume of all other mental functions, that activated or signaling enough priority to be read with enough attention by this main process, is the conciense. This process (conscience) made a registration in diferent memory’s of diverse persistence, according to his attributed importance.
I enjoyed reading your commment. Could consciousness merely be a painting in the process? (Recording of an experience). The tools used to create this painting being our senses and organs, and our brain the canvas to capture it all. Prove me wrong ;) Half of our brain operates the tools, the other half records the progress.
Interesting, although the relativistic interpretation of measurement-locality-induced-subjectivity still doesn’t seem to resolve the mechanism by which matter gives rise to self-awareness — regardless of which clump of matter is measuring what and where; it seems like the hard problem of consciousness is still lurking beneath. Maybe I missed something; I’ll have to read it again. Or perhaps it is that, but with some other bits and pieces….my personal view is that whatever consciousness is, if I were to take an entirely materialist viewpoint, it would be somehow related to the macroscopically-emergent ensemble of microscopic instances of the action-principle applied to signaling along neural pathways. You could call, in such a model, a “thought” as a causally-linked, nonlinear cascade of neural activity which has a natural “flow” (like water down a mountain — seeking the path of least resistance). I think each such “flow” has constant bombardment of external data pushing and pulling it in different directions… but the strengthened pathways from prior experience still manage to direct most of the “flow” in a specific way. Any deviation from that provides an “atom” of subjectivity — because self-awareness necessitates something to “chew” on; I would say that, in the absence of all information and sensory input, there would be no deviations from “flow” and therefore, no self-awareness at all because from an evolutionary perspective, there’s nothing to “correct” or interpret (which would have survival or reproductive value). Self-awareness (I think) must somehow be related to the action-principle applied to the neurally-guided restoring-forces acting on signal pathways. Which would seem to imply that whatever consciousness is, it must be fundamental; it must be an intrinsic property of matter which only seems observable when matter is arranged in certain ways (ways like you’d find in a brain) — like electrical charge, or gravitational fields. There is probably a “consciousness field” and the brain acts as an amplifier and localizer of that field, and it is just a natural part of the quantum fields that make up reality. Whatever that means.
The proposed ‘theory’ (is this even falsifiable?) definitely doesn’t ‘dissolve’ the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is essentially the mystery of how some types of brain activity give rise to subjective experience. The paper described here doesn’t explain the hard problem or make it go away. All they’re saying essentially is that when we observe brain activity correlated with a particular subjective experience in the lab, we don’t experience the subject’s conscious experience (duh), but some other assemblage of neurons in the subject’s brain that ‘observes’ the same brain activity generates the subject’s conscious experience.
OK; how does this other, ‘observing’ brain activity give rise to a subjective experience? This is just passing the buck from one group of neurons to another and imagining they’ve ‘dissolved’ the problem. Clearly they haven’t; there’s still a hard problem here.
Of course, it should be noted that there it is not the general consensus of neuroscientists that there is a hard problem of consciousness. While there’s obviously a lot about consciousness we don’t understand, it’s clear that it’s dependent upon brain activity. If you can reliably alter or suspend one’s consciousness or the perception of pain etc by disrupting or suspending particular brain processes, it can be reasonably inferred that, broadly speaking, consciousness is caused by this brain activity. Some brain activity just happens to feel like something.
There isn’t any point down the chain of physical activity where we could reasonably expect to ‘see’ another person’s subjective experience; all we’re ever going to see is the brain activity associated with it. Even those that think there is a hard problem of consciousness don’t necessarily think it’s a problem that can in principle be solved. If consciousness is indeed caused by certain types of brain activity, as all the evidence suggests, it’s never going to be ‘seen’ in the manner the article suggests is possible; it’s only ever going to be experienced from the first person perspective.
They know but the ego love of power blocks the power of love. They are soul robbers. Trying to make you believe one life and the consciousness goes to particles…. A devious plan to make people exploit instead of nurture
“The God” you speak falsely of, is not a he. Love, is what the god is. Didn’t know love had boundaries. It’s literally THE KEY to unlocking the mysterious multi-verse, and the most powerful force in it.
If everyone experiences love, or a lack of it: If existence (consciousness) is relative, why can’t we stop looking at individual mechanisms, as if in a binary system, and study the whole process, not the two available choices: good/bad, right/wrong, this/that, black/white, me/you, instead of, for example, the yin-yang. Two halves + one symbol=3.
When this experience is used to consider conscious existence, it’s not you/me; It’s all of us.
all are the parts of the shared experience of consciousness.
Consciousness is an awareness of yourself, and how it relates to your, and others, existence. It’s a system wide experience, not only in the brain, but the whole body, which includes energies and vibrations.
I have zero respect for anyone who is so controlled by a outdated religious system, meant to instill fear, and then using it, to indoctrinate others,
I see you, and you need to love yourself more, so to evolve those anti-social attitudes and rude and disrespectful behaviors towards others. Have some self-respect!
They did not define what consciousness is nor say where it comes from. All they’ve done is developed another way of observing it. They just assume that the brain created consciousness. Maybe consciousness created the brain!
Correct me if I’m wrong but this does nothing to suggest that consciousness is an emergent property of matter (or that it’s identical to matter and just one particular frame of reference) but rather that there is no separation between the neural activity and the conscious experience. Rather that they are simply two subjective representations of the same phenomenon.
This doesn’t really solve the hard problem of consciousness in a materialist paradigm, but rather resolves the separation of consciousness and matter. There’s not really anything other than consciousness. Matter is not external to consciousness.
It won’t be long till there is a quantum computing analogy to explain human thinking, consciousness and brain activity. Reality is that the synapse is a photonic process. Photons generated and signaling at short range. Yes we measure electrical energy but what makes it work is spectral photons messaging in The cells.all photonic generation radiation is about near atomic messaging. Photons escaping excess.
For how long would you refer to einstein inventions to solve problems of science. Try to evolve something new. Please search the integrative brain theory in google scholar authored by sohail adnan and another article of the same author ” consciousness emanates from neuronal network of coordination, a fact endorsed by preserved consciousness in focal ischemic infarctions”.
I think it’s already established that the soul can move freely in and out of the fetus as it pleases until the time of birth. If the fetus is aborted, the soul simply moves on to a different fetus and different life. That’s why trying to end abortion (or end it legally, which is all you can do) is so ridiculous. The soul is not in the fetus at the time of abortion, unless the soul actually wants to experience that particular death. The fetus is the pathway to come into a corporeal experience. There will always be other fetuses.
The author says “Now the authors want to continue to examine the exact minimal measurements that any cognitive system needs in order to create consciousness”. I hate to rain on his parade but that is what everyone has been trying to do for a long time. The exact measurement is a neural function. Neural activity is equivalent to “measurements”. A relativistic approach does not solve the problem of how the qualia emerge. The botton line is since the author has not proven which measurements create consciouness he is no better now than he was before he started.
I like to think that there is strong links between consciousness and spirituaity. I still gladly welcome anything else like this one above I think we should study more on reasonings , deductibilties, life experiences, emotions, other useful areas. Everyone’s consciousness grows with age. it is not readymade. There has to be seeds somewhere that is to be watered, watched, tendered to grow or it will be forgotten, lost, confused.
I feel the same as well. In fact, I believe that physical brain power is the soul. Stream of consciousness writing helps me to explore my conciousness. It’s cured my depression. But I am someone who believes in the “impossible”. To me, God is defined as “The impossible that serves your true self” and it’s all in the brain with the help of faith or letting go. Letting go of your mortality, fears, dreams, aspirations, inspirations. “God loves you”? This is true. Secularism is a disease.
The quote about “100 years of research” is misleading. FMRI was invented in 1990 and some of the best research began after 2003. Who actually believes just 19 years of modern research is enough to declare consciousness is not produced with neurons?
When Bob is standing by the rail track, and Alice is on a train passing Bob, using an observation/measurement method Bob finds that Alice has a velocity of 100km/hr. Now, If he uses exactly THE SAME OBSERVATION/MEASUREMENT METHOD to find his own velocity, he will find that to be 0km/hr. This measurement gives Bob the credence that his state is different from Alice, and he is stationary (his velocity being 0). Now, in a lab, Bob observes Alice’s brain and all Bob sees is some physical activities and no consciousness. Now, the way Bob observes Alice’s brain, IN THE SAME WAY he can (and should, to be unbiased) observe his own brain too. And if he does that, he will see only physical activity and no consciousness in his own brain. In order to scientifically compare, THE MEASUREMENT/OBSERVATION METHOD needs to be the same, which in this case would give similar conclusion (the scientific conclusion from Bob’s point of view would be- neither of them is conscious). Now, we understand that, it is the consciousness that enables Bob to observe. Where that consciousness is coming from? We need that elusive answer.
From the comments, it seems some people think this consciousness question is outside the realm of science. They should ask themselves a single question: WHY. Science is a methodology to obtain reliable understanding. Why something should fall outside it?
Thank you! This article seems to be simply pointing out that subjective observations of the experience of consciousness differ from the objective external observations of brain scans. This isn’t news. Your recap of spot on.
Scanning a brain to try to understand conscious experience is like scanning a running computer to understand the code running inside. It’s really not feasible. Also, each brain has a completely different low-level hardware construction. Our only hope of making this approach work is deep machine learning. If we can build models to understand deep neutral networks from the outside, then we have a chance at building similar models to understand the vastly deep neural connections in a brain.
Context matters. Bar Ilan is a religious university. Research conducted there must be considered in this context. This is not to say that research in Bar Ilan is scientifically flawed, only that any conclusion drawn from such research must be scrutinized in light of possible religious bias. It should be stated that this pseudo-philosophical discussion, while perhaps pointing to new ways of thinking about consciousness, ultimately does not repudiate what most materialist scientists already believe: consciousness is an epiphenomenon, not a fundamental constituent of life or the cosmos.
The harsh, know-it-all comments add nothing to the discussion. My view, for what it’s worth as a practicing quantum physicist but not a philosopher, is that the new ideas presented could well be off base, wrong, or not even wrong, but hey that is what hundreds of physicists thought about Einstein’s theory. I’m NOT making the mistake I see often that ‘because Einstein was right in the face of criticism, any wacky theory must also be right.’ I’m saying new ideas are hard to swallow, but take them with a pinch of salt and see where they lead.
The idea of relativism is, in fact, now entering into serious discussions by serious theoretical physicists considering how observer frames of reference might help us understand the so-called quantum measurement problem and the question of physical realism. (Bell inequalities and all that.) We obviously (I think) don’t have the final word on all of this, so dogmatic statements on either side don’t help.
The paradox of consciousness leads to only one conclusion to be made by those who dare take the step. It must be supported and exist via mechanisms of some sort external to the physical body. We are at an early stage of science in this area, wrongly dividing some phenomena into the subsection of “ParaPsychology”. When scientists are ready to admit that the consciousness processes cannot be entirely physical, nor “emergent” from physical phenomena, then progress will be made.
Using the term “relativistic” is just silly terminology. What has been discovered by actual research is that the neural patterns when remembering or imagining a stimulus are very similar to the patterns which occur when a real stimulus happens. This reflective behavior is crucial to the experience of consciousness. In a sense we continually imagine our selves. Anil Seth has an idea of the human mind “constantly hallucinating the world and the self” to create reality.
i agree that consciousness is relative and the result of physical elements in the brain, but that doesn’t answer the question of what consciousness is for me. It seems like a dance of words around the issue. Perhaps it’s just that my level of consciousness can’t comprehend consciousness. rand Lane
Is it possible that the only specialists who ponder ‘consciousness’ are those having a shared set of experiences from which that phenomenon emerges? We know that there are some people who walk in their sleep, go to the fridge in their sleep, etc. Their motor-functions and visual cortices are operating but their frontal lobes are shut down.
Then there is “lost time”. You find you have been driving for hours and have wound up in some random place without the slightest memory of the trip. Amnesiacs spend years in a strange city, fully conscious but with that parcel of data containing their name, locale, and their associations walled off, sometimes forever.
When I read these “mystery of consciousness” articles, I can’t avoid the impression that, perhaps, I’m an outlier in this shared experience… or perhaps the researchers, philosophers, and interested journalists are the outliers, comprising a few million–0.1%–of the global population of human minds. I don’t know; I think I know/perceive what they are talking about, but perhaps that perception is illusory.
It’s not like they can look down at their right hands and discuss their shared experience of having a right hand, which they could reasonably pull off lacking a right hand: they can see that other people have right hands.
Either this article didn’t get the point of the paper or the authors got carried away. Nothing jumped on me as a profound finding while reading this. Simple exercise of outrespection could easily lead to realisation that everyone views the world differently and often biased by our own experiences. I think Memory is fundamental for consciousnes. Imagine yourself without a Memory, who would you be? What references do you have to base your decision making on? I think our complex Memories what makes everyone is unique. Special events in life get registered in our Memories and subsequently shape who we are.
You are basing this on your experience as a conscious mind. You can’t rule out consciousness existing in a way I can’t understand. Does consciousness require memory? We value intelligence, but we aren’t the benchmark for intellect itself. We want to think of ourselves as smart, aware, and rational. If you think you have a good memory, who are you comparing yourself with?
We all walk in spirit yet they are trying to make you think that consciousness goes into particles when you go and that’s you you exist no more. Neuros essentially like to play mindgames for powertrips
I find this relativist argument quite interesting. Surely we all know about the subjective-objective divide as a relativist position. However, how does measure arise before consciousness? The assumption is that one is able to measure — therefore one must already be conscientious.
This is quite funny to watch. I found the individual conciousness over a decade ago. It’s all thanks to my PTSD. Unfortunately, when I found it, my subconscious wanted to get to know it. That made life very interesting. Dreaming is completely different for me now. They are all lucid dreams. I also have an entirely new category. I call them collaboration dreams since I can’t find anything on them from someone else. When my subconscious makes a dream that my conciousness is interested in and wants to know more about the subject, my subconscious agrees and they investigate together.
Consciousness is not physical at all but subtle matter that transforms its self into relevant subtle counterparts, like atoms splitting into different layers , only it splits into layers of conscious awareness. Creating dimensional wavelengths of pure light , we don’t exist purely with physical boundaries but made up of countless levels of awareness, based on our own level of perception, if you think of a diamond that is cut into Shap of a prism and place this subtle energy inside your brain you would be multidimensional, but without the awareness of these othere dimensional layers. This is one reason why only a small portion of the brain is used. We would not be able to cope with the entire portion of our brain being active, the knowledge our conscious minds holds would be to great. The trouble with science is that it doesn’t want to perceive anything outside of physical reality, we are all beings of light with the ability to raise our conscious awareness to higher levels in order to understand the true meaning of our existence.
How humancentric or monotheist are our theories and investigations of consciousness? What if consciousness resides outside the human mind? (This is eloquently pondered by Morita (contemporary of Freud) a century ago in his development of “Classic Morita Therapy” based on “peripheral consciousness”).
What if the Universe has an energy exchange, with mass releasing energy in stars, supporting another form of energy (consciousness) utilizing life forms to ascend to higher, more energetic thought levels in successive lives & more evolved species. That progression concludes with a big crunch with black hole nuggets coming together as One & all the bits of consciousness then peaked collectively overlapping that One minimal thermal energy nugget.
Then a 2nd energy exchange occurs by the collective consciousness thinking as one to transfer a thought in the form of thermal energy into the nugget, with consciousness being reduced to minimal, to cause another Big Bang expansion for a new cycling of the Universe? Since the laws of thermodynamics state energy cannot be destroyed, in this case it simply gets recycled. That’s as simple an explanation as possible (Occam’s Razor) to explain the Big Bang and the dilemma of how physical life forms have consciousness.
It is therefore theorized that all life forms have this other form of energy, consciousness, and it should be measurable from testing mice. Laugh not, for the consciousness in the mouse will some day ascend to fuse with a human.
This would also answer another dilemma, i.e. how do we discover things we could not have possibly known about? The 4th dimension fabric of spacetime is partly composed of that peak collective consciousness that sacrificed its thought level to the mass in the Big Bang. When a bit of consciousness asks a question it can tap into the spectrum of intellect all around us. It’s not that we are figuring out the Universe, as much as we are tapping into a library of knowledge. Think of those layers like the lit plexi-rectangles in the Hal 9000 in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Ask the right question and you can tap into one.
And your asking how can a Universe have such an energy exchange when we’ve only found life on Earth and see it no where else yet? The Universe is still young, and where consciousness takes seed on random planets (like Earth) scattered around in billions of galaxies, it will spread outward by terra forming surrounding planets once it proves the existence of consciousness as a separate energy that fuses with life forms, proving we live in a cyclical universe with an energy exchange in which each one of us plays a very important energetic role.
This might be a whole lot of silliness, but hear me out, because I think I have correctly identified some of the pieces of the puzzle.
I suspect that consciousness is an intrinsic attribute of what we perceive as reality. I hate to use “the force” analogies, but as a Roman Catholic we see God as the consciousness that suffuses, well no, suffuse is not quite the right word, *is* the ground truth of what we perceive as reality. Reality being our universe, the higher dimensional “plane” that brings about the multiverse that our universe is an element of and all the turtles all the way *up*. I mean without getting into “branes” and carrying on.
Or when we go in the opposite direction, into the quantum world and we attempt to envision what exactly the “quantum probability waveform” is. I think that is where the attribute that we call consciousness of reality resides. All of the possible outcomes for anything that is possible in the quantum realm and how something like that make its way to the macro realm. I’m kinda fuzzy on how all that actually interacts, but I have a feeling I’m on the right track.
I suspect that as we produce ever more powerful quantum computing technology that we may be able to explore whatever we hypothesize is “universal consciousness”. And we will develop science to understand and hopefully *exploit* (unimaginable technology) it.
So how’d *we* get conscious? Well, if consciousness is an attribute of our universe and taking into account all the rest of what might be “outside” of our universe, I would guess that it is “baked in” to any form of matter from the quantum realm up to the hydrogen atom. And it is probably also a part of the energy of our universe as well. I know there is a temptation to think in terms of a type of “field” but I’m not sure if “field” is the right terminology in the sense of the existence of the “Higgs field”, for example. Like I said earlier, it is not a matter of an entity “suffusing” the universe, but rather the “reality” of the universe itself.
You’ve heard that trope before, “It from bit–the universe computes”? I still remember seeing Brian Greene, pick up a rock and say, “This rock computes”. By that he meant that because the rock computes, it exists. Now granted rocks are not conscious, but that statement fits in with the meta notion that the universe computes. And *some* forms of matter like organic chemistry also have this baked into *their* existence. And organic chemistry leads to big clouds of organic chemicals like glycerin that is found in interstellar space. There was another organic chemical too, but I forget what it was offhand. Oh! It is *ribose*, the “R” of RNA.
And if conditions are juussst right. Like on a water planet in a “Goldilocks zone” orbit, somehow all that organic chemistry can get together and form things like RNA and eventually DNA. Given say, half a billion years, you get something that has just a titch more consciousness than a rock. You get a virus. The oldest successfully surviving and most primitive of “living” things (Including other weird “lifeforms” like plasmids and prions) on Earth. A virus is not only semi-living, it is also semi *aware*. For large portions of its existence a virus, in the form of a “virion” is no different than a rock. There is nothing going on, except for the computing that causes the virus to exist, like that rock, in the first place. And if conditions are juussst right, the virus through simple chemistry, becomes aware. And it is able to use it’s chemistry to make more viruses.
And then like over time you get onto this spectrum of ever increasing awareness, prokaryotes and mitochondria antecessors merging and what not. And continuing along that spectrum you start to get a form of continuous awareness. When I consider things like slime molds or coral, there seems to be a very fine line between awareness and consciousness. I think that the difference between awareness and consciousness is that consciousness entails *memory*. This of course was a discredited scientific belief of the 19th century. The idea that animals are “automatons”. That they did not have consciousness, but were simply reacting with a chemical reaction to their environments. Well we have a better perception nowadays.
So if you take a very simple fellow like a C. Elegans a creature that has about 300 nerve cells and no brain. It is able to do the things it needs to do to survive–Say! you know what–I’m repeating myself. I put all this down in a separate essay sometime back. It was an exploration of why and what makes us we do the things we do and how we can maybe make an AI have the same kind of capability. I mean on account of this *is* “futurology” after all lol
But to continue more along the lines of a spectrum of increasing consciousness, we see ever more continuously aware organisms like the jellyfish. I believe that a jellyfish has consciousness. I believe it can retain memory of experiences. Further I believe it can retain memory, because in some kind of way that we do not yet understand, a jellyfish requires regular periods of reduced neural activity. They require *somnolence*. They need their version of 40 winks. Why? Because they have primitive memory that straddles the divide between simple biochemical awareness and consciousness. The sleeplike state is essential because I bet that even a creature as simple as a jellyfish with its simple nervous system, has to prune out a few unnecessary neural memories and solidify a few others.
There is no doubt in my military mind that if you are conscious, you *must* sleep regularly. If you don’t, you die. And that is a very good reason for animals to render themselves vulnerable to predators for significant periods of time. They eventually learned to secret themselves to be less likely to get ate while in dreamland. Dreams. That is another essential element of consciousness. If REM sleep is continuously interrupted, you die. And then we move onto all the other animals that are conscious. When you get to a certain point of biological “complexity” you are conscious. No mistakin’ it. Then we get to the primates and that is where it gets interesting. Because now a portion of the brain has enlarged to the point that allows *rumination*. Like *thinking* about being conscious.
Oh. One other super important point. If it turns out that brains, to include r’s, are fundamentally quantum computers like some smart people think they might be, then it *might* be that nerves and brains evolved to be like a “receiver” of universal consciousness–we all draw from the same pool, so to speak. Running r hearts and lungs and muscles and thinking about thinking and whatnot might just be a *side effect* of all of that. And this helps to strengthen by evidence that “universal consciousness” is probably the right tree to bark up. I mean just ask Timothy Leary, Terrance McKenna, Carl Jung and his “archetypes” and Alan Watts. We are now doing some serious scientific investigation into just what the hell psychedelics *do* to the brain to open that “window” that allows us to experience a potentially higher form of consciousness. I do not believe we are just deluding ourselves.
So I went through all of that to demonstrate that once things get biological and are alive, you see first awareness and soon consciousness. But the ground truth of consciousness is that it is an attribute of the universe. It is an attribute of everything that composes reality. As a Roman Catholic *I* a*ttrib*ute “It from bit–the universe computes”, to the mind of God. And I believe that again, I am on the right track. Science will eventually reveal some things that I don’t believe that society today, indeed human civilization, is ready, *today* anyways, to learn.
And not to get too tin-foiled hatted, but I think this is the very reason that we are absolutely hurtling towards the “technological singularity”. We are striving teleologically, through the grace of God, to reach “the next level”. I been going through these Christopher Hitchens video debates with various theists and I just can’t help but think that they were *both* arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Because it ultimately doesn’t matter as far as the universe, and by extension, reality, is concerned. There are immutable truths that transcend all of our carrying on here on Earth. We as Roman Catholics are taught that we should love God, through Jesus Christ and therefore demonstrate that love for all of humanity as well, to the absolute best of our capabilities. Well I don’t mean to go too far into faith, but I put it here to show that I not only have faith in empirical science, I also have faith in *God*. I’d like to see everyone on Earth become a Catholic, sure, but my intention is not to force what I believe, into your face. But. If by my writing here I cause the tiniest perturbation in your mental schema, well that is the grace of the Holy Spirit. Philosophically, ‘universal consciousness’ is the “mind of God”, that we learn more and more about through science, every single hour of every single day.
The bottom line is that we really don’t have a discipline of science for apprehending what “consciousness” actually is. (*Yet*.) We are, today, at the equivalent point of the moment that sir Isaac Newton, when seeing the apple fall from the tree and making the incredible intuitive leap of faith to understanding the same exact force held the Moon in orbit about the Earth. He gave birth to Newtonian physics, but Newton in his day and age had absolutely no idea what gravity *was*. That insight had to wait until 1916 and Einstein. At some point another “Einstein” probably AI enhanced or an AI itself will tell us what consciousness *is*. And that might be the “Technological Singularity”, right around the year 2029. Time is flying!
“Consciousness ‘higher’ than yours” cannot be comprehended by you. Just as you can’t comprehend ‘lower’ consciousness. We draw assumptions on consciousness itself based on our experience of ourselves; being aware, recognising patterns, making interpretation, drawing conclusions. Small models of concepts, which relate to your place in the universe, exist in your mind as it grows. Your reference point influences what you perceive because of where/when you are, as it is specifically you there/then perceiving it to be so. Psychedelics are a window to a higher consciousness if you are making a pun. If perceptions of reality are altered, you might perceive a higher state of consciousness when really tripping balls imagining something that seems more significant now. Still completely oblivious to everything you aren’t thinking of. Some things don’t make any sense, yet you think they do. I assume there is something like metaconsciousness, such as, imagining what others might be able to conceptualise, or knowing what they can know before they do.
Hey, great comment ! Way too much to respond to right now, but, I mean, many many similar interests and thoughts, viewpoints and stuff. And coming from someone who’s “jew-ish” (heh) as in by blood and some involvement for the history and community of it, but really more just a spiritual person who is interested in peace and love… I pretty much have found and go with the idea of… “we are all consciousness experiencing itself subjectively”!!!
The authors talk about relative consciousness as perceived by two different observers in their respective cognitive reference frames. Suppose Alice and Bob look at some natural object like SUN independently without having any prior knowledge of what they are going to observe and then describe their observations at length in a write up.
Now how these two descriptions will look like in terms two sets of human consciousness. Will these be same of different partially or totally. Anything could happen.Do nonhuman objects like SUN here possess any consciousness? A great question! If consciousness is present at atomic level then its signature is present in all objects as these are made up of atoms.
Where do thoughts originate in brain? Condensation of thoughts lead to human consciousness. Only humans have a thinking machine unlike other creatures. But all creatures have consciousness but human consciousness is different due to the presence of MIND : some sort of field leading to condensation of thoughts originating in thinking machine which include all our sensory organs, in principle entire human body.
So the problem of consciousness can not be solved so easily as the mind of each individual is unique in every respect and it is here any intelligence comes in form of knowledge. So to decipher of locate the source of consciousness or intelligence is quite difficult or even impossible because every human mind is unique with very little or no common aspects. That is why it remains a metaphysical subject and beyond the scrutiny of modern science and technology. For researchers from all disciplines it is a good academic exercise like other theories. But the problem would remain unsolved in terms of natural laws of science. This is my opinion.
This is not a scientific hypothesis, and has no falsifiable implications. It is merely an analogy of Einsteins Theory of Relativity with already know facts. We already know that our own conciousness can only be experienced first person, and relative to who we are. Like all non-falsifiable claims this one tells us nothing and has no information content beyond the built in assumptions. It’s silly.
What possible test could be made to prove it wrong? What novel predictions does it make that can be tested to see whether reality conforms to them, or not? This pseudoscientific hypothesis is no different than merely stating “consciouness is subjective”.
This is one of the more interesting models to come out on consciousness, and I would love to learn more.
From only reading this article though, I do not see how taking this relativistic view of consciousness or mind has dissolved the hard problem at all, simply it has just moved it back one or two layers.
The neuron the fires the color “red” and the “red” that I see are indeed two naturalistic ways with which to view the experience of red and measure “red”.
The “hard problem” addresses emergence, and I am not seeing how this model addresses emergence at all.
For how long would you refer to einstein inventions to solve problems of science. Try to evolve something new. Please search the integrative brain theory in google scholar authored by sohail adnan and another article of the same author ” consciousness emanates from neuronal network of coordination, a fact endorsed by preserved consciousness in focal ischemic infarctions”.
Very interesting point of view. In principle your perspective would at least be closer to explaining near death experiences of patients reported by emergency room doctors. I don’t see how the theory presented in the above article could explain NDE’s.
as a poor analogy, the “Operating System” goes into a kind of emergency standby mode to protect critical operations and important information. I haven’t heard every story but they are often familiar, “drifting away” as they become aware they are nearing death. After knowing you are in danger, realising you are dying.
Perhaps if one suggests a non-physical/Physics reason for consciousness an answer can be considered: that Consciousness is not, in fact physical, rather it is an energetic structure linked to the physical processes present in the conscious mind. Rather than some mix of chemicals and electricity, perhaps Consciousness is a product of these processes expressed as an energetic structure, not unlike a magnetic field (energy) generated by a material that has the majority of its crystalline structures all oriented in a specific direction. Is Consciousness electromagnetic? It can be measured as such. Is consciousness a product of chemical activity? It can be affected in that way. Can consciousness exist absent from chemical activity? Outside of the law of conservation of energy, we cannot know…yet, but the findings of these researchers seem to point that way.
This is the dumbest pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo I’ve ever heard. Sorry, but you cannot invoke relativity and pretend that consciousness is an artifact of experience that cannot be measured. Quit pretending you even understand your own argument.
Right. Leave it to those who study Physics, the simplest of the sciences, to create idiotic theories about Biology, the most complicated of the sciences. Add this latest nonsense to the dumb physics ideas about consciousness of the past, like the Fourier Analysis and Quantum hypotheses. I agree with Grant Castillou, comment below, that Edelman’s theory is the best guidance we have to date.
Leave it be, scientists. Allow consciousness to BE, without need to disect and define. It simply IS.Look to ancient philosophers and modern followers who find in Metaphysics the simple “That which you are seeking is causing you to seek”.
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461 | We are now doing some serious scientific investigation into just what the hell psychedelics *do* to the brain to open that “window” that allows us to experience a potentially higher form of consciousness. I do not believe we are just deluding ourselves.
So I went through all of that to demonstrate that once things get biological and are alive, you see first awareness and soon consciousness. But the ground truth of consciousness is that it is an attribute of the universe. It is an attribute of everything that composes reality. As a Roman Catholic *I* a*ttrib*ute “It from bit–the universe computes”, to the mind of God. And I believe that again, I am on the right track. Science will eventually reveal some things that I don’t believe that society today, indeed human civilization, is ready, *today* anyways, to learn.
And not to get too tin-foiled hatted, but I think this is the very reason that we are absolutely hurtling towards the “technological singularity”. We are striving teleologically, through the grace of God, to reach “the next level”. I been going through these Christopher Hitchens video debates with various theists and I just can’t help but think that they were *both* arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Because it ultimately doesn’t matter as far as the universe, and by extension, reality, is concerned. There are immutable truths that transcend all of our carrying on here on Earth. We as Roman Catholics are taught that we should love God, through Jesus Christ and therefore demonstrate that love for all of humanity as well, to the absolute best of our capabilities. Well I don’t mean to go too far into faith, but I put it here to show that I not only have faith in empirical science, I also have faith in *God*. I’d like to see everyone on Earth become a Catholic, sure, but my intention is not to force what I believe, into your face. But. If by my writing here I cause the tiniest perturbation in your mental schema, well that is the grace of the Holy Spirit. | yes |
Epistemology | Can we know anything beyond our minds? | yes_statement | we can "know" things beyond our "minds".. knowledge extends beyond our "minds". | https://www.siue.edu/~evailat/mo-lk-grf.html | Untitled | 1. We are capable of knowing certainly that there is a God. Though
God has given us no innate ideas of himself; though he has stamped
no original characters on our minds, wherein we may read his being;
yet having furnished us with those faculties our minds are endowed
with, he hath not left himself without witness: since we have sense,
perception, and reason, and cannot want a clear proof of him, as
long as we carry ourselves about us. Nor can we justly complain of
our
ignorance in this great point; since he has so plentifully provided
us
with the means to discover and know him; so far as is necessary to
the
end of our being, and the great concernment of our happiness. But,
though this be the most obvious truth that reason discovers, and
though its evidence be (if I mistake not) equal to mathematical
certainty: yet it requires thought and attention; and the mind must
apply itself to a regular deduction of it from some part of our
intuitive knowledge, or else we shall be as uncertain and ignorant
of this as of other propositions, which are in themselves capable of
clear demonstration. To show, therefore, that we are capable of
knowing, i.e. being certain that there is a God, and how we may come
by this certainty, I think we need go no further than ourselves, and
that undoubted knowledge we have of our own existence.
2. For man knows that he himself exists. I think it is beyond
question, that man has a clear idea of his own being; he knows
certainly he exists, and that he is something. He that can doubt
whether he be anything or no, I speak not to; no more than I would
argue with pure nothing, or endeavour to convince nonentity that it
were something. If any one pretends to be so sceptical as to deny
his own existence, (for really to doubt of it is manifestly
impossible,) let him for me enjoy his beloved happiness of being
nothing, until hunger or some other pain convince him of the contrary.
This, then, I think I may take for a truth, which every one's
certain knowledge assures him of, beyond the liberty of doubting, viz.
that he is something that actually exists.
3 He knows also that nothing cannot produce a being; therefore
something must have existed from eternity. In the next place, man
knows, by an intuitive certainty, that bare nothing can no more
produce any real being, than it can be equal to two right angles. If
a
man knows not that nonentity, or the absence of all being, cannot be
equal to two right angles, it is impossible he should know any
demonstration in Euclid. If, therefore, we know there is some real
being, and that nonentity cannot produce any real being, it is an
evident demonstration, that from eternity there has been something;
since what was not from eternity had a beginning; and what had a
beginning must be produced by something else.
4. And that eternal Being must be most powerful. Next, it is
evident, that what had its being and beginning from another, must also
have all that which is in and belongs to its being from another too.
All the powers it has must be owing to and received from the same
source. This eternal source, then, of all being must also be the
source and original of all power; and so this eternal Being must be
also the most powerful.
5. And most knowing. Again, a man finds in himself perception
and
knowledge. We have then got one step further; and we are certain now
that there is not only some being, but some knowing, intelligent being
in the world. There was a time, then, when there was no knowing being,
and when knowledge began to be; or else there has been also a
knowing being from eternity. If it be said, there was a time when no
being had any knowledge, when that eternal being was void of all
understanding; I reply, that then it was impossible there should
ever have been any knowledge: it being as impossible that things
wholly void of knowledge, and operating blindly, and without any
perception, should produce a knowing being, as it is impossible that
a
triangle should make itself three angles bigger than two right ones.
For it is as repugnant to the idea of senseless matter, that it should
put into itself sense, perception, and knowledge, as it is repugnant
to the idea of a triangle, that it should put into itself greater
angles than two right ones.
6. And therefore God. Thus, from the consideration of ourselves,
and
what we infallibly find in our own constitutions, our reason leads
us to the knowledge of this certain and evident truth,- That there
is an eternal, most powerful, and most knowing Being; which whether
any one will please to call God, it matters not. The thing is evident;
and from this idea duly considered, will easily be deduced all those
other attributes, which we ought to ascribe to this eternal Being.
If,
nevertheless, any one should be found so senselessly arrogant, as to
suppose man alone knowing and wise, but yet the product of mere
ignorance and chance; and that all the rest of the universe acted only
by that blind haphazard; I shall leave with him that very rational
and
emphatical rebuke of Tully (I. ii. De Leg.), to be considered at his
leisure: "What can be more sillily arrogant and misbecoming, than
for a man to think that he has a mind and understanding in him, but
yet in all the universe beside there is no such thing? Or that those
things, which with the utmost stretch of his reason he can scarce
comprehend, should be moved and managed without any reason at all?"
Quid est enim verius, quam neminem esse oportere tam stulte
arrogantem, ut in se mentem et rationem putet inesse, in caelo
mundoque non putet? Aut ea quae vix summa ingenii ratione
comprehendat, nulla ratione moveri putet?
From what has been said, it is plain to me we have a more certain
knowledge of the existence of a God, than of anything our senses
have not immediately discovered to us. Nay, I presume I may say,
that we more certainly know that there is a God, than that there is
anything else without us. When I say we know, I mean there is such
a
knowledge within our reach which we cannot miss, if we will but
apply our minds to that, as we do to several other inquiries.
7. Our idea of a most perfect Being, not the sole proof of a
God.
How far the idea of a most perfect being, which a man may frame in
his
mind, does or does not prove the existence of a God, I will not here
examine. For in the different make of men's tempers and application
of
their thoughts, some arguments prevail more on one, and some on
another, for the confirmation of the same truth. But yet, I think,
this I may say, that it is an ill way of establishing this truth,
and silencing atheists, to lay the whole stress of so important a
point as this upon that sole foundation: and take some men's having
that idea of God in their minds, (for it is evident some men have
none, and some worse than none, and the most very different,) for
the only proof of a Deity; and out of an over fondness of that darling
invention, cashier, or at least endeavour to invalidate all other
arguments; and forbid us to hearken to those proofs, as being weak
or fallacious, which our own existence, and the sensible parts of
the universe offer so clearly and cogently to our thoughts, that I
deem it impossible for a considering man to withstand them. For I
judge it as certain and clear a truth as can anywhere be delivered,
that "the invisible things of God are clearly seen from the creation
of the world, being understood by the things that are made, even his
eternal power and Godhead." Though our own being furnishes us, as I
have shown, with an evident and incontestable proof of a Deity; and
I believe nobody can avoid the cogency of it, who will but as
carefully attend to it, as to any other demonstration of so many
parts: yet this being so fundamental a truth, and of that consequence,
that all religion and genuine morality depend thereon, I doubt not
but
I shall be forgiven by my reader if I go over some parts of this
argument again, and enlarge a little more upon them.
8. Recapitulation- something from eternity. There is no truth
more
evident than that something must be from eternity. I never yet heard
of any one so unreasonable, or that could suppose so manifest a
contradiction, as a time wherein there was perfectly nothing. This
being of all absurdities the greatest, to imagine that pure nothing,
the perfect negation and absence of all beings, should ever produce
any real existence.
It being, then, unavoidable for all rational creatures to
conclude, that something has existed from eternity; let us next see
what kind of thing that must be.
9. Two sorts of beings, cogitative and incogitative. There are
but
two sorts of beings in the world that man knows or conceives.
First, such as are purely material, without sense, perception,
or
thought, as the clippings of our beards, and parings of our nails.
Secondly, sensible, thinking, perceiving beings, such as we
find
ourselves to be. Which, if you please, we will hereafter call
cogitative and incogitative beings; which to our present purpose, if
for nothing else, are perhaps better terms than material and
immaterial.
10. Incogitative being cannot produce a cogitative being. If,
then, there must be something eternal, let us see what sort of being
it must be. And to that it is very obvious to reason, that it must
necessarily be a cogitative being. For it is as impossible to conceive
that ever bare incogitative matter should produce a thinking
intelligent being, as that nothing should of itself produce matter.
Let us suppose any parcel of matter eternal, great or small, we
shall find it, in itself, able to produce nothing. For example: let
us
suppose the matter of the next pebble we meet with eternal, closely
united, and the parts firmly at rest together; if there were no
other being in the world, must it not eternally remain so, a dead
inactive lump? Is it possible to conceive it can add motion to itself,
being purely matter, or produce anything? Matter, then, by its own
strength, cannot produce in itself so much as motion: the motion it
has must also be from eternity, or else be produced, and added to
matter by some other being more powerful than matter; matter, as is
evident, having not power to produce motion in itself. But let us
suppose motion eternal too: yet matter, incogitative matter and
motion, whatever changes it might produce of figure and bulk, could
never produce thought: knowledge will still be as far beyond the power
of motion and matter to produce, as matter is beyond the power of
nothing or nonentity to produce. And I appeal to every one's own
thoughts, whether he cannot as easily conceive matter produced by
nothing, as thought to be produced by pure matter, when, before, there
was no such thing as thought or an intelligent being existing?
Divide matter into as many parts as you will, (which we are apt to
imagine a sort of spiritualizing, or making a thinking thing of it,)
vary the figure and motion of it as much as you please- a globe, cube,
cone, prism, cylinder, &c., whose diameters are but 100,000th part
of a gry, will operate no otherwise upon other bodies of
proportionable bulk, than those of an inch or foot diameter; and you
may as rationally expect to produce sense, thought, and knowledge,
by putting together, in a certain figure and motion, gross particles
of matter, as by those that are the very minutest that do anywhere
exist. They knock, impel, and resist one another, just as the
greater do; and that is all they can do. So that, if we will suppose
nothing first or eternal, matter can never begin to be: if we
suppose bare matter without motion, eternal, motion can never begin
to
be: if we suppose only matter and motion first, or eternal, thought
can never begin to be. For it is impossible to conceive that matter,
either with or without motion, could have, originally, in and from
itself, sense, perception, and knowledge; as is evident from hence,
that then sense, perception, and knowledge, must be a property
eternally inseparable from matter and every particle of it. Not to
add, that, though our general or specific conception of matter makes
us speak of it as one thing, yet really all matter is not one
individual thing, neither is there any such thing existing as one
material being, or one single body that we know or can conceive. And
therefore, if matter were the eternal first cogitative being, there
would not be one eternal, infinite, cogitative being, but an
infinite number of eternal, finite, cogitative beings, independent
one
of another, of limited force, and distinct thoughts, which could never
produce that order, harmony, and beauty which are to be found in
nature. Since, therefore, whatsoever is the first eternal being must
necessarily be cogitative; and whatsoever is first of all things
must necessarily contain in it, and actually have, at least, all the
perfections that can ever after exist; nor can it ever give to another
any perfection that it hath not either actually in itself, or, at
least, in a higher degree; it necessarily follows, that the first
eternal being cannot be matter.
11. Therefore, there has been an eternal cogitative Being. If,
therefore, it be evident, that something necessarily must exist from
eternity, it is also as evident, that that something must
necessarily be a cogitative being: for it is as impossible that
incogitative matter should produce a cogitative being, as that
nothing, or the negation of all being, should produce a positive being
or matter.
Chapter XVIII
Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces
....
2. Faith and reason, what, as contradistinguished. I find every
sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly: and
where it fails them, they cry out, It is matter of faith, and above
reason. And I do not see how they can argue with any one, or ever
convince a gainsayer who makes use of the same plea, without setting
down strict boundaries between faith and reason; which ought to be
the
first point established in all questions where faith has anything to
do.
Reason, therefore, here, as contradistinguished to faith, I
take
to be the discovery of the certainty or probability of such
propositions or truths which the mind arrives at by deduction made
from such ideas, which it has got by the use of its natural faculties;
viz. by sensation or reflection.
Faith, on the other side, is the assent to any proposition,
not thus
made out by the deductions of reason, but upon the credit of the
proposer, as coming from God, in some extraordinary way of
communication. This way of discovering truths to men, we call
revelation.
3. No new simple idea can be conveyed by traditional revelation.
First, Then I say, that no man inspired by God can by any revelation
communicate to others any new simple ideas which they had not before
from sensation or reflection. For, whatsoever impressions he himself
may have from the immediate hand of God, this revelation, if it be
of new simple ideas, cannot be conveyed to another, either by words
or
any other signs. Because words, by their immediate operation on us,
cause no other ideas but of their natural sounds: and it is by the
custom of using them for signs, that they excite and revive in our
minds latent ideas; but yet only such ideas as were there before.
For words, seen or heard, recall to our thoughts those ideas only
which to us they have been wont to be signs of, but cannot introduce
any perfectly new and formerly unknown simple ideas. The same holds
in
all other signs; which cannot signify to us things of which we have
before never had any idea at all.
Thus whatever things were discovered to St. Paul, when he was
rapt
up into the third heaven; whatever new ideas his mind there
received, all the description he can make to others of that place,
is only this, That there are such things, "as eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive."
And
supposing God should discover to any one, supernaturally, a species
of
creatures inhabiting, for example, Jupiter or Saturn, (for that it
is possible there may be such, nobody can deny,) which had six senses;
and imprint on his mind the ideas conveyed to theirs by that sixth
sense: he could no more, by words, produce in the minds of other men
those ideas imprinted by that sixth sense, than one of us could convey
the idea of any colour, by the sound of words, into a man who,
having the other four senses perfect, had always totally wanted the
fifth, of seeing. For our simple ideas, then, which are the
foundation, and sole matter of all our notions and knowledge, we
must depend wholly on our reason; I mean our natural faculties; and
can by no means receive them, or any of them, from traditional
revelation. I say, traditional revelation, in distinction to
original revelation. By the one, I mean that first impression which
is
made immediately by God on the mind of any man, to which we cannot
set
any bounds; and by the other, those impressions delivered over to
others in words, and the ordinary ways of conveying our conceptions
one to another.
4. Traditional revelation may make us know propositions knowable
also by reason, but not with the same certainty that reason doth.
Secondly, I say that the same truths may be discovered, and conveyed
down from revelation, which are discoverable to us by reason, and by
those ideas we naturally may have. So God might, by revelation,
discover the truth of any proposition in Euclid; as well as men, by
the natural use of their faculties, come to make the discovery
themselves. In all things of this kind there is little need or use
of revelation, God having furnished us with natural and surer means
to
arrive at the knowledge of them. For whatsoever truth we come to the
clear discovery of, from the knowledge and contemplation of our own
ideas, will always be certainer to us than those which are conveyed
to
us by traditional revelation. For the knowledge we have that this
revelation came at first from God can never be so sure as the
knowledge we have from the clear and distinct perception of the
agreement or disagreement of our own ideas: v.g. if it were revealed
some ages since, that the three angles of a triangle were equal to
two
right ones, I might assent to the truth of that proposition, upon
the credit of that tradition, that it was revealed: but that would
never amount to so great a certainty as the knowledge of it, upon
the comparing and measuring my own ideas of two right angles, and
the three angles of a triangle. The like holds in matter of fact
knowable by our senses; v.g. the history of the deluge is conveyed
to us by writings which had their original from revelation: and yet
nobody, I think, will say he has as certain and clear a knowledge of
the flood as Noah, that saw it; or that he himself would have had,
had
he then been alive and seen it. For he has no greater an assurance
than that of his senses, that it is writ in the book supposed writ
by Moses inspired: but he has not so great an assurance that Moses
wrote that book as if he had seen Moses write it. So that the
assurance of its being a revelation is less still than the assurance
of his senses.
5. Even original revelation cannot be admitted against the clear
evidence of reason. In propositions, then, whose certainty is built
upon the clear perception of the agreement or disagreement of our
ideas, attained either by immediate intuition, as in self-evident
propositions, or by evident deductions of reason in demonstrations
we need not the assistance of revelation, as necessary to gain our
assent, and introduce them into our minds. Because the natural ways
of
knowledge could settle them there, or had done it already; which is
the greatest assurance we can possibly have of anything, unless
where God immediately reveals it to us: and there too our assurance
can be no greater than our knowledge is, that it is a revelation
from God. But yet nothing, I think, can, under that title, shake or
overrule plain knowledge; or rationally prevail with any man to
admit it for true, in a direct contradiction to the clear evidence
of his own understanding. For, since no evidence of our faculties,
by which we receive such revelations, can exceed, if equal, the
certainty of our intuitive knowledge, we can never receive for a truth
anything that is directly contrary to our clear and distinct
knowledge; v.g. the ideas of one body and one place do so clearly
agree, and the mind has so evident a perception of their agreement,
that we can never assent to a proposition that affirms the same body
to be in two distant places at once, however it should pretend to
the authority of a divine revelation: since the evidence, first,
that we deceive not ourselves, in ascribing it to God; secondly,
that we understand it right; can never be so great as the evidence
of our own intuitive knowledge, whereby we discern it impossible for
the same body to be in two places at once. And therefore no
proposition can be received for divine revelation, or obtain the
assent due to all such, if it be contradictory to our clear
intuitive knowledge. Because this would be to subvert the principles
and foundations of all knowledge, evidence, and assent whatsoever:
and
there would be left no difference between truth and falsehood, no
measures of credible and incredible in the world, if doubtful
propositions shall take place before self-evident; and what we
certainly know give way to what we may possibly be mistaken in. In
propositions therefore contrary to the clear perception of the
agreement or disagreement of any of our ideas, it will be in vain to
urge them as matters of faith. They cannot move our assent under
that or any other title whatsoever. For faith can never convince us
of
anything that contradicts our knowledge. Because, though faith be
founded on the testimony of God (who cannot lie) revealing any
proposition to us: yet we cannot have an assurance of the truth of
its
being a divine revelation greater than our own knowledge. Since the
whole strength of the certainty depends upon our knowledge that God
revealed it; which, in this case, where the proposition supposed
revealed contradicts our knowledge or reason, will always have this
objection hanging to it, viz. that we cannot tell how to conceive that
to come from God, the bountiful Author of our being, which, if
received for true, must overturn all the principles and foundations
of
knowledge he has given us; render all our faculties useless; wholly
destroy the most excellent part of his workmanship, our
understandings; and put a man in a condition wherein he will have less
light, less conduct than the beast that perisheth. For if the mind
of man can never have a clearer (and perhaps not so clear) evidence
of
anything to be a divine revelation, as it has of the principles of
its
own reason, it can never have a ground to quit the clear evidence of
its reason, to give a place to a proposition, whose revelation has
not
a greater evidence than those principles have.
6. Traditional revelation much less. Thus far a man has use
of
reason, and ought to hearken to it, even in immediate and original
revelation, where it is supposed to be made to himself. But to all
those who pretend not to immediate revelation, but are required to
pay
obedience, and to receive the truths revealed to others, which, by
the
tradition of writings, or word of mouth, are conveyed down to them,
reason has a great deal more to do, and is that only which can
induce us to receive them. For matter of faith being only divine
revelation, and nothing else, faith, as we use the word, (called
commonly divine faith), has to do with no propositions, but those
which are supposed to be divinely revealed. So that I do not see how
those who make revelation alone the sole object of faith can say
that it is a matter of faith, and not of reason, to believe that
such or such a proposition, to be found in such or such a book, is
of divine inspiration; unless it be revealed that that proposition,
or
all in that book, was communicated by divine inspiration. Without such
a revelation, the believing, or not believing, that proposition, or
book, to be of divine authority, can never be matter of faith, but
matter of reason; and such as I must come to an assent to only by
the use of my reason, which can never require or enable me to
believe that which is contrary to itself: it being impossible for
reason ever to procure any assent to that which to itself appears
unreasonable.
In all things, therefore, where we have clear evidence from
our
ideas, and those principles of knowledge I have above mentioned,
reason is the proper judge; and revelation, though it may, in
consenting with it, confirm its dictates, yet cannot in such cases
invalidate its decrees: nor can we be obliged, where we have the clear
and evident sentience of reason, to quit it for the contrary
opinion, under a pretence that it is matter of faith: which can have
no authority against the plain and clear dictates of reason.
7. Things above reason are, when revealed, the proper matter
of
faith. But, Thirdly, There being many things wherein we have very
imperfect notions, or none at all; and other things, of whose past,
present, or future existence, by the natural use of our faculties,
we can have no knowledge at all; these, as being beyond the
discovery of our natural faculties, and above reason, are, when
revealed, the proper matter of faith. Thus, that part of the angels
rebelled against God, and thereby lost their first happy state: and
that the dead shall rise, and live again: these and the like, being
beyond the discovery of reason, are purely matters of faith, with
which reason has directly nothing to do.
8. Or not contrary to reason, if revealed, are matter of faith;
and must carry it against probable conjectures of reason. But since
God, in giving us the light of reason, has not thereby tied up his
own
hands from affording us, when he thinks fit, the light of revelation
in any of those matters wherein our natural faculties are able to give
a probable determination; revelation, where God has been pleased to
give it, must carry it against the probable conjectures of reason.
Because the mind not being certain of the truth of that it does not
evidently know, but only yielding to the probability that appears in
it, is bound to give up its assent to such a testimony which, it is
satisfied, comes from one who cannot err, and will not deceive. But
yet, it still belongs to reason to judge of the truth of its being
a
revelation, and of the signification of the words wherein it is
delivered. Indeed, if anything shall be thought revelation which is
contrary to the plain principles of reason, and the evident
knowledge the mind has of its own clear and distinct ideas; there
reason must be hearkened to, as to a matter within its province. Since
a man can never have so certain a knowledge that a proposition which
contradicts the clear principles and evidence of his own knowledge
was
divinely revealed, or that he understands the words rightly wherein
it
is delivered, as he has that the contrary is true, and so is bound
to consider and judge of it as a matter of reason, and not swallow
it,
without examination, as a matter of faith.
9. Revelation in matters where reason cannot judge, or but probably,
ought to be hearkened to. First, Whatever proposition is revealed,
of whose truth our mind, by its natural faculties and notions,
cannot judge, that is purely matter of faith, and above reason.
Secondly, All propositions whereof the mind, by the use of its
natural faculties, can come to determine and judge, from naturally
acquired ideas, are matter of reason; with this difference still,
that, in those concerning which it has but an uncertain evidence,
and so is persuaded of their truth only upon probable grounds, which
still admit a possibility of the contrary to be true, without doing
violence to the certain evidence of its own knowledge, and overturning
the principles of all reason; in such probable propositions, I say,
an
evident revelation ought to determine our assent, even against
probability. For where the principles of reason have not evidenced
a
proposition to be certainly true or false, there clear revelation,
as another principle of truth and ground of assent, may determine;
and
so it may be matter of faith, and be also above reason. Because
reason, in that particular matter, being able to reach no higher
than probability, faith gave the determination where reason came
short; and revelation discovered on which side the truth lay.
10. In matters where reason can afford certain knowledge, that
is to
be hearkened to. Thus far the dominion of faith reaches, and that
without any violence or hindrance to reason; which is not injured or
disturbed, but assisted and improved by new discoveries of truth,
coming from the eternal fountain of all knowledge. Whatever God hath
revealed is certainly true: no doubt can be made of it. This is the
proper object of faith: but whether it be a divine revelation or no,
reason must judge; which can never permit the mind to reject a greater
evidence to embrace what is less evident, nor allow it to entertain
probability in opposition to knowledge and certainty. There can be
no evidence that any traditional revelation is of divine original,
in the words we receive it, and in the sense we understand it, so
clear and so certain as that of the principles of reason: and
therefore Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the
clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to he urged
or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to
do. Whatsoever is divine revelation, ought to overrule all our
opinions, prejudices, and interest, and hath a right to be received
with full assent. Such a submission as this, of our reason to faith,
takes not away the landmarks of knowledge: this shakes not the
foundations of reason, but leaves us that use of our faculties for
which they were given us.
11. If the boundaries be not set between faith and reason, no
enthusiasm or extravagancy in religion can be contradicted. If the
provinces of faith and reason are not kept distinct by these
boundaries, there will, in matters of religion, be no room for
reason at all; and those extravagant opinions and ceremonies that
are to be found in the several religions of the world will not deserve
to be blamed. For, to this crying up of faith in opposition to reason,
we may, I think, in good measure ascribe those absurdities that fill
almost all the religions which possess and divide mankind. For men
having been principled with an opinion that they must not consult
reason in the things of religion, however apparently contradictory
to common sense and the very principles of all their knowledge, have
let loose their fancies and natural superstition; and have been by
them led into so strange opinions, and extravagant practices in
religion, that a considerate man cannot but stand amazed at their
follies, and judge them so far from being acceptable to the great
and wise God, that he cannot avoid thinking them ridiculous and
offensive to a sober good man. So that, in effect, religion, which
should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to
elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men
often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts
themselves. Credo, quia impossibile est: I believe, because it is
impossible, might, in a good man, pass for a sally of zeal; but
would prove a very ill rule for men to choose their opinions or
religion by.
Chapter XIX
Of Enthusiasm
1. Love of truth necessary. He that would seriously set upon
the
search of truth ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a
love of it. For he that loves it not will not take much pains to get
it; nor be much concerned when he misses it. There is nobody in the
commonwealth of learning who does not profess himself a lover of
truth: and there is not a rational creature that would not take it
amiss to be thought otherwise of. And yet, for all this, one may truly
say, that there are very few lovers of truth, for truth's sake, even
amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man
may know whether he be so in earnest, is worth inquiry: and I think
there is one unerring mark of it, viz. The not entertaining any
proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon
will warrant. Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain,
receives not the truth in the love of it; loves not truth for
truth's sake, but for some other bye-end. For the evidence that any
proposition is true (except such as are self-evident) lying only in
the proofs a man has of it, whatsoever degrees of assent he affords
it
beyond the degrees of that evidence, it is plain that all the
surplusage of assurance is owing to some other affection, and not to
the love of truth: it being as impossible that the love of truth
should carry my assent above the evidence there is to me that it is
true, as that the love of truth should make me assent to any
proposition for the sake of that evidence which it has not, that it
is
true: which is in effect to love it as a truth, because it is possible
or probable that it may not be true. In any truth that gets not
possession of our minds by the irresistible light of self-evidence,
or
by the force of demonstration, the arguments that gain it assent are
the vouchers and gage of its probability to us; and we can receive
it for no other than such as they deliver it to our understandings.
Whatsoever credit or authority we give to any proposition more than
it
receives from the principles and proofs it supports itself upon, is
owing to our inclinations that way, and is so far a derogation from
the love of truth as such: which, as it can receive no evidence from
our passions or interests, so it should receive no tincture from them.
2. A forwardness to dictate another's beliefs, from whence.
The
assuming an authority of dictating to others, and a forwardness to
prescribe to their opinions, is a constant concomitant of this bias
and corruption of our judgments. For how almost can it be otherwise,
but that he should be ready to impose on another's belief, who has
already imposed on his own? Who can reasonably expect arguments and
conviction from him in dealing with others, whose understanding is
not
accustomed to them in his dealing with himself? Who does violence to
his own faculties, tyrannizes over his own mind, and usurps the
prerogative that belongs to truth alone, which is to command assent
by
only its own authority, i.e. by and in proportion to that evidence
which it carries with it.
3. Force of enthusiasm, in which reason is taken away. Upon
this
occasion I shall take the liberty to consider a third ground of
assent, which with some men has the same authority, and is as
confidently relied on as either faith or reason; I mean enthusiasm:
which, laying by reason, would set up revelation without it. Whereby
in effect it takes away both reason and revelation, and substitutes
in
the room of them the ungrounded fancies of a man's own brain, and
assumes them for a foundation both of opinion and conduct.
4. Reason and revelation. Reason is natural revelation, whereby
the eternal Father of light and fountain of all knowledge,
communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within
the reach of their natural faculties: revelation is natural reason
enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God
immediately; which reason vouches the truth of, by the testimony and
proofs it gives that they come from God. So that he that takes away
reason to make way for revelation, puts out the light of both, and
does much what the same as if he would persuade a man to put out his
eyes, the better to receive the remote light of an invisible star by
a
telescope.
5. Rise of enthusiasm. Immediate revelation being a much easier
way for men to establish their opinions and regulate their conduct
than the tedious and not always successful labour of strict reasoning,
it is no wonder that some have been very apt to pretend to revelation,
and to persuade themselves that they are under the peculiar guidance
of heaven in their actions and opinions, especially in those of them
which they cannot account for by the ordinary methods of knowledge
and
principles of reason. Hence we see that, in all ages, men in whom
melancholy has mixed with devotion, or whose conceit of themselves
has
raised them into an opinion of a greater familiarity with God, and
a
nearer admittance to his favour than is afforded to others, have often
flattered themselves with a persuasion of an immediate intercourse
with the Deity, and frequent communications from the Divine Spirit.
God, I own, cannot be denied to be able to enlighten the understanding
by a ray darted into the mind immediately from the fountain of
light: this they understand he has promised to do, and who then has
so
good a title to expect it as those who are his peculiar people, chosen
by him, and depending on him?
6. Enthusiastic impulse. Their minds being thus prepared, whatever
groundless opinion comes to settle itself strongly upon their
fancies is an illumination from the Spirit of God, and presently of
divine authority: and whatsoever odd action they find in themselves
a strong inclination to do, that impulse is concluded to be a call
or direction from heaven, and must be obeyed: it is a commission
from above, and they cannot err in executing it.
7. What is meant by enthusiasm. This I take to be properly
enthusiasm, which, though founded neither on reason nor divine
revelation, but rising from the conceits of a warmed or overweening
brain, works yet, where it once gets footing, more powerfully on the
persuasions and actions of men than either of those two, or both
together: men being most forwardly obedient to the impulses they
receive from themselves; and the whole man is sure to act more
vigorously where the whole man is carried by a natural motion. For
strong conceit, like a new principle, carries all easily with it, when
got above common sense, and freed from all restraint of reason and
check of reflection, it is heightened into a divine authority, in
concurrence with our own temper and inclination.
8. Enthusiasm accepts its supposed illumination without search
and
proof. Though the odd opinions and extravagant actions enthusiasm
has run men into were enough to warn them against this wrong
principle, so apt to misguide them both in their belief and conduct:
yet the love of something extraordinary, the ease and glory it is to
be inspired, and be above the common and natural ways of knowledge,
so
flatters many men's laziness, ignorance, and vanity, that, when once
they are got into this way of immediate revelation, of illumination
without search, and of certainty without proof and without
examination, it is a hard matter to get them out of it. Reason is lost
upon them, they are above it: they see the light infused into their
understandings, and cannot be mistaken; it is clear and visible there,
like the light of bright sunshine; shows itself, and needs no other
proof but its own evidence: they feel the hand of God moving them
within, and the impulses of the Spirit, and cannot be mistaken in what
they feel. Thus they support themselves, and are sure reasoning hath
nothing to do with what they see and feel in themselves: what they
have a sensible experience of admits no doubt, needs no probation.
Would he not be ridiculous, who should require to have it proved to
him that the light shines, and that he sees it? It is its own proof,
and can have no other. When the Spirit brings light into our minds,
it
dispels darkness. We see it as we do that of the sun at noon, and need
not the twilight of reason to show it us. This light from heaven is
strong, clear, and pure; carries its own demonstration with it: and
we
may as naturally take a glow-worm to assist us to discover the sun,
as
to examine the celestial ray by our dim candle, reason.
9. Enthusiasm how to be discovered. This is the way of talking
of
these men: they are sure, because they are sure: and their persuasions
are right, because they are strong in them. For, when what they say
is
stripped of the metaphor of seeing and feeling, this is all it amounts
to: and yet these similes so impose on them, that they serve them
for certainty in themselves, and demonstration to others.
10. The supposed internal light examined. But to examine a little
soberly this internal light, and this feeling on which they build so
much. These men have, they say, clear light, and they see; they have
awakened sense, and they feel: this cannot, they are sure, be disputed
them. For when a man says he sees or feels, nobody can deny him that
he does so. But here let me ask: This seeing, is it the perception
of the truth of the proposition, or of this, that it is a revelation
from God? This feeling, is it a perception of an inclination or
fancy to do something, or of the Spirit of God moving that
inclination? These are two very different perceptions, and must be
carefully distinguished, if we would not impose upon ourselves. I
may perceive the truth of a proposition, and yet not perceive that
it is an immediate revelation from God. I may perceive the truth of
a proposition in Euclid, without its being, or my perceiving it to
be,
a revelation: nay, I may perceive I came not by this knowledge in a
natural way, and so may conclude it revealed, without perceiving
that it is a revelation of God. Because there be spirits which,
without being divinely commissioned, may excite those ideas in me,
and
lay them in such order before my mind, that I may perceive their
connexion. So that the knowledge of any proposition coming into my
mind, I know not how, is not a perception that it is from God. Much
less is a strong persuasion that it is true, a perception that it is
from God, or so much as true. But however it be called light and
seeing, I suppose it is at most but belief and assurance: and the
proposition taken for a revelation is not such as they know to be
true, but take to be true. For where a proposition is known to be
true, revelation is needless: and it is hard to conceive how there
can
be a revelation to any one of what he knows already. If therefore it
be a proposition which they are persuaded, but do not know, to be
true, whatever they may call it, it is not seeing, but believing.
For these are two ways whereby truth comes into the mind, wholly
distinct, so that one is not the other. What I see, I know to be so,
by the evidence of the thing itself: what I believe, I take to be so
upon the testimony of another. But this testimony I must know to be
given, or else what ground have I of believing? I must see that it
is God that reveals this to me, or else I see nothing. The question
then here is: How do I know that God is the revealer of this to me;
that this impression is made upon my mind by his Holy Spirit; and that
therefore I ought to obey it? If I know not this, how great soever
the
assurance is that I am possessed with, it is groundless; whatever
light I pretend to, it is but enthusiasm. For, whether the proposition
supposed to be revealed be in itself evidently true, or visibly
probable, or, by the natural ways of knowledge, uncertain, the
proposition that must be well grounded and manifested to be true, is
this, That God is the revealer of it, and that what I take to be a
revelation is certainly put into my mind by Him, and is not an
illusion dropped in by some other spirit, or raised by my own fancy.
For, if I mistake not, these men receive it for true, because they
presume God revealed it. Does it not, then, stand them upon to examine
upon what grounds they presume it to be a revelation from God? or else
all their confidence is mere presumption: and this light they are so
dazzled with is nothing but an ignis fatuus, that leads them
constantly round in this circle; It is a revelation, because they
firmly believe it; and they believe it, because it is a revelation.
11. Enthusiasm fails of evidence, that the proposition is from
God. In all that is of divine revelation, there is need of no other
proof but that it is an inspiration from God: for he can neither
deceive nor be deceived. But how shall it be known that any
proposition in our minds is a truth infused by God; a truth that is
revealed to us by him, which he declares to us, and therefore we ought
to believe? Here it is that enthusiasm fails of the evidence it
pretends to. For men thus possessed, boast of a light whereby they
say
they are enlightened, and brought into the knowledge of this or that
truth. But if they know it to be a truth, they must know it to be
so, either by its own self-evidence to natural reason, or by the
rational proofs that make it out to be so. If they see and know it
to be a truth, either of these two ways, they in vain suppose it to
be
a revelation. For they know it to be true the same way that any
other man naturally may know that it is so, without the help of
revelation. For thus, all the truths, of what kind soever, that men
uninspired are enlightened with, came into their minds, and are
established there. If they say they know it to be true, because it
is a revelation from God, the reason is good: but then it will be
demanded how they know it to be a revelation from God. If they say,
by
the light it brings with it, which shines bright in their minds, and
they cannot resist: I beseech them to consider whether this be any
more than what we have taken notice of already, viz. that it is a
revelation, because they strongly believe it to be true. For all the
light they speak of is but a strong, though ungrounded persuasion of
their own minds, that it is a truth. For rational grounds from
proofs that it is a truth, they must acknowledge to have none; for
then it is not received as a revelation, but upon the ordinary grounds
that other truths are received: and if they believe it to be true
because it is a revelation, and have no other reason for its being
a
revelation, but because they are fully persuaded, without any other
reason, that it is true, then they believe it to be a revelation
only because they strongly believe it to be a revelation; which is
a
very unsafe ground to proceed on, either in our tenets or actions.
And
what readier way can there be to run ourselves into the most
extravagant errors and miscarriages, than thus to set up fancy for
our
supreme and sole guide, and to believe any proposition to be true,
any
action to be right, only because we believe it to be so? The
strength of our persuasions is no evidence at all of their own
rectitude: crooked things may be as stiff and inflexible as
straight: and men may be as positive and peremptory in error as in
truth. How come else the untractable zealots in different and opposite
parties? For if the light, which every one thinks he has in his
mind, which in this case is nothing but the strength of his own
persuasion, be an evidence that it is from God, contrary opinions have
the same title to be inspirations; and God will be not only the Father
of lights, but of opposite and contradictory lights, leading men
contrary ways; and contradictory propositions will be divine truths,
if an ungrounded strength of assurance be an evidence that any
proposition is a Divine Revelation.
12. Firmness of persuasion no Proof that any proposition is
from
God. This cannot be otherwise, whilst firmness of persuasion is made
the cause of believing, and confidence of being in the right is made
an argument of truth. St. Paul himself believed he did well, and
that he had a call to it, when he persecuted the Christians, whom he
confidently thought in the wrong: but yet it was he, and not they,
who
were mistaken. Good men are men still liable to mistakes, and are
sometimes warmly engaged in errors, which they take for divine truths,
shining in their minds with the clearest light.
13. Light in the mind, what. Light, true light, in the mind
is, or
can be, nothing else but the evidence of the truth of any proposition;
and if it be not a self-evident proposition, all the light it has,
or can have, is from the clearness and validity of those proofs upon
which it is received. To talk of any other light in the
understanding is to put ourselves in the dark, or in the power of
the Prince of Darkness, and, by our own consent, to give ourselves
up to delusion to believe a lie. For, if strength of persuasion be
the
light which must guide us; I ask how shall any one distinguish between
the delusions of Satan, and the inspirations of the Holy Ghost? He
can
transform himself into an angel of light. And they who are led by this
Son of the Morning are as fully satisfied of the illumination, i.e.
are as strongly persuaded that they are enlightened by the Spirit of
God as any one who is so: they acquiesce and rejoice in it, are
actuated by it: and nobody can be more sure, nor more in the right
(if
their own belief may be judge) than they.
14. Revelation must be judged of by reason. He, therefore, that
will
not give himself up to all the extravagances of delusion and error
must bring this guide of his light within to the trial. God when he
makes the prophet does not unmake the man. He leaves all his faculties
in the natural state, to enable him to judge of his inspirations,
whether they be of divine original or no. When he illuminates the mind
with supernatural light, he does not extinguish that which is natural.
If he would have us assent to the truth of any proposition, he
either evidences that truth by the usual methods of natural reason,
or
else makes it known to be a truth which he would have us assent to
by his authority, and convinces us that it is from him, by some
marks which reason cannot be mistaken in. Reason must be our last
judge and guide in everything. I do not mean that we must consult
reason, and examine whether a proposition revealed from God can be
made out by natural principles, and if it cannot, that then we may
reject it: but consult it we must, and by it examine whether it be
a
revelation from God or no: and if reason finds it to be revealed
from God, reason then declares for it as much as for any other
truth, and makes it one of her dictates. Every conceit that thoroughly
warms our fancies must pass for an inspiration, if there be nothing
but the strength of our persuasions, whereby to judge of our
persuasions: if reason must not examine their truth by something
extrinsical to the persuasions themselves, inspirations and delusions,
truth and falsehood, will have the same measure, and will not be
possible to be distinguished.
15. Belief no proof of revelation. If this internal light, or
any
proposition which under that title we take for inspired, be
conformable to the principles of reason, or to the word of God,
which is attested revelation, reason warrants it, and we may safely
receive it for true, and be guided by it in our belief and actions:
if
it receive no testimony nor evidence from either of these rules, we
cannot take it for a revelation, or so much as for true, till we
have some other mark that it is a revelation, besides our believing
that it is so. Thus we see the holy men of old, who had revelations
from God, had something else besides that internal light of
assurance in their own minds, to testify to them that it was from God.
They were not left to their own persuasions alone, that those
persuasions were from God, but had outward signs to convince them of
the Author of those revelations. And when they were to convince
others, they had a power given them to justify the truth of their
commission from heaven, and by visible signs to assert the divine
authority of a message they were sent with. Moses saw the bush burn
without being consumed, and heard a voice out of it: this was
something besides finding an impulse upon his mind to go to Pharaoh,
that he might bring his brethren out of Egypt: and yet he thought
not this enough to authorize him to go with that message, till God,
by
another miracle of his rod turned into a serpent, had assured him of
a
power to testify his mission, by the same miracle repeated before them
whom he was sent to. Gideon was sent by an angel to deliver Israel
from the Midianites, and yet he desired a sign to convince him that
this commission was from God. These, and several the like instances
to
be found among the prophets of old, are enough to show that they
thought not an inward seeing or persuasion of their own minds, without
any other proof, a sufficient evidence that it was from God; though
the Scripture does not everywhere mention their demanding or having
such proofs.
16. Criteria of a divine revelation. In what I have said I am
far
from denying, that God can, or doth sometimes enlighten men's minds
in
the apprehending of certain truths or excite them to good actions,
by the immediate influence and assistance of the Holy Spirit,
without any extraordinary signs accompanying it. But in such cases
too
we have reason and Scripture; unerring rules to know whether it be
from God or no. Where the truth embraced is consonant to the
revelation in the written word of God, or the action conformable to
the dictates of right reason or holy writ, we may be assured that we
run no risk in entertaining it as such: because, though perhaps it
be not an immediate revelation from God, extraordinarily operating
on our minds, yet we are sure it is warranted by that revelation which
he has given us of truth. But it is not the strength of our private
persuasion within ourselves, that can warrant it to be a light or
motion from heaven: nothing can do that but the written Word of God
without us, or that standard of reason which is common to us with
all men. Where reason or Scripture is express for any opinion or
action, we may receive it as of divine authority: but it is not the
strength of our own persuasions which can by itself give it that
stamp. The bent of our own minds may favour it as much as we please:
that may show it to be a fondling of our own, but will by no means
prove it to be an offspring of heaven, and of divine original. | 1. We are capable of knowing certainly that there is a God. Though
God has given us no innate ideas of himself; though he has stamped
no original characters on our minds, wherein we may read his being;
yet having furnished us with those faculties our minds are endowed
with, he hath not left himself without witness: since we have sense,
perception, and reason, and cannot want a clear proof of him, as
long as we carry ourselves about us. Nor can we justly complain of
our
ignorance in this great point; since he has so plentifully provided
us
with the means to discover and know him; so far as is necessary to
the
end of our being, and the great concernment of our happiness. But,
though this be the most obvious truth that reason discovers, and
though its evidence be (if I mistake not) equal to mathematical
certainty: yet it requires thought and attention; and the mind must
apply itself to a regular deduction of it from some part of our
intuitive knowledge, or else we shall be as uncertain and ignorant
of this as of other propositions, which are in themselves capable of
clear demonstration. To show, therefore, that we are capable of
knowing, i.e. being certain that there is a God, and how we may come
by this certainty, I think we need go no further than ourselves, and
that undoubted knowledge we have of our own existence.
2. For man knows that he himself exists. I think it is beyond
question, that man has a clear idea of his own being; he knows
certainly he exists, and that he is something. He that can doubt
whether he be anything or no, I speak not to; no more than I would
argue with pure nothing, or endeavour to convince nonentity that it
were something. If any one pretends to be so sceptical as to deny
his own existence, (for really to doubt of it is manifestly
impossible,) let him for me enjoy his beloved happiness of being
nothing, until hunger or some other pain convince him of the contrary.
| yes |
Epistemology | Can we know anything beyond our minds? | no_statement | we cannot "know" anything beyond our "minds".. knowledge is limited to our "minds". | http://people.tamu.edu/~sdaniel/quests5.html | 8 | Answers at end. Because these
questions draw on different textbooks and topics covered
in different semesters, not all of them apply to any particular course
in a semester.
True/False (True=A, False=B)
1.Epistemology is the study of the
origin, structure, and extent of reality.
2.Because rationalism does not rely on sense
experience, it cannot provide justified true beliefs (i.e., knowledge)
about a priori propositions.
3.Because rationalism does not rely on sense
experience, it can provide justified true beliefs (i.e., knowledge)
about a posteriori propositions but not a priori
propositions.
4.Rationalism is a form of foundationalist epistemology because it claims
that knowledge is possible only if it is based on a principle or
principles that are known with certainty.
5.Rationalists argue that, since sense
experiences are often mistaken and thus cannot provide certainty, we
must appeal to reason alone to establish the foundations for knowledge.
6.Because rationalism does not rely on sense
experience, it cannot account for how we know anything at all and
therefore is not really a legitimate epistemological approach.
7.According to Plato, things in our ordinary
experience (e.g., trees) are merely copies or instances of the ideal,
perfect Forms in virtue of which those ordinary things exist and are
known.
8.Platos theory of recollection is his way
of explaining how we know perfect or ideal instances of things (e.g.,
what a perfect triangle is) even though we have never experienced such
things with our senses.
9.According to Plato, the eternal Forms or
Ideas are the universal characteristics by which things are what they
are and are known as what they are.
10.In Plato's
account, Menos Paradox refers to the
problem of explaining how someone can remember anything about the realm
of the Forms after the shock of being born into this world.
11.Platos Forms are copies of the things we
experience in this world.
12.According to Plato, our knowledge
about things in the sensible world is not based on sense experience but
on our a priori apprehension of the Forms.
13.In his account of the Divided Line, Plato
says that objects of reason and understanding (e.g., mathematical
objects and Forms) depend on objects of belief and imagination (e.g.,
sensible objects) to be known.
14.In Platos Allegory of the Cave, the
figures that cast shadows on the back wall of the cave are supposed to
be understood as the Forms in terms of which things outside of the Cave
are intelligible.
15.According to Plato, to understand a thing
means being able to conceive the thing in terms of the concept or logos
by which it is intelligible.
16.According to Plato, the Form of the Good is
the ultimate cause or rationale for every meaningful or intelligible
thing.
17.For Plato, all knowledge (as opposed to
opinion) is innate insofar as it is based on reasoning that cannot have
been obtained through sense experience.
18.Platos rationalism is a foundationalist epistemology because it
assumes that real knowledge is possible only if it is based on some
certain, unchanging priniciples (which in
Platos case are the Forms).
19.According to Descartes, a belief is
justified only if it is based on an indubitable (undoubtable)
principle.
20.Descartes argues that we cannot know
things about the world based on sense experience because we can be
deceived by our senses or might simply be dreaming.
21.In order for the self to exist, Descartes
argues, there must be an infinite being (God) in terms of which the
selfs knowledge of itself as a finite existence is intelligible.
22.Because Descartes knows of God only through
his sense experience of the world, his argument that if he exists then
God must exist is based on a posteriori propositions.
23.Descartes claims that when we know
a physical object (e.g., wax) clearly and distinctly, we do not rely on
our intellect or reason but rather think of the object solely by means
of our senses.
24.By means of his wax example Descartes wants
to show how our ideas of substance and identity are not based on sense
experience.
25.Even though Descartes recommends that we
extend doubt to everything we believe, he acknowledges that there are
some beliefs (e.g., 2+3=5; shortest distance between points is a
straight line) that we cannot doubt.
26.By noting that he is at least a doubting
(thinking) being, Descartes shows how he knows he exists.
27.The point of Descartes appeal to an evil
genius (as opposed to his discussion of illusions and dreams) is to
raise doubts about his knowledge of a priori propositions and
our ability to reason in general.
28.The point of Descartes appeal to an evil
genius (as opposed to his discussion of illusions and dreams) is to
raise doubts about his knowledge of a
posteriori propositions.
29.The proposition I think, therefore I am
provides Descartes with exactly what he as a rationalist needs to
develop an epistemology, namely, a rule by which to distinguish a
priori from a posteriori propositions.
30.By means of his methodic doubt, Descartes
is able to show that there is one thing we can know with absolute
certainty--namely, that we cannot know anything with
certainty.
31.Descartes uses the methodic doubt to show
that there is at least one thing that can be known with absolute
certainty, namely, that he exists.
32.In order to know that he exists,
Descartes first has to prove that his bodily senses can be trusted when
they reveal to him that he is behaving in a thinking manner.
33.The methodic doubt by which
Descartes hopes to achieve certainty and a foundation for claims of
knowledge is, for him, both a real and reasonable doubt about the
existence of things.
34.Descartes methodic doubt is intended to
raise doubts about illusions, dreams, and occasionally sense
experiences--but not about beliefs concerning the self, God, or one's
own body.
35.According to Descartes, since sense
experience is sometimes deceiving, it cannot be the ultimate and
indubitable (undoubtable) basis for
knowledge.
36.According to Descartes, no all-good God
would permit us ever to make mistakes about what we claim to know about
the world using our senses.
37.According to Descartes, the criteria
or principles for determining whether a claim is true are clarity and
distinctness.
38.By assuming that knowledge is possible by
reasoning alone, rationalists like Plato and Descartes conclude that
the only things we ever know to exist are our minds and their ideas.
39.According to Jainism, our knowledge
of sensible objects is based on our sense perceptions of them.
40.An a priori
statement is one whose truth/falsity is known without having to appeal
to experience.
41.An a posteriori
statement is one whose truth/falsity is known without having to appeal
to experience.
42.Even though a
posteriori propositions can sometimes be universal, they are
never necessary (that is, they are always contingent).
43.The word empiricism literally means the
study of knowledge.
44.Empiricismis not a legitimate
epistemological position, because it is not really concerned with the
study of the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge.
45.Empiricism is the study of the nature,
extent, origin, and justification of knowledge.
46.Empiricists claim that purely mental (i.e.,
a priori) operations of reason do not provide knowledge about the
world.
47.According to Aristotle, through our senses
we know things in the world because the things we sense are real
things.
48.Aristotle says that what makes things be
what they are--namely, their essence--does not exist apart from
individuals that exist in the world.
49.According to Lockes representationalist
theory, our ideas of so-called primary qualities correspond to the way
things are in the world, but our ideas of secondary qualities do not.
50.By saying that the mind is a tabularasa,
Locke emphasizes the empiricist doctrine that prior to experience the
mind is blank or empty.
51.In saying that our mind at birth is a tabularasa,
Locke claims that all our knowledge is based on experience.
52.For Locke, all knowledge is based on simple
ideas of experience and their combinations, relations, or abstractions.
53.To say that Locke is a representational
realist means that he believes that at least some of our ideas
actually represent things outside of the mind.
54.In Lockes representationalist
epistemology, our ideas are said to represent things in the world that
cause us to have the ideas we have.
55.Even though Lockes epistemology is called representationalism because he argues
that our ideas represent things in the world, he does not believe that
things in the world cause us to have any of our ideas.
56.According to Locke, we can have knowledge
of innate ideas (as opposed to ideas of sense experience) because they
are based on primary qualities rather than secondary qualities.
57.According to Locke, ideas of sensation and
reflection are innate because they are based on primary rather than
secondary qualities.
58.According to Locke, we know about abstract
general ideas like humanity or blueness because there are such general
things in the world to which such ideas correspond.
59.Primary qualities, for Locke, are ideas
about things (e.g., being solid, taking up space, being in motion or at
rest) which resemble the way those things really are.
60.To distinguish primary and secondary
qualities, Locke assumes that we can compare those characteristics of
things that exist in objects themselves with characteristics that exist
only in our minds.
61.Berkeley
uses his doctrine that to be is to be perceived to show how there is
no real world.
62.According to Berkeley,
real physical objects are nothing other than ideas or sense data
experienced by minds.
63.According to Berkeley,
because we can never know anything outside our own minds, we must
conclude that there is no such thing as a real world.
64.For Berkeley,
To be is to be perceived or to perceive means that the only things
that are real are ideas and the minds that have those ideas.
65.In his critique of Locke, Berkeley
argues that primary qualities cannot legitimately be distinguished from
secondary qualities because primary qualities depend
as much on perception as do secondary qualities.
66.According to Berkeley,
because we can never know anything outside of our own minds, the only
defensible philosophic position is solipsism.
67.A solipsist is
someone who doubts whether anything else exists
other than his or her own mind.
68.Instead of saying that we often perceive
what really exists, Berkeley
argues that what really exists is what we or some other minds perceive.
69.In Berkeleys
view, real physical objects are nothing other than the ideas or
collections of sense data that are experienced by minds.
70.Berkeley
recognizes that to his claim to be is to be perceived he has to add
or to perceive in order to allow for the existence of minds (which
are not perceived).
71.According to Berkeley,
since only a mind can actually perceive ideas, and ideas are not real
things, then only minds really exist.
72.Philosophical skepticism
claims that nothing exists.
73.Skepticism and solipsism are fundamentally
identical, in that both deny that we can know anything at all.
74.Epistemology does not consider skepticism as a legitimate theory because skepticism
claims that we can never be completely justified in our beliefs.
75.According to Hume, because our ideas are
copies of sense impressions, we cannot form ideas of anything (even
imaginary creatures) without drawing ultimately on sense experiences.
76.According to Hume, we know that "every
event has a cause" is true because we have never experienced an
event without a cause.
77.All human
beings think clearly is an example of a tautology.
78.For Hume causal relations are properly
described by means of a posteriori
statements.
79.Hume notes that our knowledge that the sun
will rise tomorrow is necessarily certain because the sun will rise
tomorrow is a matter of fact, not simply a relation of
ideas.
80.Hume argues that, because things are
nothing more than clusters of ideas, there is no meaningful way to talk
about an external world which
causes our ideas.
81.In Humes view, a priori propositions are
always analytic, and a posteriori propositions are always synthetic.
82.Bachelors are
fun-loving people is a synthetic proposition because the predicate is
contained in the subject.
83.Unicorns have horns is not an analytic
proposition because unicorns do not exist.
84.According to logical positivism, meaningful
statements are either based on sense experience or tautologies.
85.Because a priori propositions are
known to be true or false prior to experience, they are similar to
analytic propositions, since analytic propositions are true or false
based solely on definitions.
86.Mathematical propositions (e.g., 7+5=12)
are known a priori because their truth or falsity can be known without
having to appeal to sense experience.
87.Kant claims that our knowledge about things
in the world depends on how the mind structures experience.
88.Our knowledge of things in the world,
according to Kant, is limited to how those things appear to us
as structured according to the categories of the mind.
89.Kant combines rationalism and empiricism by
claiming that while sense data provide us with the content of
knowledge, the categories of reason organize that content.
90.Kant's
epistemology is called transcendental idealism because he says that
knowledge "transcends"
(or is beyond) what any human being can understand.
91.Even though Kant agrees with the
rationalists that the mind brings something to experience and is not a
blank slate (tabularasa), he agrees with the empiricists that
knowledge depends also on experience.
92.According to Kant, all synthetic a priori
judgments are false.
93.According to Kant, we know that all actual
and possible experienced events (even future events) have causes
because that is the way that our minds structure experience.
94.According to Kant, synthetic a priori
propositions are true because the predicates of such propositions are
not contained in the subjects of those propositions.
95.Logical positivists argue that, if only
sense data reports and tautologies are meaningful, then neither a
priori nor a posteriori propositions can be meaningful or
true.
96.According to realist critics of skepticism
(e.g., Moore), there is no
way that we can really know whether there is an external world.
97.Critics of foundationalist
epistemology (e.g., Richard Rorty) argue
that, since neither reason nor experience can provide an ultimate
foundation for knowledge, nothing can be known to be true.
98.By characterizing objects as permanent
possibilities of sensation, John Stuart Mill claims that we can never
know physical objects.
99.Even though J. S. Mill describes objects as
permanent possibilities of sensation, he does not deny that physical
objects exist in the world.
100.
According to Thomas Kuhn, truly "scientific"
knowledge does not have to be falsifiable or even part of any theory,
because science is merely a matter of the personal opinions of groups
of scientists.
Multiple
Choice
101.According to Plato the Forms in terms of
which all sensible objects exist and are known must exist apart from the sensible world because:
(a)Forms
are generalizations of our sense experiences based on our use of
imagination when we are asked the right kinds of questions.
(b)Forms
would not exist unless there were individual things in the sensible,
experienced world by means of which the Forms could be known.
(c)as
Plato shows by his Divided Line, ordinary objects in the world (e.g.,
your desk) cannot exist unless they are known with certainty by
relying on our senses.
(d)we
truly know something only in terms of its unchanging, perfect essence,
and everything that appears to us in the sensible world changes or is
imperfect.
102.In his discussion of the Divided Line,
Plato says that, in contrast to mere belief or opinion, knowledge
is a belief for which we give reasons or justifications by appealing:
(a)to
what our senses reveal to us about how things appear to us, not
how they really are.
(b)beyond the Forms to images of goodness, beauty, and
truth obtained from particular objects.
(c)to
what we sincerely believe is true about the Forms based on our
experiences in the world.
(d)beyond sense experience to unchanging ideas (Forms)
that are perceived as rationally ordered.
103.In Plato's
Divided Line, an ordinary sensible thing (e.g., your desk) is an object
of belief but is not an object of understanding or reason. To think of
it as an object of understanding or reason, we would have to conceive
of it:
(a)based on what we can picture using our senses or
based on what we know from sensation.
(b)as
a thing that exists only in our minds or that exists in the physical,
sensible world apart from minds.
(c)in
purely mathematical terms or in terms of the Form that identifies it as
an object in the first place.
(d)as
a concept that is more real than the Form that identifies it as an
object in the first place.
104.Plato indicates that the knowledge of pure
reason is preferable to conceptual understanding, because knowing that something is a certain kind of
thing is not as good as knowing:
(a)how we come to learn what to call a thing in
virtue of our own experiences.
(b)thelogos or rationale of the thing,
that is, why it is the way it is.
(c)why we differ among ourselves about what we
claim to know.
(d)the difference between knowledge and opinion as
outlined in Plato's Divided Line
image.
105.Plato defines knowledge as justified true
belief. This assumes that we might be able to claim to know something as true which might
actually be false. But, in fact, it is impossible for us really to know something that is false,
because:
(a)to
know something that is false is to know no real thing, nothing (i.e.,
not to know at all).
(b)what we know as true is ultimately based on what
we claim to know as true.
(c)we
cannot give a justification or reason for believing in something that
is false.
(d)in
contrast to our knowledge of the unchanging Forms, beliefs about
particular objects can change.
106.Plato's
suggestion that knowledge is innate or remembered when triggered by
experience is in response to a paradox he sets up for himself. The
paradox, now referred to as Meno's
Paradox, has to do with the question of:
(a)how knowledge of the Forms can ever be anything
other than a generalization of experience.
(b)how a person can remember anything about the
Forms after the shock of being born into this world.
(c)how anyone can recognize the correct answer to a
question without already knowing the answer.
(d)how concepts bound to the realm of becoming have
meaning only when associated with the realm of Being.
107.In Plato's
idealism, the unchanging Ideas or "Forms"
in terms of which sensible objects both exist and are known must
transcend (that is, exist beyond) the changing realm of appearances;
because if Forms changed, then:
(a)the only things in the sensible world that we
could ever experience would be concepts.
(b)the sensible realm (in contrast to the
intelligible realm) would consist only of copies of real things.
(c)nothing in the experienced world could be or be
identified as one determinate thing or another.
(d)the sensible world would consist of unchanging
Forms.
108.In Plato's
allegory of the cave, the Forms and mathematical objects (e.g.,
triangles) are represented by things outside the cave and shadows or
reflections of things outside the cave. Inside the cave the objects
carried by the figures in front of the fire and the shadows cast on the
wall by those objects represent:
(a)the things we normally experience using our
senses, the realm of appearances.
(b)things such as mud and hair that do not seem to
have a Form by which they are intelligible.
(c)the Forms we remember after we have sensible
experiences and recover from the shock of being born.
(d)things that are understood when we try to use
reason alone without the benefit of relying on our senses as well.
109.According to Plato, we attain knowledge
only by seeing beyond this world of particular, changing objects to the
true essences or Forms in terms of which things in this world are
intelligible. For example, we know what triangularity
is not from comparing sensible triangles but by thinking of the ideal
of triangularity in terms of which these
sensible figures are recognized as triangles. From this Plato concludes
that all knowledge (as opposed to opinion) is innate, because:
(a)from the moment we are born we know what things
are in the world in terms of ideas that we get through our senses.
(b)since we are born with senses (that is, our senses
are innate), we can know things about the sensible world with certainty
as long as we rely on the senses alone.
(c)our knowledge of the world is not really of the
sensible world itself but of the world grasped mathematically and
ideally.
(d)since our knowledge of things is based on
changing, sensible experience, it depends on a clear understanding of
what words mean.
110."When
a person starts on the discovery of the absolute by the light of reason
only, and without any assistance of sense, and perseveres until by pure
intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute good, he at
last finds himself at the end of the intellectual world. . . .
Dialectic, and dialectic alone, goes directly to the first principle
and is the only science which does away with hypotheses in order to
make her ground secure."
Here Plato indicates how hypothetical knowledge cannot provide the
foundation of dialectical knowledge, because hypotheses simply:
(a)explain sense experiences in terms of general
concepts which themselves are not explained.
(b)show how particular objects of experience cause
us to recall innate ideas.
(c)describe sense experience without providing an
explanation for dialectical methods.
(d)reject the use of reason, preferring instead
dialectic, to achieve knowledge.
111.After noting that we sometimes have
been deceived by our senses, Descartes argues that we cannot rely on any
sense experience as the basis for knowledge because:
(a)even in our dreams we experience the same kinds
of objects that we experience while awake.
(b)without our sense experiences we would not know what
words like "doubt" mean.
(d)we
never know which sense experiences are accurate, so we should play it
safe and doubt them all.
112.Descartes'
evil genie hypothesis is not intended to raise doubts about whether our
senses can be trusted or whether our bodies and the physical world
exist. By highlighting the possibility of sense deception and dreaming,
he has already raised those doubts. The point of the evil genie
hypothesis is to:
(a)argue that God can exist only if we assume that a
comparable evil power (the devil) exists as well.
(b)raise doubts about a priori beliefs and
reasoning abilities that do not depend on sense or being awake.
(c)provide a means whereby we can escape from the
skepticism created by universal doubt.
(d)show how dreaming lacks the coherence of being
awake and thus cannot be confused with it.
113.Descartes appeals to the device of the evil
genius to make sure that we do not uncritically accept a prioripropositions without first allowing for the possibility that we
might be wrong about them. Why?
(a)Unlike
a posterioripropositions that depend for their truth or
falsity on experience, a prioripropositions are known
as true or false prior to experience.
(b)A
prioripropositions are both necessary and
universal, whereas a posteriori propositions are not.
(c)If
there is the slightest possibility that we could be wrong about the
foundation of our knowledge, then everything based on that foundation
is questionable.
(d)The
evil genius is Descartes' way of
ensuring that he does not forget how his whole project of methodic
doubt is itself prior to any experiences (and thus a priori).
114.According to Descartes, illusions and
dreams often appear as real as ordinary sense experience, but they
obviously cannot provide us with any certainty about the world. Because
sense experience is also often mistaken, it too cannot provide a
dependable ground for knowledge. Given such a situation, he concludes,
the most responsible thing that a true searcher for truth can do is to
engage in methodic doubt--that is, a doubt about:
(a)those things for which we have good reason to
doubt.
(b)only those things for which we have no good
reason to doubt.
(c)contingent but not necessary truths.
(d)everything, even if such a doubt seems unreasonable.
115.Descartes argues that the cogito
(I think, I exist) is the foundation for all subsequent knowledge
because it:
(a)provides an indubitable principle on which all other
claims of knowledge can be based.
(b)is
the first step in Descartes' method of
doubt.
(c)is
not really known to be true but is rather something that
everyone believes.
(d)can be doubted just as much as anything else we
might claim to know.
116.As the product of his methodic doubt, the
proposition "I think, therefore I am"
provides Descartes with exactly what he as a rationalist needs to
develop an epistemology, namely:
(a)a
criterion or rule by which to distinguish a priori from a posteriori
propositions.
(b)an
indubitable, certain principle on which to ground all other claims of
knowledge.
(c)a
way of distinguishing empiricist principles from rationalist principles
of knowledge.
(d)the basis for an a posteriori proof for
the existence of God.
117.Descartes'
wax example indicates how we can know what a thing (e.g., wax) is:
(a)in
purely mathematical terms, without having to rely on what our senses
tell us about it.
(b)only after it has changed into something which it
originally is not.
(c)in
terms about which even the evil genius could not have tricked us.
(d)without having to relate scientific truth to
religious belief.
118.Descartes'
wax example is intended to show that the wax is the same substance before and after it is melted, and
this observation indicates how:
(b)our knowledge of sensible objects (e.g., wax) is
based on what reason, not sense, identifies.
(c)without sense experiences, we would not know whether
the wax before and after melting is the same.
(d)knowing that something is wax is the same thing as
sensibly experiencing something as wax.
119.To know anything with certainty about
the world, Descartes first has to prove that God exists because:
(a)without God there is no reasonable hope for an
afterlife and thus no reason to act morally.
(b)a
perfect (all-good) God would not allow us to be wrong when we know
things clearly and distinctly.
(c)if
God's existence is
doubtful, so is Descartes' existence; so
he has to prove that God exists.
(d)as
the most important thing in the world, God is the first thing that must
be shown to exist.
120.The knowledge of his own existence is the
basis, Descartes claims, for all subsequent knowledge. But before he
can justify his knowledge of anything about the world, he first has to
prove that an all-good God exists because:
(a)even if God does exist, he might not be all-good
and could make us think (mistakenly) that we exist.
(b)our knowledge of the world is independent of God's existence,
but knowing about God is useful in life.
(c)if
God exists, only he (and not Descartes) would be able to have clear and
distinct ideas of the world.
(d)unless God exists, there is no guarantee that clear
and distinct ideas about the world can be trusted.
121.Descartes'
methodic doubt expands from raising questions about sense experiences
to more general doubts about whether my body or the world exists (it
might be a dream) and finally to doubts about:
(a)how one culture's beliefs about
what is real can be compared to the beliefs of other cultures.
(b)what causes our ideas to seem so real, when we
know in fact that our ideas are merely imaginations.
(d)the value of doubting itself, in an
epistemological comparison of rationalism and empiricism.
122.According to the "epistemological
turn"
epitomized by Descartes'
philosophy, epistemology takes precedence over metaphysics. In other
words, in Descartes' philosophy:
(a)that which is real is more important than that
which is imaginary.
(b)before we can know what exists, we must know what
we can know and what knowing means.
(c)knowing something to be true comes after believing
something to be true.
(d)nothing exists without first being known by human
beings to exist.
123.Rationalists often claim that knowledge
of ideas or principles is possible only if we are born with such ideas
or principles. Which of the following IS NOT a position
defending innate ideas?
(a)Certain
ideas or propositions are remembered as truths acquired before our
births (Plato).
(b)All
people in all cultures have similar beliefs (e.g., about causality):
that proves innate ideas (Locke).
(c)Ideas
and truths are knowable in virtue of innate dispositions of the mind
(Leibniz).
(d)Our
past unethical behavior has blinded us to our naturally innate
knowledge of all things (Jainism).
124.Both Plato and Descartes are often
identified as rationalists because they agree generally on doctrines
that distinguish them from empiricists. Which of the following IS
NOT a typical rationalist doctrine?
(a)Though
sense experience is sometimes deceptive, it is necessary for true
knowledge.
(b)Sense
experience cannot be trusted to provide knowledge.
(c)Reason
alone must be the means for getting knowledge.
(d)Knowledge
is based ultimately on innate ideas and a priori principles.
125.Which of the following IS NOT
a typical objection raised against a rationalist view such as Descartes'?
(a)A
priori propositions may be
true, but they tell us nothing about the way the world is.
(b)Sense
experience may not be certain, but we are often justified in claiming
to know things based on it.
(c)We
never really know physical objects other than as intelligible
(mathematical, quantifiable) objects.
(d)There
is no agreement on which ideas or beliefs are self-evident or innate.
126.According to critics of foundationalist epistemology (like Richard Rorty), evidence for one's
beliefs can be conclusive without being necessarily
conclusive or based on some indubitable (undoubtable)
principle such as Descartes'cogito. That is, it is sometimes legitimate to say that we "know"
something even when:
(a)we
don't believe it.
(b)what we know is not based on any evidence.
(c)all evidence contradicts our belief.
(d)we
might still be wrong.
127.Which of the following is an a priori proposition?
(a)All
material objects are extended (that is, they take up space).
(b)Some
material objects are heavier than others.
(c)All
physical objects are seen sometime or other by some human being.
(d)Some
material objects are living creatures.
128.Empiricists charge that if claims of
knowledge are limited to things we know with logical certainty, we will
never be able to know anything about existing things in the
world, because:
(a)the actual existence of things in the world is
known only through experience, not reason.
(b)simply by thinking or reasoning we can know
specifically which things exist and how.
(c)things in the world cannot be known to exist unless
they exist previously in some mind.
(d)the existence of things depends on their having
been created by some prior cause, God.
129.According to empiricists, even though the
kind of information provided by a priori propositions is
indubitable, it is not very useful in expanding our knowledge about the
world, because:
(a)the world is nothing other than what we
experience it to be.
(b)such propositions are concerned with the world as
it is in itself, not with how we experience the world.
(c)any information provided by such propositions is
ultimately based on someone's personal
experience.
(d)such propositions are true (or false) by
definition and do not describe any facts about the world.
130.John Locke argues that our knowledge of the
world is not based on innate ideas, for if ideas were innate:
(a)they would be known a posteriori and thus
come into our consciousness through experience.
(b)we
could know them only in terms of primary qualities and not in terms of
secondary qualities.
(c)they would be based on simple ideas rather than
complex ideas, relations, or abstractions.
(d)everyone would have them and would know they have
them (yet neither of these is the case).
131.In his assault on innate ideas, Locke notes
that some thinkers argue that maybe all people (including children)
have such innate ideas but simply are not aware of knowing such truths.
To this particular point Locke responds:
(a)it
makes no sense to say that we know something that we do not know.
(b)even children know what they know only by means
of experience.
(c)even if all people agreed about a belief, that
would not necessarily make it innate.
(d)because we should limit our assent to the evidence,
we should believe in innate ideas only to the extent that we have
evidence for them.
132.In calling the mind a "tabularasa,"
Locke wants to emphasize that all knowledge, even knowledge of
mathematical truths, is based on solely on:
(a)innate ideas.
(b)experience.
(c)formal training or education.
(d)language.
133."The
particular bulk, number, figure, and motion of the parts of fire or
snow are really in them, whether anyone's
senses perceive them or not; and therefore they may be called real
qualities, because they really exist in those bodies. But light, heat,
whiteness, or coldness, are no more really in them than sickness or
pain is in manna bread."
In this passage Locke locates the distinction between primary and
secondary qualities in the difference between:
(a)the parts of bodies that we cannot sense and the
parts that we can sense.
(b)qualities of bodies that exist independently of
sensation and qualities that rely on sensation.
(c)the power to perceive things in our own bodies
and the power to perceive things in other bodies.
(d)those qualities that no one ever perceives and
those qualities that we always perceive.
134.Substance, Locke claims, is that "I
know not what" in which the primary qualities of a thing
inhere. Without assuming the existence of substance and primary
qualities, Locke would not be able to conclude that his knowledge is in
any way:
(a)the same as the knowledge that God has in
coordinating events in the universe.
(b)the same as the knowledge that God has in
ordering our sense data into specific things.
(c)the same as other people have when they have his
experiences.
(d)based or grounded in a reality apart from
experience.
135.For Locke, all knowledge is based on ideas
that represent things outside the mind which cause our experiences. The
problem with this "representational realism,"Berkeley notes, is that:
(a)it
implies that the only thing that really exists is God's mind.
(b)it
suggests that our knowledge of the world is really based on innate
ideas instead of mental images.
(c)it
assumes things outside our minds as causes of our ideas even though we
know only our ideas.
(d)it
fails to indicate whether things in the world are known a posteriori
or a priori.
(d)primary qualities of things are known a
posteriori, whereas secondary qualities are known a priori.
137.According to Berkeley,
primary qualities are as dependent on being perceived as secondary
qualities, and thus Locke's
attempt to distinguish them is pointless. So why did Locke make the
distinction in the first place?
(a)To
show how some of our ideas really do represent material things as we
perceive them.
(b)To
show how God is the source of our ideas of primary qualities but not
ideas of secondary qualities.
(c)To
show how our different ideas can never provide certainty or knowledge
about the world.
(d)To
show how some ideas of primary qualities (e.g., solidity, shape) can
also be understood as ideas of secondary qualities (e.g., color).
138.Instead of saying that we often perceive
what really exists, Berkeley
argues that:
(a)what really exists is what we or some other mind
perceives.
(b)that which really perceives (i.e., mind) is all
that really exists.
(c)that which is perceived (i.e., idea) is that
which does the perceiving.
(d)we
seldom perceive what really exists; when we do, we do not recognize it
as such.
139.Berkeley
writes, "I ask whether those supposed originals or
external things, of which our ideas are the pictures or
representations, be themselves perceivable or not?"
In answering this question, he concludes that really existing things
must be ideas, because:
(a)ideas
are caused in us by the external things ("supposed
originals") that our
ideas represent
(b)external things are perceivable and the only things
that are perceivable are ideas.
(c)God
cannot perceive ideas because he cannot perceive our minds.
(d)to
say that something exists means that it is perceivable, not that it is
perceived (even by God).
140.Berkeley
suggests that his theory prevents the skeptic from denying the
existence of God, because in Berkeley's
philosophy the existence of God is necessary to show why:
(a)we
feel that something external to us causes us to have particular
perceptions.
(b)the skeptical attitude towards knowledge
undermines the doctrine of secondary qualities but not that of primary
qualities.
(c)the laws of nature are human generalizations of
our experiences.
(d)our interest in perception is one which has a
religious or theological character.
141.According to Berkeley,
even if you and I do not have the same mental experiences when we think
"red,"
we are still able to agree on what red is because:
(a)as
a secondary quality, the color red is something that is purely private
and individual.
(b)we
learn to associate our experiences with words that we agree upon intersubjectively.
(c)we
in fact do have the same mental experience, even if we don't know it.
(d)red is a simple idea, whereas redness is an
abstract idea.
142.Berkeley
expands his definition of the meaning of real things to
include perceivers as well as things perceived because:
(a)we
can perceive our own minds but not the minds of others.
(b)God
perceives those things which no other minds perceive.
(c)we
can perceive each others' minds but not
our own.
(d)nothing can be perceived without its being perceived
by some mind(s).
143.If all I ever know is that I exist and have
ideas, but cannot be sure about whether those ideas refer to anything
outside of myself, then I am trapped in my
own consciousness. Such a position is referred to as:
(a)conceptualism.
(b)phenomenalism.
(c)solipsism.
(d)representational realism.
144."There
is no question of importance whose decision is not comprised in the
science of man; and there is none which can be decided with any
certainty before we become acquainted with that science."
Here Hume notes that since everything is known through our ideas and
reasoning, then:
(a)an
empiricist epistemology is better than a rationalist epistemology
insofar as empiricism gives us knowledge of the world and rationalism
gives us knowledge of ourselves.
(b)by
acknowledging that certainty is unachievable, we show the fruitlessness
of trying to develop a philosophy of human nature.
(c)to
know anything about human nature with any certainty, we first have to
know about the world apart from our ideas and processes of reasoning.
(d)by
understanding human nature (which includes how our ideas of things are
ordered), we can understand everything that is knowable.
145.Hume points out that, if all knowledge is
based on experience, then our knowledge that every event has a cause
has to be based on our experience of every event. But since we have not
had experiences of future events nor even of every past event, how can
we be sure that all events (including future events) will have causes?
Hume's
answer:
(a)since we know that past events will be like future
events, we can be sure they will all have causes.
(b)we
can't be sure: all
we do is "imagine" events will
have causes, we develop that habit or custom.
(c)it
is impossible even to imagine an event without imagining it as having
had a specific kind of cause.
(d)we
know with certainty (innately) that no future or past events ever had
causes.
146.Locke says that we know external objects
only indirectly through ideas that are caused by objects. Berkeley
denies that external objects exist at all, claiming that real things are
ideas caused in our minds by God. Hume goes even further in saying that:
(a)external objects are created by God in such a way so
as to make us have ideas of them.
(b)God
creates us so that there are minds that can be caused to think about
external objects.
(c)our minds are structured in a way that makes us
think that God causes us to have ideas.
(d)even the claim that God causes our ideas is not
justified because cause itself is questionable.
147.Hume argues that we do not know a priori
that all events have causes, and our a posteriori knowledge of
causal relations is limited to temporal priority and contiguity. This
latter "knowledge"
does not guarantee that every event (y) must have some cause (x),
because:
(a)thus far in our experience, every event y
has always had a cause x, and even if it is not a certainty,
there is a high probability that future events will also have causes.
(b)we
do not experience any necessary connection between prior, contiguous
events x and subsequent events y that we think of as
their effects.
(c)the meaning of the word event, unlike
that of effect, contains within it as part of its definition
the notion of having a cause.
(d)even if we do not know what
the cause of an event is, then at least God knows; and that is all that
we need to guarantee the cause-effect relationship.
148.For Hume (unlike Locke or Berkeley), we
cannot know the cause of our ideas because the concept of cause:
(a)is
a pattern of regularity that God has created in our minds to allow us
to live in the world.
(b)refers only to the relation between ideas that I
have and the ideas that other people have.
(c)refers only to how our ideas are associated, and
thus cannot be applied outside of our ideas.
(d)the three components of cause (temporal
priority, contiguity, and necessary connection) are innate.
149.According to Hume, I cannot know (or predict with any certainty or high
probability) that things in the future will occur in particular ways,
because:
(a)the future will not resemble the past: that is
what distinguishes the future from the past.
(b)I
have no experience on which to base the claim that the future will
resemble the past.
(c)knowledge of the future would require an infinite
intellect; for Hume, only God knows the future.
(d)to
have an idea of the future, I would have to have an idea of my future self
(which is impossible).
150.According to Hume, we will never be able to
know anything about whether there is a world outside of our ideas which
causes those ideas because:
(a)all of our ideas are based on sense impressions,
and we have no way of comparing those impressions with their supposed
external causes.
(b)ideas are copies of sense impressions, and since
the external world is itself a copy of an ideal world in our minds, we
can never know what the external world is like.
(c)the world outside of our ideas causes those
ideas only in regard to "matters of fact" and not in
regard to "relations of
ideas."
(d)the external world is the realm of matter,
selves, and freedom--which are all unknowable because we have only
sensible impressions of them but not ideas.
151.Hume's
analysis of cause and effect undermines any
claim to know that our ideasare
causedby things in the world, because (according to Hume):
(a)the notion of "cause"
applies only to things outside our experience, not to our ideas.
(b)whenever we experience things that have no causes,
we conclude that they are miracles.
(c)the cause-effect relation is a relation of ideas
and cannot be applied to anything outside our ideas.
(d)the cause of our ideas must be something other
than our ideas.
152.Which of the following IS NOT
a typical objection raised by critics against Locke's
or Hume's empiricism?
(a)Our
experience is a web of beliefs, not a collection of discrete
experiences.
(b)Ideas
are not intermediaries through which we experience things; we
experience things themselves.
(c)Knowledge
of the world, including ideas of cause-effect and the self, is
ultimately based on experience.
(d)Natural
inclinations are as philosophically respectable as sense experience or
truths by definition.
153.Critics of Hume's
skepticism acknowledge that there is always a purely logical or
theoretical possibility that our so-called knowledge of the external
world is unjustified. But for such critics (e.g., Moore, Malcolm) that
is irrelevant, because to say that we know things about the external
world simply means that:
(a)we
have no good reason to doubt what we believe and cannot imagine really
being wrong about it.
(b)even if we were wrong about we know, we would not
realize it and so it would not matter.
(c)we
believe that what we claim to know is based on all the other things we
believe about the world.
(d)our doubts about what we know about the world
are based solely on weak (vs. strong) beliefs.
154.By combining rationalism and empiricism,
Kant says we can explain how knowledge is possible by noting how:
(a)sense data provide us with the content of
knowledge, the categories of reason organize that content.
(b)categories of reason provide us with sense data, which
are then organized either mentally or physically.
(c)a
priori truths are innate, whereas a posteriori
truths are based on experience.
(d)knowledge must understood as a web of constantly
changing beliefs, not a static collection of ideas.
155.Kant joins elements of empiricism and
rationalism by suggesting that, in addition to synthetic a posteriori
propositions and analytic a priori propositions, there is a third kind
of proposition that provides knowledge, namely, synthetic a priori
propositions (such as "every
event has a cause"). In this third kind of proposition:
(a)the predicate is contained in the subject, and
the truth of the proposition is known only by appealing to experience.
(b)the predicate is not contained in the subject,
and the truth of the proposition is known only by appealing to
experience.
(c)the predicate is contained in the subject, and
the truth of the proposition is not known by appealing to experience.
(d)the predicate is not contained in the subject,
and the truth of the proposition is not known by appealing to
experience.
156.Kant "saves"
science from Hume's skeptical description of causal regularity
(as merely a habit or custom) by proposing that our knowledge that all
events have causes is due to the fact that:
(a)our minds are structured to experience all
events (as phenomena) as having causes.
(b)events in the realm of the Forms always have
causes, even if we don't experience
them.
(c)just as our experience is caused by something, so
also is our knowledge of that experience.
(d)our habit of thinking of things as causally
related is an inductive generalization of past experience.
157.According to Kant, the way to respond to
Hume's
critique of causality is to show that certainty about propositions like
"every
event has a cause" is possible in virtue of the fact that:
(a)our experience of events itself is caused by
something apart from all experience.
(b)the"law" of causality
(every event has a cause) is merely an inductive generalization.
(d)even though every "effect" has a cause,
not every "event" has a cause.
158.In order to avoid Hume's
conclusion that we cannot know that
things in the future will always have causes, Kant argues that we know
that all events in the future will have causes because:
(a)our belief that future events will have causes
is so strong that it alone is sufficient to guarantee that future
events will, in fact, have causes.
(b)all minds are organized in such a way that, in
order for events (including future events) to be experienced at all,
they must always be experienced as having a cause.
(c)cause-and-effect is a law of nature independent of human
experience; regardless of whether we or any other minds experience
them, events in the future will have causes.
(d)future events themselves are caused by past and
present events; so we know that if future events occur at all, they
will have been caused by something.
159.Kant's
critics claim that, if we know things in the world only insofar as they
are experienced (as phenomena) and not as they are in
themselves, we will never know if our ideas really describe the
world. To this he replies:
(b)reason is not limited to any one set of categories;
we can always choose another culture's categories.
(c)the world is what we really experience; to
think of things "in themselves" is impossible,
contradictory.
(d)our knowledge depends not on experience but on
the particular language games of our culture.
160.Critics of Kant argue that his attempt to
guarantee knowledge by proposing that all minds organize experience
according to universal categories ignores how:
(a)even anomalies in experience can be explained to
the extent they appear to us (i.e., as phenomena).
(b)sense data alone do not give us knowledge
of the world: our minds are not blank slates.
(c)we
know things about the world not by means of innate ideas but only
through perceptions.
(d)ways of organizing experience vary in different
cultures and languages (the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis).
161.According to the psychological atomism
implicit in logical positivism, our knowledge of the world is built up
from discrete sensory impressions. However, as Gestalt
theorists point out, perceptions are not simply isolated sense data,
because perceptions--indeed, all experiences--are
intelligible in virtue of:
(d)the linguistic background or social field of
expectations by which they are identified.
162.According to Logical Positivists, only
those statements that can be tested by experience or are true by
definition are meaningful. The most that one would be able to say about
ethical or religious claims would be:
(a)they report on how we feel about something, but
they do not express any truth.
(b)such claims may be true or false; it's just that we
may not know whether our beliefs are justified.
(c)they are purely logical truths--that is, truths
of reason (or by definition), not matters of fact.
(d)they have meaning insofar as they provide the
hypothetical or theoretical bases for thought.
163.According to positivists (also known
sometimes as phenomenalists), the meaning
of a sentence consists in its being either a tautology or
understandable in terms of past or predicted sense experiences. In
other words, a sentence (like "God
exists")
is meaningful only if:
(a)for the person who utters it, the sentence has
meaning, regardless of what others think.
(b)it
represents the truth, even if we don't know which
experiences to believe.
(c)it
is true by definition or is testable by appeal to sense experience.
(d)it
expresses a belief that is innate, known to all rational beings.
164.Positivists (also known sometimes as phenomenalists) claim that physical things are
simply constructs of sense data that we talk about in ways different
from those things that we identify as mental or spiritual things.
Specifically, to say that a thing is a physical object means that:
(a)it
is proper to speak about the thing in terms of dimensionality, size,
and shape.
(b)the thing's primary
qualities (extension, shape, and solidity) do not depend on the mind.
(c)appearances of the thing, even in hallucinations or
dreams, must be accepted as real.
(d)claims about it are ultimately understandable as
being tautologies.
165.According to the "problem
of induction" (often credited to Hume), we cannot use past
experiences to predict the probability of future events or experiences,
because such predictions would:
(a) not be based on generalizations of past
experiences but rather on primary (vs. secondary) qualities.
(b) assume the future will
resemble the past; but without experience of the future, we cannot
conclude this.
(c) rely more on custom/habit (i.e., things
outside the mind) than on the unchanging structure of the mind.
(d) be merely hypothetical (and thus not
intelligible in terms of any conceivable paradigm).
166. According to Thomas Kuhn, when a
scientific revolution occurs (i.e., when one set of theories and
practices that have traditionally defined a discipline is replaced by
another), not only are new methods adopted, but also:
(a) no new paradigm replaces the former paradigm.
(b)the new paradigm is used
to reassert the truth of the old paradigm. | (c)things in the world cannot be known to exist unless
they exist previously in some mind.
(d)the existence of things depends on their having
been created by some prior cause, God.
129.According to empiricists, even though the
kind of information provided by a priori propositions is
indubitable, it is not very useful in expanding our knowledge about the
world, because:
(a)the world is nothing other than what we
experience it to be.
(b)such propositions are concerned with the world as
it is in itself, not with how we experience the world.
(c)any information provided by such propositions is
ultimately based on someone's personal
experience.
(d)such propositions are true (or false) by
definition and do not describe any facts about the world.
130.John Locke argues that our knowledge of the
world is not based on innate ideas, for if ideas were innate:
(a)they would be known a posteriori and thus
come into our consciousness through experience.
(b)we
could know them only in terms of primary qualities and not in terms of
secondary qualities.
(c)they would be based on simple ideas rather than
complex ideas, relations, or abstractions.
(d)everyone would have them and would know they have
them (yet neither of these is the case).
131.In his assault on innate ideas, Locke notes
that some thinkers argue that maybe all people (including children)
have such innate ideas but simply are not aware of knowing such truths.
To this particular point Locke responds:
(a)it
makes no sense to say that we know something that we do not know.
(b)even children know what they know only by means
of experience.
(c)even if all people agreed about a belief, that
would not necessarily make it innate.
(d)because we should limit our assent to the evidence,
we should believe in innate ideas only to the extent that we have
evidence for them.
| no |
Epistemology | Can we know anything beyond our minds? | no_statement | we cannot "know" anything beyond our "minds".. knowledge is limited to our "minds". | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9177348/ | Does a Mind Need a Body? - PMC | Share
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Alex McKeown: Opening Argument in the Affirmative
This question of whether the mind needs a body is a long-standing philosophical dispute, so I do not imagine that we are going to settle it once and for all today; nevertheless, I am going to argue that a mind does, in fact, need a body.
Some of these remarks are reflected in my paper “What Do We Owe to Novel Synthetic Being and How Can We Be Sure?” which will be appearing in the July issue of the Cambridge Quarterly. In that paper, I argue that any account of our obligations to Novel Synthetic Beings (NSBs), whether they are machine-based or (synthetic) biologically based, will be incomplete and faulty if we only consider them in terms of how “intelligent” they are, in the narrow cognitive sense that we tend to often use the word. It is easy to overlook the role of embodiment and assume that the only component that is essential for moral status is mental sophistication, since it is this that enables a being to self-reflect, have a conception of its own future, plans, values, an awareness of its own desires, and so on. But in fact, as I argue in the paper, doing this excludes the role that embodiment has to play in the having of those capacities.
In the paper, I defend the view that we will have an incomplete account of what we owe to NSBs, what their rights are, and what they are entitled to, if we do not take into account the terms of their embodiment, what it enables and forbids them to do. My argument is that the physical aspect of their existence cannot be disaggregated from their mental capacities, and so to properly understand the nature of minds, in artificially intelligent beings in the case of the paper, we must also take into account how the putatively exclusively mental processes are physically instantiated. Those thoughts are the basis for where we stand now. I am arguing for the purposes of this debate that a mind does indeed need a body.
As a starting point, I think there are two interpretations of “need” at play here. The first is whether or not the processes of mind are intelligible in the absence of the body; that is to say, whether we can even conceive of them as occurring in the absence of the body, or whether we can get a sense of what the mental is without taking into account the physical vehicle in which it is instantiated.
The second interpretation of “need” is not just about intelligibility but whether, as a matter of logic, there must be body for there to be mind. Since, for reasons I will defend, the answer to this second interpretation is “yes,” insofar as mind cannot logically exist without body, the other question, of intelligibility, is a red herring. This is because if we hold that the mental logically requires the physical, then the notion of disembodied mind cannot be properly intelligible.
My claim that there is no mind without body is grounded on an underlying ontological physicalist naturalism, and more specifically Strawsonian physicalist naturalism.
1 It is fair to say that if you dispute the coherence of the underlying ontological picture, you will find the arguments that I make unpersuasive, and I flag this as a caveat and potential weakness of the arguments that I am going to make. Nevertheless, I find it a persuasive ontological account, and according to this account, the physical is coextensive with all there is. Everything exists within the physical universe. There is nothing beyond it; the substrate of everything is physical. As such, all phenomena are grounded in the physical. Because nothing exists beyond the physical, anything and everything that exists is necessarily physically instantiated, including processes of mind. Even though the association between the two can seem mysterious, nevertheless, there are no processes in mind that are not physically instantiated.
There is a second and more difficult challenge to my argument that I also need to flag. This is the difference between embodiment and mere instantiation. I accept this challenge. All bodies are physical, but not everything physical is going to count as body—or at least there can be legitimate dispute about what a body is. For example, it does not appear to make sense to say that the air could count as “a body,” just because it is physical.
In response to this challenge, however, one could say that equally we do not have the privilege of defining what definitely is and is not a body. We know that the bodies are the delimited seats of conscious experience in humans and animals, but they do not necessarily have to rigidly conform to the way that we use the word “body” currently in perpetuity. And if our technological trajectory is one where at some point we will be able to create novel forms of consciousness—true AI, for example—then at some point, questions about the meaning and self-understanding of their physical form are likely to arise.
If both the development of AI and synthetic biology were to succeed in this way in future, then we may be on the path to widening the scope of what count as bodies. We already know there is more than one kind of body: human bodies vary, within certain limits, and there are numerous kinds of animal bodies. Therefore, the scope is wide for what other physical forms could legitimately count as bodies. A useful intuition pump here for starting to think about this is Chrisley’s fourfold typology of embodiment, which has been developed in the context of AI but is valuable for thinking more generally about different ways that embodiment might be legitimately understood.
2 In addition, what it is to have a mind is integrated with what it is like to exist and experience the world. And the only way to experience the world is by the physical operators that enable you to do that. So, the notion of mind breaks down and becomes unintelligible without that physical coupling being part of the conceptual picture.
3
This is not true only for relatively cognitively sophisticated beings such as humans, which not only have mental processes but are also consciously aware of having them. It is easy to forget that what we count as “mental” properties are not necessarily only a set of higher-order processes that enable us to have conversations like the one we are having in this debate, but also much more primitive, overtly “physical”—that is to say, rather than overtly intellectual—processes.
4 We often tend to think of the mental in terms of the former—like the ability to reflect on one’s values, or doing mathematics, or whatever it might be. But of course, even basic functions necessary for getting by in the most simple way
5—such as the ability to perceive and be aware of one’s environment or negotiate one’s environment via a particular form of locomotion—require both the capacity (realized in a brain or comparable organ or component) to interpret the information coming in and the mediation of this information by physical sensing apparatus.
6 Indeed, given the underlying ontological position from which I am starting, going down to an even lower level of sophistication, mental processes are necessarily physically instantiated, or embodied, and as such, the idea of mind existing without an interface with the world outside is incoherent.
So, to summarize briefly: since mind is mediated by the physical, so there are no minds which are not grounded in the physical, and since bodies are necessarily physical, a mind requires a body. A reasonable objection to this final claim is that not everything physical is a body, but the response to that is, again, to say that the notion of a nonphysical body is in coherent, so whatever else a body is or is not, it is definitely physical. Therefore, I think what is really up for grabs and at the core of the dispute here is what does and does not count as a body.
David Lawrence: Opening Argument in the Negative
I have a difficult task, I admit, in making a case for the negative. Somewhat controversially I will begin by telling you first why I doubt my own position, and why I had a hard time constructing this stance. You will all be familiar, if not previously so then certainly following Alex’s well-made argument, with the fundamentals of the “mind–body problem” discourse- (physicalist) Monism versus Dualism. An impasse between those who claim that the mind, the self, perhaps consciousness, are intrinsic to the brain and its biology
7; and those who cannot accept that, who see the mind as something other, is that there is some distinction between mind and matter.
8 In this debate, it might be more useful to talk about monism in terms of the physical, Alex being so concerned with the material reality of the brain as being all that there is, and so I will use both physicalism and materialism somewhat interchangeably from now on, the distinction between the two not seeming to matter too much for our question.
9
An easy approach to this argument would have been to decry a purely physicalist approach, to just wholeheartedly endorse dualism, but I do not see it as my place to try to convince you of some ephemeral, invisible other. I would struggle with that position, and I always considered myself a materialist—I struggle to accept arguments for which, by their nature, we cannot present observable evidence. Ironically, I have faith in science explaining everything, so I cannot blindly endorse a classic dualism. Unfortunately for me, that faith, or the desire for that to be true, at least, does not prevent a niggling doubt I have, which I want to explore here.
The question “does a mind need a body?” presupposes a couple of things. It requires us to know what a mind is, and it requires us to know what a body is. The formulation of the question implies, perhaps, that a body is a host for a mind, a place it resides in some way. That works very nicely for my opponent’s physicalist viewpoint—if “mind” is just a word we use for whatever biological processes we do not yet entirely understand (and lest we forget, cannot yet identify)—then those processes need meat, and they need anatomy in which to occur. A body, of course, provides that. We tend to think of a human body when we say the word “body,” but since there is not really a platonic idea of what a body is or should be, we know at least that it does not have to be a plantigrade biped with cranium uppermost, like us. Format does not matter much, and is in many ways banal—so long as there is a material structure to support the processes that we tend to call “mind.” Whatever those might prove to be, the body for this view could just be a host for these processes.
But of course, we do not actually tend to have such an open perspective, particularly in general conversation. When we talk about the body as a physical object in this discussion on the mind–body problem, we tend to be actually using it as what Peter Wolfendale refers to as an “index of authenticity,” a “stand-in for whatever it is that supposedly enables actual human cognition…[with] little reason offered for this beyond its centrality to the current form of life we share.”
10 In other words, we are only really using the term, because it is what we recognize, and not because we actually mean something specific by it. Alex, really, has kindly made this argument for me, much better than I could. “Real meat” is, as Wolfenden puts it, our common denominator, so that is what we tend to think of. To me, that tendency makes us miss something important in this debate, which is that we do not really have any good reason to pick some specific thing as representing “body” here. It also leads us to certain assumptions about what a mind is.
Of course, we can observe some cognitive processes, seeing where and how they take place and connect within our neuroanatomy.
11 We can observe similar processes in other carbon-based, organic bodies. We can see how those processes might differ slightly in different animals, in different body plans, and in different body complexities. We sometimes use what we understand about one kind of body to deduce the biological processes in another kind of body. We use animal testing for a reason, after all. And I accept some examples of bodies have more complex architecture, more capable hardware, so to speak. They can perform mental processes that others cannot. Clearly, some examples of bodies have the capacity for higher levels of cognition than others. I would not stand here and suggest to you that, in that respect, the body of a mouse is equal to that of an orangutan. But… they are all “A Body.” I will come back to this point.
The Subjective Mind
The other issue raised by the debate question was that we are assumed to know what a “mind” actually is. As I have said, I find it hard to accept the idea of some nebulous “other” substance interposed on or occupying the same physical space as our body. Most sensations we have are rooted in some observable physical way in our biology. I do not presume to dispute that, but here is the thing I mentioned that creates doubt within me. There is a lot about our physical bodies that might well be physically instantiated, but which we do not experience in any meaningful way. There is nothing much you can describe about the workings of your kidneys, your gall bladder, or your liver—they all fulfil vital, important functions, but they only time we become aware of them is because some malady causes other bodily systems to draw our attention to them. The flipside of all this, of course, is that there is a lot of experience that we do perceive, but that is not obviously physically instantiated. Relevantly here, the experiences of our mind are, or at least include, subjective experiences. These would be by nature unobservable, at least in terms of their character.
According to Thomas Nagel, who I accept is very commonly invoked in this debate, this subjectivity defeats reduction, because the subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a system of functional or intentional states.
12 How can every possible subjective experience—and degree of such—be tied to an individual physical property? It simply cannot be proved, because it is impossible to have an objective answer. Subjective experiences cannot be objective, as they cannot be verified—by nature, they are one point of view. We could not know what it is like for a bat to be a bat, because we can never be a bat ourselves—only imagine it, as a human and from our experience as humans. It is not possible for us to shed that experiential bias.
Daniel Dennett’s argument against Nagel is that the “interesting or theoretically important”
13 elements of mind or consciousness could be observed, and that subjective experience, therefore, does not matter—because the mindset of a bat does not matter. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose this is true, bats are not important, but this seems to me to willfully miss something valuable. A copy of a mind—if such a thing is possible—would not be a copy if it was missing some element. Without the subjective experience, a copy would be a fundamentally impoverished account of that individual and specific mind. In the best case, it would be a blank slate—a mind in function and form, perhaps, but crucially not the one you tried to copy. This is sometimes called a philosophical zombie.
14
Similarly to the bat, it is not possible for me to know what it is like to be Alex. I cannot know his experience, or at least how he perceives experience. I cannot know how he perceives color—maybe it is the same way as I do, but maybe not, and we just have no way to prove it one way or the other. Even if we were to scan our cognitive activity, and the records seemed comparable, nothing much could arise from that save to demonstrate that our substrate is the same and we operate according to the same laws of physics and biochemistry (which would be some relief, even if not useful). It could not say anything significant about what he experiences, or if our experiences are the same. You cannot reduce things to a pure physicalist view without ignoring that subjectivity.
We have developed various ways of trying to discuss these subjectivities and label them, isolate them, and package them off. We often use the term qualia
15 to denote a single “unit” of subjective experience, but this only does a partial job in capturing what that experience IS. Qualia is a nice way of saying that something is a subjective experience, but it cannot evoke that experience, and it cannot tell us what that experience is. You see the color blue. There is a physical instantiation of this experience. A wavelength of light is hitting your retina, and signals are sent to the brain conveying that. The signals will say something about the shade of the blue, maybe its intensity and its brightness—lots of characteristics that can be explained in terms of color physics—but there is also a subjective experience here: the blueness of the blue. The blueness is the qualia in this example, and it is something that cannot be verified. I simply cannot know what it is you are experiencing when presented with “blue.” We can both understand what we see to be blue, but there is no indication that what we see is actually the same. You cannot describe to me this experience of perception in a way that would tell me what it is to see what you consider “blue.” Frank Jackson’s classic “knowledge argument” goes that you could not explain blue to a person raised in a black-and-white room, without showing them—even if they know everything there is to know about the color physics, they still could not understand or imagine the experience of seeing blue until they have actually done so.
16 Furthermore, Moreland Perkins argues that qualia do not necessarily link to objective causes: a smell does not bear any obvious resemblance to the molecule we inhale. Physical sensations do not necessarily actually take place where we perceive them to; we have referred to sensation.
17 You could not look at a molecule or a site of pain and know what the experience of that sensation would be to an individual.
All of this is to say that qualia only go so far as a descriptor. It can tell us that there is a sensation, but not what that sensation is. Further still, it does not appear that there actually is any way to communicate that sensation, or, indeed, that it is possible to know what the sensation as perceived by another even is. So, despite my desire for, and faith in, science to explain the brain and explain the mind, to explain what, who, and how we are, it does not seem possible for science to answer this problem—to codify the blueness of blue. Per Nagel, again, “if we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue about how this could be done.”
18 So, there is some aspect of our lived experiences—some aspect of our minds—that cannot be reduced to the physical, at least not in a useful or observable way.
My opponent could jump in here and say that I am endorsing some plain dualism, just as I said I would not do. But I would like to occupy a more subtle ground—presumably, whatever this subjectivity is, it must be in some way a product of its physical basis. Without a physical basis, just as Alex has said, there could be no capacity to perceive qualia, and there could be no experience. This leaves me with an irreconcilable problem—I do not accept the mind as some aetheric force, it must, in some way, exist in our universe, but at the same time, it is not an ontologically simple existence.
Irreducibility
In some ways, one could argue that this comes close to ideas of an “emergent materialism”; that mind is a novel nonphysical property born of a complex system, and it cannot be reduced to a given physicality in itself.
19 Mind may be only metaphysically dependent on the brain.
20 If I were to endorse this, I find myself dangerously close to giving ground to Alex. Even if body is only metaphysically necessary, that may be enough to say that a mind needs one. However, I believe we can introduce sufficient separation.
David Chalmers holds that consciousness, or mind, is entailed by information, and information is an ontologically separate fundamental property of the universe, explaining that:
In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world.
21
This greatly resembles the ways in which we often talk about minds. Chalmers suggests that qualia are informational—the blueness of blue is information of which we are aware, although which we cannot convey to others. Qualia do not follow logically from the physical facts of the brain or body, and so they are what is sometimes referred to by, for example, Derek Parfit as further facts.
22,
23 Qualia, then, exist only as information—they are irreducible any further.
Information, or subjective experience, means nothing in and of itself. It is also metaphysically possible that it does not exist without being observed, per the famous “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” thought experiment. The process of observation, of receipt of that information, is what I think we refer to as mind. These are cases in which we have a human patient, say in a permanent vegetative state, where the brain architecture exists, but there is no perception, no receipt, or no processing of information, and correspondingly, we see no evidence of a mind. The brain may be the engine, but without informational fuel, what use is that engine?
The corollary of this is that without instantiation of some kind, there is not anything present to receive, to interpret, or to experience the information regarding the blueness of blue. We need a tank in which to pour that fuel. Mind must, therefore, have some physical property—it must be instantiated within the universe. It must exist somewhere in order to accept inputs of information. But it is also nonphysical—it is a gestalt of, for want of a better term, functional informational capacities such as the ability to understand, or to perceive qualia. The mind is inhabiting an odd, quantum space; higher mental processes seem to be somehow phenomenologically different from physical cognitive processes. I am, therefore, forced to admit that my views on this debate may lay closer to property dualism (or at best a nonreductive physicalism) than I perhaps previously thought, with nonphysical mental properties supervening on physical substance. And, this is as close as I will come to saying that my opponent has a point—it appears our minds do need a host or substrate to function, and if you choose to call that a body, then very well. But there is no reason to say that this host need be any specific body.
Function over Form?
The chick is not the eggshell. But without the shell, the chick could not form. It is conceivably possible to remove the embryo from the shell and place it in another shell, where it will grow. It may now be a slightly different chick, but it will still be a chick. So, it may be with the mind. I do not dispute that modes of instantiation—or to return to the language of our initial question, embodiment—will affect the mind, or rather, that they will affect our subjective experience. It is almost undeniable—if the body is a conduit through which inputs are filtered, the incoming sensations, whatever they are, are going in some way to be colored by the medium through which they are transferred. There are wavelengths of electromagnetism that our Homo sapiens eyes cannot receive. As such, looking at a light source does not transfer to us the experience of seeing infrared—although our retinas are being impacted by infrared wavelengths of light. An eye that could see infrared would include that input, and we would presumably subjectively experience it as… something. As I have tried to point out, we cannot know what that experience would be.
If the functionality of the mind is the core of the matter, as I believe, it will presumably proceed to enact these functions—to receive information and to have subjective experiences—no matter its mode of instantiation (or its shell) if we can assume a similar degree of complexity for that embodiment. It may not have these experiences in the same ways, the informational input may be inflected or colored or even expanded by the conduit, but an experience would nonetheless be had. The mind would have performed its role in perceiving that input, and interpreting it as an experience.
The brain-in-a-vat concept
24 is frequently misused, but it seems apt here to demonstrate this idea of the body as a conduit that does not, in itself, matter. Assuming, for a moment, that such a thing is possible, then the vat—its various, presumably electronic and chemical, inputs would act in the same way as our senses. The mechanism by which these operate does not seem to be significant, but it does not seem unrealistic to suggest that we could, in future, emulate the types of electrochemical activity that enter our brains “naturally.” The mind residing in that vat would still take that activity as an input and experience it subjectively, although that the information would be transferred not through ears or eyes and neurons, but through a chemical soup and wires. So, rather than the mode or medium of ingress, the significant element would be the information contained in that electrochemical activity. The process of perception, of mind, would be unchanged. The mind, then, needs a body, but it could be any sufficiently complex body, and anything that we could conceive of as a body.
Concluding Remarks
The question “Does a Mind Need a Body” is, essentially, flawed. Each is reliant on the other to constitute themselves. A mind may be metaphysically dependent on a substrate, a host. But a substrate is not a body without a mind—it is just an interchangeable shell. If a mind cannot be reduced to a physicality, then specific embodiment does not matter. It has an effect, and it matters in as much as it does shape the mind, gives it structure, and colors our experiences. But that is a byproduct, not the main event. It seems to me that it is not what a mind is but what a mind does that matters, and what a mind does is to subjectively experience information, to interpret embodied inputs, and to have purpose in and of itself.
If these capacities are emergent properties that we cannot reduce solely to their underlying biology, properties with some nonphysical element that we cannot objectively measure, about which there is an unsolvable epistemological gap, then this says that the first assumption of our central question is problematic. We do not know, objectively, what a mind is and we cannot know, because we cannot escape our own perspective and subjectivity. We are limited by an inability to be objectively introspective; so, there is a systemic and epistemic barrier to any attempt to understand the basis of our minds.
25 Just as we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, we can only know what it is like to be a human, and that tells us nothing of the nature of a mind in and of itself, removed from a given host. One method may be to attempt to build a mind for someone or something else, perhaps an artificial general intelligence—but the very inability we have to escape ourselves will likely cause us to create their minds in our own image.
If we cannot know mind beyond its abstract functionality, then we cannot say definitively what it is, and where it resides. If we cannot say where it resides, then we cannot say that that must be in a given body. If we cannot definitely say it must reside within our body, then we cannot definitively say that a mind needs a body. That the mind needs a given body relies wholly on the idea that a mind entirely can be quantified and reduced. Because that argument fails, it cannot be proved, despite how much I may wish it could be, then we cannot in good faith say that a mind needs a body in any way that we should care about.
Alex McKeown’s Rebuttal: Does David Really Disagree with Me?
One thing that I am concerned by is the extent to which David is actually disagreeing with me. Perhaps in the process of discussing this, we will tease out what it is he is arguing with me about, but it seems to me there was a lot that he accepted. And on my reading of it, what he accepts should lead him to accept my conclusion rather than his.
For example, David accepts that there needs to be some kind of physical host for mind. He accepts that it has to be somewhere. But then, he says it does not have to be any particular host and, you know, I suppose I understand what he means by that. But he does not dispute that mind has to be instantiated in some way and so he does not dispute the underlying physicalist picture. And once you have accepted that the mind needs to be extended in space somewhere, it does not seem to me that there is enormous scope for disagreement.
David also accepts my argument that humans do not necessarily have any privileged account of what counts as a body. There could be many different kinds of bodies, so we are not entitled to point to instances of different kinds of physical instantiations of mind and say that is definitely not a body. I flag that I kind of anthropomorphic uncertainty, and David accepts that as well.
So David accepts the physicalist picture and he accepts that we do not have a privileged account of what a body is or is not. Really what he is disagreeing about is whether I am right in saying that there are lots of things that count as bodies, given that this move can be construed as claiming a kind of anthropomorphic certainty to which I am not entitled. However, just because something is different embodied in a way that we could not possibly imagine does not mean they are not entitled to say that they are embodied.
David Lawrence’s Rebuttal: Embodiment Does Not Matter
Alex, in his argument, rightly gave a great deal of attention to the idea of embodiment. This is not the first forum in which he and I have taken opposing sides on that subject, and I dare say it will not be the last either.
To rebut, I will return to my characterization of the body—whatever we are understanding that to be—as a “conduit.” I want to make two points about this; the first being to reiterate that the specific body does not seem to me to matter very much. I contended that while embodiment surely does matter in as much as any medium will exert an effect on whatever passes through it, this does not fundamentally change the fact that experiences would still be had, and mind would continue to exist and function. Whatever color or inflection the conduit imparts, the signal still arrives and is still processed, as it were.
The Banality of Substrate
A hardline, reductive physicalist might liken the brain to a machine, some piece of complex electronics. This is, ironically, a helpful analogy here—electronic circuitry imparts resistance to the electrons flowing through it, but the signals travel. A slightly different alloy used in the circuit would provide a different resistance, and that altered resistance might affect the character of the signal slightly—less strong, say—but it would still travel, and still incite the response at the point of receipt. Providing it is capable of transmitting the signal, the alloy—the conduit—does not matter.
Let us say you were born as an able-bodied, neurotypical person, who suffers some accident that affects your body plan, such as the loss of an appendage. Your embodiment is now altered, and your embodied experience is changed. You would, undoubtedly, experience things differently, even once you were adapted to the physical differences. However—your mind would remain your mind, and you would still experience things by the very same processes that it would have, but for the accident. The changing of your embodied shape or self does not self-evidently change the function or purpose of the mind. If we accept that this function is, in part, to experience subjectivity, and we accept that subjectivity is a, or even the, distinguishing feature of a conscious mind, then we could go further to say that the perception of these subjective experiences is us in all the ways which matter.
Here, I would like to invoke John Harris, who discusses the continuation of narrative identity and the possibility of “successive selves” in radical life extension. As he puts it,
Suppose [an individual] has three identities, A, B, and C, descending vertically into the future… A will want to be B, who will remember being A; B will want to become C, who will remember being B but possibly not remember being A.
26
Although Harris uses this to discuss an extreme life span, it holds true for an ordinary one. We do not generally remember the subjective experience of being a baby, beyond possible flashes of certain physical sensations that made a great impression on us, or maybe broad emotional states. We certainly do not recall qualia—and in many ways, this simply does not matter. We are having experiences as who we are now, and who we were does not seem to be significant beyond that it led us to the present. Furthermore, our embodiment has changed—no element of our bodies is the same as it was when we were small children, or “A.” This is instrumentally true in a real cellular sense, but also true in as much as we are physically different, larger, a different shape. We have, necessarily, a very different embodied experience of life, and as “C” you likely do not remember—and cannot know—what it is like for a young child to be a young child, just as we cannot know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
27
Despite this, we do not consider that that change in embodiment has made us some new person, something significantly different from who we were as “A.” This ought also to be true of the mind. A different shell, or substrate—a different embodiment, here—does not prevent subjective experiences taking place in and of themselves, so what seems to be at stake in our original question—does a mind need a body—is whether or not that body has much to do with the actual function of mind.
One subject of much discussion within transhumanist-leaning literature is the idea of whole-brain emulation, or mind upload. Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom suggest that:
The basic idea is to take a particular brain, scan its structure in detail, and construct a software model of it that is so faithful to the original that, when run on appropriate hardware, it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain.
28
We can more simply think of this as a perfect copy of the type sometimes considered as a means of digital immortality.
29 As discussed in my opening argument, a perfect copy seems to require copying the element of subjectivity as well, so let us imagine that our copy achieves this. Once you have sat in the copy machine, the you (you-X) that was copied can get up and walk away (assuming a nondestructive process) and continue living and having subjective experiences. You-X’s mind continues to operate, and you-X’s life is generally unchanged. The copied you, you-Y, branches off. For a single instant, the minds of you-X and you-Y will be identical, until it began to have its own subjective experiences as soon as it came “online.” You-Y would be having different experiences to you-X, by virtue of its inputs being different, despite being processed by the same mental architecture. The inputs would enter through a different conduit, dependent on whatever the copied mind resides in—that is, its body.
The distinction between you-X and you-Y, though, is not because they are instantiated in different ways. It is simply that once these minds are no longer exactly identical, it is not possible for one to know the experience of the other. Their mode of embodiment would affect their experience, just as losing a hand would affect it. However, for both you-X and you-Y, the fundamental fact is that they would still be having subjective experiences, in parallel but in the same manner as the predivergent you. Both you-X and you-Y would remain you, although on a new path and unable to know each other’s mind. Their housing does not seem to be significant.
Malleability
The second point I would like to make is that even if you disagree on the primacy of the function of mind as having experiences, embodiment seems to be malleable. If it is malleable, it cannot be fundamentally significant for the existence of mind.
There is an increasing amount of research into how to manipulate the neurological basis of the hypothetical body schema—our internal “map” of our bodies—into accepting new embodiments.
30 This is primarily of use in the field of prosthetics, wherein it is desirable to help a user adapt to their prosthesis, consider it “part of their body,” and reduce phenomena such as “phantom limb.” Bioengineers also present a “soft embodiment,”
31 where neural and cognitive body mechanisms are repurposed to allow the embodiment of nonorganic additions, perhaps even things that are nonbiomimetic. A similar affect can be achieved externally—via application of the body transfer illusion, most recognized as the “rubber hand illusion.” Here, the subject’s organic hand is hidden, and a rubber hand is placed within sight. The hidden organic hand is stroked, but the subject experiences the sensation as though it were in the rubber hand. Perceptual mechanisms can override our knowledge about the material reality of our bodies, and give an illusion of a different embodiment than the strict truth.
32 If such a simple experiment can induce a new embodied experience—even if only temporary—how fundamental can our true embodiment be to our mind and mental processes?
Furthermore, we induce this in ourselves frequently and without intending to, without the use of illusion. With experience and practice, we frequently describe tools or other objects as being “a part of my body.” A snooker player’s cue becomes an extension of their arm, and they experience the strike of the ball at the tip and not in their hand.
33 A heavy plant operator need not think about the levers they pull to extend the hydraulic arm, to draw the scoop. The machine moves as though it is an extension of the operator. There are countless other examples—driving being the most common. After an adjustment period, we are simply aware of the bounds of our vehicle, we know the spaces in which it can fit—without needing to get out and measure.
Far from being trite examples, these demonstrate that our embodiment is far from concrete. In all the ways that appear to matter, these nonorganic additions to our bodies function and are experienced as though they are part of our bodies. I experience the qualia of the strike on the ball; however, it is mediated, and I go on to have whatever resultant emotion or thought or experience that stems from that. I draw away from the needle threatening “my” rubber hand, because I want to avoid the pain I instinctively think will ensue.
34 If our embodiment is so malleable, and our experiences continue through these new body parts that are so easily incorporated into our schema, then it does not seem to me that embodiment matters in any significant way.
The Flawed Language of Mind
The final, brief point I would make perhaps serves both Alex and myself. Our debate has relied on circumlocution, and we have both struggled to articulate entirely accurately what we think mind to be. This is borne out across the literature of the mind–body problem and more widely in philosophy of mind—it is extremely difficult to effectively discuss something which is, by its nature, entirely nebulous and unknown. Furthermore, we are limited by the language we have available to us. All the terminology we use—“mind,” “consciousness,” and even “body”—can be understood in myriad ways. We invoke possessive terms constantly, and in so doing necessarily suggest that “my” mind is “me,” when this view is not shared—for instance, by my learned opponent. We cannot describe qualia, because we utterly lack the words for it, in any language. We analogize—and I have done so extensively here—because we are trying to describe an invisible and quite possible nonphysical process, but the analogies themselves are limited to things that we can observe, things that, therefore, fundamentally cannot entirely represent such a process.
Until we can solve some of these issues—until we can agree some definitions, some limits—it does not seem likely that this is a debate we can conclude one way or the other. I maintain, then, that even if my arguments in these statements fail in themselves, there must remain a reasonable doubt that mind “needs” body.
Alex McKeown: David Lawrence’s Best Argument
The strongest argument David makes relates to the use of the definite article when talking about mind, given we do not we do not know what “a” mind is and that it is probably better understood as a “functional Gestalt.” A key difference between mind and body is that the body, which in humans and other animals includes the brain, can be seen and observed by empirical investigation, whereas even though processes of mind are physically instantiated, you are not going to open up a brain and find “a mind.” Rather, “a” mind is a shorthand for describing a collection of functions that are characteristic of the kinds of beings that we are.
35
This of course admits a degree of uncertainty about what mind is and is not, however, so David’s skepticism about this is reasonable and there is a risk that I am in fact over-anthropomorphizing the picture. So, to me, that is probably David’s strongest argument, because there is some legitimate skepticism about what “a mind” is and where it resides. There is also the general skepticism about knowledge of other minds because of the radical uncertainty about what other people’s subjective experience is like.
As an aside, of course, if one were a panpsychist—we all know that the panpsychist debate has been raging recently and let’s not get into that here— one could just say, “well, the mental is an intrinsic feature of the physical, because this sidesteps the hard problem of emergence”. Not all experience will be as sophisticated as our mental events, and matter in general might just have an unimaginably primitive form of experience; that is, one that is not self-aware or self-referential and so on. Nevertheless, if you buy the conclusion that matter is experiencing, because this is a more parsimonious explanation for the existence of mind than the dualist picture in which mind and body are separate, then you might have some sympathy with the view that there is necessarily no non-physically instantiated mind.
Having said this, and to finish off, I think David articulated his strongest point well at the end there, which is that in spite of these arguments it is possible to have reasonable doubt that mind and body are inseparable. There really does seem to be something different about mental experiences from physical ones, we experience those things differently, and this phenomenological aspect is a challenge that might instill reasonable doubt as to whether, in fact, you cannot have one without the other.
David Lawrence: Alex McKeown’s Best Argument
For all my contention that the mode of embodiment does not matter, I have to accept—and I was forced to admit during my own arguments—that I find it nearly impossible to deny the necessity of physicality, even if that necessity is purely instrumental. All phenomena must be grounded in the physical, in some way even those we cannot easily reduce to it. There is no aetheric substance experiencing subjectivity—the mind, whatever it proves to be, must be in some way instantiated. It must be subject to the fundamental laws of physics, even if it may be that we do not entirely understand how as yet. If subjectivity is information, and if the information can be considered a fundamental component of physics—as Chalmers might have it—then perhaps subjectivity, too, has a rational scientific explanation to be discovered. Physicality does not have to mean we can touch something, merely that it be subject to physics, and materialism such as that which Alex relies on merely requires that there is matter and material interaction in the process of mind. In this regard, I cannot deny him.
This problem returns us to one of the flaws of our central debate topic—what we understand to count as a body. It is a reasonable argument to make to say that whatever host, substrate, or conduit mind resides in could be called its body. If so, then that is impossible to repudiate—even if it makes “body” so vague a concept as to be useless.
Acknowledgments
David R. Lawrence was supported by the Wellcome Trust through [grant number 209519/Z/17/Z]. Alex McKeown is supported by The Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, which is supported by core funding from the Wellcome Trust [203132/Z/16/Z]. | If these capacities are emergent properties that we cannot reduce solely to their underlying biology, properties with some nonphysical element that we cannot objectively measure, about which there is an unsolvable epistemological gap, then this says that the first assumption of our central question is problematic. We do not know, objectively, what a mind is and we cannot know, because we cannot escape our own perspective and subjectivity. We are limited by an inability to be objectively introspective; so, there is a systemic and epistemic barrier to any attempt to understand the basis of our minds.
25 Just as we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, we can only know what it is like to be a human, and that tells us nothing of the nature of a mind in and of itself, removed from a given host. One method may be to attempt to build a mind for someone or something else, perhaps an artificial general intelligence—but the very inability we have to escape ourselves will likely cause us to create their minds in our own image.
If we cannot know mind beyond its abstract functionality, then we cannot say definitively what it is, and where it resides. If we cannot say where it resides, then we cannot say that that must be in a given body. If we cannot definitely say it must reside within our body, then we cannot definitively say that a mind needs a body. That the mind needs a given body relies wholly on the idea that a mind entirely can be quantified and reduced. Because that argument fails, it cannot be proved, despite how much I may wish it could be, then we cannot in good faith say that a mind needs a body in any way that we should care about.
Alex McKeown’s Rebuttal: Does David Really Disagree with Me?
One thing that I am concerned by is the extent to which David is actually disagreeing with me. Perhaps in the process of discussing this, we will tease out what it is he is arguing with me about, but it seems to me there was a lot that he accepted. And on my reading of it, what he accepts should lead him to accept my conclusion rather than his.
| no |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | yes_statement | we can "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-far-advance-could-scientists-predict-eruption-yellowstone-volcano | How far in advance could scientists predict an eruption of the ... | Breadcrumb
How far in advance could scientists predict an eruption of the Yellowstone volcano?
The science of forecasting a volcanic eruption has significantly advanced over the past 25 years. Most scientists think that the buildup preceding a catastrophic eruption would be detectable for weeks and perhaps months to years. Precursors to volcanic eruptions include strong earthquake swarms and rapid ground deformation and typically take place days to weeks before an actual eruption. Scientists at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) closely monitor the Yellowstone region for such precursors. They expect that the buildup to larger eruptions would include intense precursory activity (far exceeding background levels) at multiple spots within the Yellowstone volcano. As at many caldera systems around the world, small earthquakes, ground uplift and subsidence, and gas releases at Yellowstone are commonplace events and do not reflect impending eruptions.
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Yellowstone is a plateau high in the Rocky Mountains, and is snowbound for over six months per year. The mean annual temperature is 2.2°C (36°F), barely above the freezing point of water. However, Yellowstone is also an active geothermal area with hot springs emerging at ~92°C (~198°F) (the boiling point of water at Yellowstone's mean altitude) and steam vents reported as high as 135°C (275°F)...
How hot is Yellowstone?
Yellowstone is a plateau high in the Rocky Mountains, and is snowbound for over six months per year. The mean annual temperature is 2.2°C (36°F), barely above the freezing point of water. However, Yellowstone is also an active geothermal area with hot springs emerging at ~92°C (~198°F) (the boiling point of water at Yellowstone's mean altitude) and steam vents reported as high as 135°C (275°F)...
The term "supervolcano" implies a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI), meaning that at one point in time it erupted more than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of material. In the early 2000s, the term “supereruption” began being used as a catchy way to describe VEI 8 eruptions. Explosive events of this size erupt so much magma that...
What is a supervolcano? What is a supereruption?
The term "supervolcano" implies a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI), meaning that at one point in time it erupted more than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of material. In the early 2000s, the term “supereruption” began being used as a catchy way to describe VEI 8 eruptions. Explosive events of this size erupt so much magma that...
Almost all earthquakes at Yellowstone are brittle-failure events caused when rocks break due to crustal stresses. Though we've been looking at Yellowstone for years, no one has yet identified "long-period (LP) events" commonly attributed to magma movement. If LP events are observed, that will NOT mean Yellowstone is getting ready to erupt. LP earthquakes commonly occur at other volcanoes in the...
Why are there so many earthquakes at Yellowstone?
Almost all earthquakes at Yellowstone are brittle-failure events caused when rocks break due to crustal stresses. Though we've been looking at Yellowstone for years, no one has yet identified "long-period (LP) events" commonly attributed to magma movement. If LP events are observed, that will NOT mean Yellowstone is getting ready to erupt. LP earthquakes commonly occur at other volcanoes in the...
The most recent volcanic activity at Yellowstone consisted of rhyolitic lava flows that erupted approximately 70,000 years ago. The largest of these flows formed the Pitchstone Plateau in southwestern Yellowstone National Park. Learn more: Yellowstone Eruption History The evolution of the Yellowstone Plateau Volcani Field: Past, present, and future!
When was the last time Yellowstone erupted?
The most recent volcanic activity at Yellowstone consisted of rhyolitic lava flows that erupted approximately 70,000 years ago. The largest of these flows formed the Pitchstone Plateau in southwestern Yellowstone National Park. Learn more: Yellowstone Eruption History The evolution of the Yellowstone Plateau Volcani Field: Past, present, and future!
Yellowstone is not overdue for an eruption. Volcanoes do not work in predictable ways and their eruptions do not follow predictable schedules. Even so, the math doesn’t work out for the volcano to be “overdue” for an eruption. In terms of large explosions, Yellowstone has experienced three at 2.08, 1.3, and 0.631 million years ago. This comes out to an average of about 725,000 years between...
Is Yellowstone overdue for an eruption? When will Yellowstone erupt?
Yellowstone is not overdue for an eruption. Volcanoes do not work in predictable ways and their eruptions do not follow predictable schedules. Even so, the math doesn’t work out for the volcano to be “overdue” for an eruption. In terms of large explosions, Yellowstone has experienced three at 2.08, 1.3, and 0.631 million years ago. This comes out to an average of about 725,000 years between...
Yellowstone Volcano is monitored for signs of volcanic activity. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) is a partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Yellowstone National Park, the University of Utah, the University of Wyoming, UNAVCO, the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, the Idaho Geological Survey, and the Wyoming State Geological Survey. YVO closely monitors volcanic...
How do scientists know what’s going on beneath the ground at Yellowstone? Is Yellowstone monitored for volcanic activity?
Yellowstone Volcano is monitored for signs of volcanic activity. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) is a partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Yellowstone National Park, the University of Utah, the University of Wyoming, UNAVCO, the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, the Idaho Geological Survey, and the Wyoming State Geological Survey. YVO closely monitors volcanic...
The most likely explosive event to occur at Yellowstone is actually a hydrothermal explosion (a rock hurling geyser eruption) or a lava flow. Hydrothermal explosions are very small; they occur in Yellowstone National Park every few years and form a crater a few meters across. Every few thousand years, a hydrothermal explosion will form a crater as much as a few hundred meters across. Though the...
What type of eruption will Yellowstone have if it erupts again?
The most likely explosive event to occur at Yellowstone is actually a hydrothermal explosion (a rock hurling geyser eruption) or a lava flow. Hydrothermal explosions are very small; they occur in Yellowstone National Park every few years and form a crater a few meters across. Every few thousand years, a hydrothermal explosion will form a crater as much as a few hundred meters across. Though the...
Since the most recent giant (caldera-forming) eruption 631,000 years ago, approximately 80 relatively nonexplosive eruptions have occurred. Of these eruptions, at least 27 were rhyolite lava flows in the caldera, 13 were rhyolite lava flows outside the caldera, and 40 were basalt vents outside the caldera. The most recent volcanic eruption at Yellowstone, a lava flow on the Pitchstone Plateau...
How much volcanic activity has there been at Yellowstone since the most recent giant eruption?
Since the most recent giant (caldera-forming) eruption 631,000 years ago, approximately 80 relatively nonexplosive eruptions have occurred. Of these eruptions, at least 27 were rhyolite lava flows in the caldera, 13 were rhyolite lava flows outside the caldera, and 40 were basalt vents outside the caldera. The most recent volcanic eruption at Yellowstone, a lava flow on the Pitchstone Plateau...
The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) monitors volcanic and hydrothermal activity associated with the Yellowstone magmatic system, carries out research into magmatic processes occurring beneath Yellowstone Caldera, and issues timely warnings and guidance related to potential future geologic hazards. This report summarizes the activities and findings of YVO during the year 2022, focusing on the
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Yellowstone, one of the world’s largest active volcanic systems, has produced several giant volcanic eruptions in the past few million years, as well as many smaller eruptions and steam explosions. Although no eruptions of lava or volcanic ash have occurred for many thousands of years, future eruptions are likely. In the next few hundred years, hazards will most probably be limited to ongoing geys
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Yellowstone is a plateau high in the Rocky Mountains, and is snowbound for over six months per year. The mean annual temperature is 2.2°C (36°F), barely above the freezing point of water. However, Yellowstone is also an active geothermal area with hot springs emerging at ~92°C (~198°F) (the boiling point of water at Yellowstone's mean altitude) and steam vents reported as high as 135°C (275°F)...
How hot is Yellowstone?
Yellowstone is a plateau high in the Rocky Mountains, and is snowbound for over six months per year. The mean annual temperature is 2.2°C (36°F), barely above the freezing point of water. However, Yellowstone is also an active geothermal area with hot springs emerging at ~92°C (~198°F) (the boiling point of water at Yellowstone's mean altitude) and steam vents reported as high as 135°C (275°F)...
The term "supervolcano" implies a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI), meaning that at one point in time it erupted more than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of material. In the early 2000s, the term “supereruption” began being used as a catchy way to describe VEI 8 eruptions. Explosive events of this size erupt so much magma that...
What is a supervolcano? What is a supereruption?
The term "supervolcano" implies a volcanic center that has had an eruption of magnitude 8 on the Volcano Explosivity Index (VEI), meaning that at one point in time it erupted more than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of material. In the early 2000s, the term “supereruption” began being used as a catchy way to describe VEI 8 eruptions. Explosive events of this size erupt so much magma that...
Almost all earthquakes at Yellowstone are brittle-failure events caused when rocks break due to crustal stresses. Though we've been looking at Yellowstone for years, no one has yet identified "long-period (LP) events" commonly attributed to magma movement. If LP events are observed, that will NOT mean Yellowstone is getting ready to erupt. LP earthquakes commonly occur at other volcanoes in the...
Why are there so many earthquakes at Yellowstone?
Almost all earthquakes at Yellowstone are brittle-failure events caused when rocks break due to crustal stresses. Though we've been looking at Yellowstone for years, no one has yet identified "long-period (LP) events" commonly attributed to magma movement. If LP events are observed, that will NOT mean Yellowstone is getting ready to erupt. LP earthquakes commonly occur at other volcanoes in the...
The most recent volcanic activity at Yellowstone consisted of rhyolitic lava flows that erupted approximately 70,000 years ago. The largest of these flows formed the Pitchstone Plateau in southwestern Yellowstone National Park. Learn more: Yellowstone Eruption History The evolution of the Yellowstone Plateau Volcani Field: Past, present, and future!
When was the last time Yellowstone erupted?
The most recent volcanic activity at Yellowstone consisted of rhyolitic lava flows that erupted approximately 70,000 years ago. The largest of these flows formed the Pitchstone Plateau in southwestern Yellowstone National Park. Learn more: Yellowstone Eruption History The evolution of the Yellowstone Plateau Volcani Field: Past, present, and future!
Yellowstone is not overdue for an eruption. Volcanoes do not work in predictable ways and their eruptions do not follow predictable schedules. Even so, the math doesn’t work out for the volcano to be “overdue” for an eruption. In terms of large explosions, Yellowstone has experienced three at 2.08, 1.3, and 0.631 million years ago. This comes out to an average of about 725,000 years between...
Is Yellowstone overdue for an eruption? When will Yellowstone erupt?
Yellowstone is not overdue for an eruption. Volcanoes do not work in predictable ways and their eruptions do not follow predictable schedules. Even so, the math doesn’t work out for the volcano to be “overdue” for an eruption. In terms of large explosions, Yellowstone has experienced three at 2.08, 1.3, and 0.631 million years ago. This comes out to an average of about 725,000 years between...
Yellowstone Volcano is monitored for signs of volcanic activity. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) is a partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Yellowstone National Park, the University of Utah, the University of Wyoming, UNAVCO, the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, the Idaho Geological Survey, and the Wyoming State Geological Survey. YVO closely monitors volcanic...
How do scientists know what’s going on beneath the ground at Yellowstone? Is Yellowstone monitored for volcanic activity?
Yellowstone Volcano is monitored for signs of volcanic activity. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) is a partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Yellowstone National Park, the University of Utah, the University of Wyoming, UNAVCO, the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, the Idaho Geological Survey, and the Wyoming State Geological Survey. YVO closely monitors volcanic...
The most likely explosive event to occur at Yellowstone is actually a hydrothermal explosion (a rock hurling geyser eruption) or a lava flow. Hydrothermal explosions are very small; they occur in Yellowstone National Park every few years and form a crater a few meters across. Every few thousand years, a hydrothermal explosion will form a crater as much as a few hundred meters across. Though the...
What type of eruption will Yellowstone have if it erupts again?
The most likely explosive event to occur at Yellowstone is actually a hydrothermal explosion (a rock hurling geyser eruption) or a lava flow. Hydrothermal explosions are very small; they occur in Yellowstone National Park every few years and form a crater a few meters across. Every few thousand years, a hydrothermal explosion will form a crater as much as a few hundred meters across. Though the...
Since the most recent giant (caldera-forming) eruption 631,000 years ago, approximately 80 relatively nonexplosive eruptions have occurred. Of these eruptions, at least 27 were rhyolite lava flows in the caldera, 13 were rhyolite lava flows outside the caldera, and 40 were basalt vents outside the caldera. The most recent volcanic eruption at Yellowstone, a lava flow on the Pitchstone Plateau...
How much volcanic activity has there been at Yellowstone since the most recent giant eruption?
Since the most recent giant (caldera-forming) eruption 631,000 years ago, approximately 80 relatively nonexplosive eruptions have occurred. Of these eruptions, at least 27 were rhyolite lava flows in the caldera, 13 were rhyolite lava flows outside the caldera, and 40 were basalt vents outside the caldera. The most recent volcanic eruption at Yellowstone, a lava flow on the Pitchstone Plateau...
The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) monitors volcanic and hydrothermal activity associated with the Yellowstone magmatic system, carries out research into magmatic processes occurring beneath Yellowstone Caldera, and issues timely warnings and guidance related to potential future geologic hazards. This report summarizes the activities and findings of YVO during the year 2022, focusing on the
Executive SummaryThe Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) is a consortium of nine Federal, State, and academic agencies that: (1) provides timely monitoring and hazards assessment of volcanic, hydrothermal, and earthquake activity in and around Yellowstone National Park, and (2) conducts research to develop new approaches to volcano monitoring and better understand volcanic activity in the Yellow
The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) monitors volcanic and hydrothermal activity associated with the Yellowstone magmatic system, conducts research into magmatic processes occurring beneath Yellowstone Caldera, and issues timely warnings and guidance related to potential future geologic hazards. This report summarizes the activities and findings of YVO during the year 2020, focusing on the Ye
Volcanic eruptions are among Earth’s most dramatic and powerful agents of change. Ash, mudflows, and lava flows can devastate communities near volcanoes and cause havoc in areas far downwind, downstream, and downslope. Even when a volcano is quiet, steep volcanic slopes can collapse to become landslides, and large rocks can be hurled by powerful steam blasts. Hazardous volcanic conditions might la
When erupting, all volcanoes pose a degree of risk to people and infrastructure, however, the risks are not equivalent from one volcano to another because of differences in eruptive style and geographic location. Assessing the relative threats posed by U.S. volcanoes identifies which volcanoes warrant the greatest risk-mitigation efforts by the U.S. Geological Survey and its partners. This update
Yellowstone National Park, a nearly 9,000 km2 (~3,468 mi2) area, was preserved in 1872 as the world’s first national park for its unique, extraordinary, and magnificent natural features. Rimmed by a crescent of older mountainous terrain, Yellowstone National Park has at its core the Quaternary Yellowstone Plateau, an undulating landscape shaped by forces of late Cenozoic explosive and effusive vol
The superlative hot springs, geysers, and fumarole fields of Yellowstone National Park are vivid reminders of a recent volcanic past. Volcanism on an immense scale largely shaped the unique landscape of central and western Yellowstone Park, and intimately related tectonism and seismicity continue even now. Furthermore, the volcanism that gave rise to Yellowstone's hydrothermal displays was only pa
Possible future violent events in the active hydrothermal, magmatic, and tectonic system of Yellowstone National Park pose potential hazards to park visitors and infrastructure. Most of the national park and vicinity are sparsely populated, but significant numbers of people as well as park resources could nevertheless be at risk from these hazards. Depending on the nature and magnitude of a partic
To provide Yellowstone National Park (YNP) and its surrounding communities with a modern, comprehensive system for volcano and earthquake monitoring, the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) has developed a monitoring plan for the period 2006-2015. Such a plan is needed so that YVO can provide timely information during seismic, volcanic, and hydrothermal crises and can anticipate hazardous events
Yellowstone, one of the world’s largest active volcanic systems, has produced several giant volcanic eruptions in the past few million years, as well as many smaller eruptions and steam explosions. Although no eruptions of lava or volcanic ash have occurred for many thousands of years, future eruptions are likely. In the next few hundred years, hazards will most probably be limited to ongoing geys
This region of Yellowstone National Park has been the active focus of one of the Earth's largest magmatic systems for more than 2 million years. The resulting volcanism has been characterized by the eruption of voluminous rhyolites and subordinate basalts but virtually no lavas of intermediate composition. The magmatic system at depth remains active and drives the massive hydrothermal circulation | When will Yellowstone erupt?
Yellowstone is not overdue for an eruption. Volcanoes do not work in predictable ways and their eruptions do not follow predictable schedules. Even so, the math doesn’t work out for the volcano to be “overdue” for an eruption. In terms of large explosions, Yellowstone has experienced three at 2.08, 1.3, and 0.631 million years ago. This comes out to an average of about 725,000 years between...
Yellowstone Volcano is monitored for signs of volcanic activity. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) is a partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Yellowstone National Park, the University of Utah, the University of Wyoming, UNAVCO, the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, the Idaho Geological Survey, and the Wyoming State Geological Survey. YVO closely monitors volcanic...
How do scientists know what’s going on beneath the ground at Yellowstone? Is Yellowstone monitored for volcanic activity?
Yellowstone Volcano is monitored for signs of volcanic activity. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) is a partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Yellowstone National Park, the University of Utah, the University of Wyoming, UNAVCO, the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, the Idaho Geological Survey, and the Wyoming State Geological Survey. YVO closely monitors volcanic...
The most likely explosive event to occur at Yellowstone is actually a hydrothermal explosion (a rock hurling geyser eruption) or a lava flow. Hydrothermal explosions are very small; they occur in Yellowstone National Park every few years and form a crater a few meters across. Every few thousand years, a hydrothermal explosion will form a crater as much as a few hundred meters across. Though the...
What type of eruption will Yellowstone have if it erupts again?
| no |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | yes_statement | we can "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://theconversation.com/why-cant-we-predict-when-a-volcano-will-erupt-53898 | Why can't we predict when a volcano will erupt? | Partners
We started 2016 with a bang. Both Chileand Indonesia saw a clutch of volcanoes erupting after laying dormant for a decade or more. This followed an eruption in April 2015, when Calbuco volcano in Chile burst back to life after more than 40 years of silence, with experts giving less than two hours of warning. In an era of global satellite monitoring with proliferating networks of instruments on the ground, why can we still not accurately predict volcanic eruptions?
Volcano scientists have an unprecedented array of tools with which to keep an eye on the world’s many restless and active volcanoes. In many cases, we can watch emerging events from the safe distance of an volcano observatory. Or, once an eruption has begun, we can observe it in near-real time using satellite feeds and social media. But this isn’t matched by our ability to anticipate what might happen next at a restless but dormant volcano. New research, however, is providing clues about the best way to look for signals of future volcanic behaviour.
Like medicine, volcanologists can get a clearer sense of the state of a volcano using observations from many other examples around the world. But if we don’t know the prior history of a particular volcano, and with no way of taking the equivalent of a biopsy from it, our capacity to work out what is going on is always going to be limited. For example, some volcanoes stay completely quiet and then erupt violently without warning, while others are noisy but have a moment of calm before they erupt. Without prior knowledge, how would we know?
Volcanoes spew out rocks that could hold the key to understanding them.Shutterstock
Sampling eruptions
While we can’t yet safely drill into a rumbling volcano, the deposits from past eruptions may contain the information we need about what happened in the build-up to that eruption. Explosive eruptions typically throw out large quantities of ejecta, the frozen and disrupted remnants of the emptied magma reservoir.
This often includes pumice, a light and frothy rock made of a network of glassy tubes, sheets and strands and a void space that fills with volcanic gas, mainly steam, just before eruption which is then replaced with air. Other components include crystals of different minerals that grew at depth as the magma cooled and started to solidify, perhaps for decades or centuries.
Explosive eruptions are thought to be caused by bubbles of gas escaping from the molten rock deep below the ground. When fresh magma first arrives beneath the volcano, it usually contains quantities of dissolved gases, like water and carbon dioxide.
As the magma cools and freezes into solid rock, the gases remain dissolved in a smaller and smaller amount of melt, until eventually the melt becomes saturated and bubbles of gas start to form. From this point, the pressure inside the volcano begins to build and eventually, the rocks around the magma chamber crack. Then the bubbly magma rises through the crack to the surface, starting an eruption.
Could eruptions like Calbuco one day be predicted?Reuters
Bubbles point the way
But how can we find out the point at which the magma starts to grow bubbles? This is where forensic volcanology comes in. As magmas freeze, the crystals formed at different times will capture snapshots of the state of the reservoir. With some good fortune, it is sometime possible to go and find these crystals after an eruption, and piece together the sequence of events.
In our new research, my colleagues and I have shown how this approach works at Campi Flegrei, a steaming volcanic field that lies west of Naples and the supposed location of the entrance to the underworld in Roman mythology. By analysing the composition of one particular mineral called apatite, which grew throughout the long cooling history of the magma, we found that the gas bubbles could only have formed shortly – perhaps a few days to months – before the eruption itself. So at this volcano, the best signals of an impending eruption might be a combination of swelling of the ground levels (with changing pressure) and in the gases escaping out of the volcano.
This still doesn’t provide us with a simple way to predict the eruptions of any volcano. But it does show how taking a forensic look at the deposits of past eruptions at a specific site offer a way to help identify the monitoring signals that will give us clues to future behaviour. And this moves us a step closer to being able predict when an eruption is likely. | Partners
We started 2016 with a bang. Both Chileand Indonesia saw a clutch of volcanoes erupting after laying dormant for a decade or more. This followed an eruption in April 2015, when Calbuco volcano in Chile burst back to life after more than 40 years of silence, with experts giving less than two hours of warning. In an era of global satellite monitoring with proliferating networks of instruments on the ground, why can we still not accurately predict volcanic eruptions?
Volcano scientists have an unprecedented array of tools with which to keep an eye on the world’s many restless and active volcanoes. In many cases, we can watch emerging events from the safe distance of an volcano observatory. Or, once an eruption has begun, we can observe it in near-real time using satellite feeds and social media. But this isn’t matched by our ability to anticipate what might happen next at a restless but dormant volcano. New research, however, is providing clues about the best way to look for signals of future volcanic behaviour.
Like medicine, volcanologists can get a clearer sense of the state of a volcano using observations from many other examples around the world. But if we don’t know the prior history of a particular volcano, and with no way of taking the equivalent of a biopsy from it, our capacity to work out what is going on is always going to be limited. For example, some volcanoes stay completely quiet and then erupt violently without warning, while others are noisy but have a moment of calm before they erupt. Without prior knowledge, how would we know?
Volcanoes spew out rocks that could hold the key to understanding them. Shutterstock
Sampling eruptions
While we can’t yet safely drill into a rumbling volcano, the deposits from past eruptions may contain the information we need about what happened in the build-up to that eruption. Explosive eruptions typically throw out large quantities of ejecta, the frozen and disrupted remnants of the emptied magma reservoir.
| no |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | yes_statement | we can "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/13880748 | Can we predict when a volcano is going to erupt? - BBC Newsround | Can we predict when a volcano is going to erupt?
Scientists who specialise in volcanoes are called volcanologists. They are growing more and more confident at predicting when volcanoes will erupt in the short-term.
If a volcano was going to erupt in one hour they'd have a good idea it was going to happen. If it was going to blow in a week they'd be less sure, and in six months even less so.
The further a volcano is from erupting, the harder it is to predict. Working out if a volcano will erupt in future years is still impossible.
Volcanologists combine several techniques to predict what will happen.
They use monitors to detect movement in the rocks that make up the volcano and in the earth's crust. They also measure the gases that come out of the volcanic mountains, and even the angle of the slopes.
If an eruption is likely to happen very soon the the behaviour of animals in the area can be a clue.
Animals often seem to be able to 'detect' when an eruption is coming, and they become agitated and worried.
And volcanologists are always trying to find new ways to detect eruptions. Some are now using satellites to try to understand how and when they may blow. | Can we predict when a volcano is going to erupt?
Scientists who specialise in volcanoes are called volcanologists. They are growing more and more confident at predicting when volcanoes will erupt in the short-term.
If a volcano was going to erupt in one hour they'd have a good idea it was going to happen. If it was going to blow in a week they'd be less sure, and in six months even less so.
The further a volcano is from erupting, the harder it is to predict. Working out if a volcano will erupt in future years is still impossible.
Volcanologists combine several techniques to predict what will happen.
They use monitors to detect movement in the rocks that make up the volcano and in the earth's crust. They also measure the gases that come out of the volcanic mountains, and even the angle of the slopes.
If an eruption is likely to happen very soon the the behaviour of animals in the area can be a clue.
Animals often seem to be able to 'detect' when an eruption is coming, and they become agitated and worried.
And volcanologists are always trying to find new ways to detect eruptions. Some are now using satellites to try to understand how and when they may blow. | yes |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | yes_statement | we can "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/vesuvius/predict.html | NOVA Online | Deadly Shadow of Vesuvius | Can We Predict ... | In a word, yes. But that assertion, like saying we can predict the weather,
bears significant caveats. Volcanologists can predict eruptions—if they have
a thorough understanding of a volcano's eruptive history, if they can install
the proper instrumentation on a volcano well in advance of an eruption, and if
they can continuously monitor and adequately interpret data coming from that
equipment. But even then, like their counterparts in meteorology,
volcanologists can only offer probabilities that an event will occur; they can
never be sure how severe a predicted eruption will be or, for that matter,
whether it will even break the surface.
Still, under ideal conditions, volcanologists have recently met with a great
deal of success in foretelling eruptions. While they were caught off guard by
the exact timing and magnitude of the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption, for
example, their timely warnings of an impending blow prompted the U.S. Forest
Service to evacuate people from dangerous areas near the volcano. Though 57
people died in the eruption, perhaps 20,000 lives were saved, says Dr. William
Rose, a volcanologist at Michigan Technological University. Similarly, a USGS
SWAT team that rushed to the Philippines' Mt. Pinatubo in the spring of
1991 successfully augured the June eruption, leading to evacuations that saved
thousands if not tens of thousands of lives and millions of dollars worth of
military equipment at the nearby Clark Air Force Base.
A Kilauea lava
fountain spews from Puu Oo vent on March 13, 1985.
Not surprisingly, volcanologists have had the most success at volcanoes that
host their own observatories. In 1912, Thomas A. Jaggar, head of the Geology
Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded the first
volcano observatory in the United States on Kilauea. (There are now three
others—in Menlo Park, California; Anchorage, Alaska; and Vancouver,
Washington, near Mt. St. Helens.) Over the succeeding decades, researchers at
the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory developed many of the techniques used today
and can now predict Kilauea's eruptions to a tee.
They know when and how Kilauea will erupt because it does so frequently and
predictably, and because after decades of intensive study they know the volcano
inside and out. Learning as much as possible about a volcano's previous
behavior is the essential first step in anticipating future blows, just as
knowing a career criminal's record can help indicate what he might do next.
"There is no doubt that the eruptive history of a volcano is the main key for
long-term prediction," says Dr. Yuri Doubik, a Russian volcanologist who has
studied past eruptions on the Kamchatka Peninsula for 35 years. Such work
entails laboriously picking through the physical remains of previous eruptions.
And mapping such old lava flows, pyroclastic deposits, and other volcanic
debris distributed around a crater can reveal much about the timing, type,
direction, and magnitude of previous blows.
Close-up of a seismograph drum.
Satellite data can greatly aid such mapping, and volcanologists are looking
forward to using images generated by the Earth Observing System after it is
launched in 1999. The satellite's purpose is to study environmental ills such
as global warming and depletion of the ozone layer, but it will also gather
information of use to volcanologists, including gas concentrations in the
atmosphere over volcanoes and images clear enough to reveal the fallout from
former eruptions.
The Volcanologist's Toolkit
When a volcano's eruptive history is known, researchers can more confidently
turn to modern techniques to help them call the next eruption. The most
valuable among these, volcanologists agree, is monitoring a volcano's
seismicity—the frequency and distribution of underlying earthquakes. Use of
the seismologist's tool in volcanology has come a long way since Frank Perret,
one-time assistant to Thomas Edison, gleaned the frequency of the small shocks
that continually shake Vesuvius's flanks by biting down on the metal frame of
his bed, which was set in cement. Today sophisticated seismographs can register
the magnitude, escalation, and epicenters of earthquakes that occur as magma
moves beneath volcanoes. The more seismographs technicians deploy on a volcano,
the more complete the picture they get of the mountain's plumbing.
Tavurvur volcano erupts in the distance
as workers install a tiltmeter at Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, September
1994.
Seismic networks can transmit data by radio 24 hours a day to
computer-equipped monitoring stations well out of harm's reach. This enables
scientists to safely watch for changes in "nature's noise," as one
volcanologist labeled the geophysical status quo within a volcano.
Computer-based seismic data acquisition and analysis systems, which in essence
constitute portable observatories, enabled the USGS Volcano Disaster Assistance
Program's crisis-response team to successfully predict the 1991 eruption of Mt.
Pinatubo. Such "mobile observatories" themselves now constitute a major weapon
in the prediction arsenal.
While seismicity is the workhorse, monitoring ground deformation is another
up-and-coming technique that allows three-dimensional mapping of what's
occurring underground. Magma rising from the depths often pushes the skin of a
volcano up and out, like a balloon filling with air. Sensitive tiltmeters and
surveying instruments can measure and record the slightest changes, which help
volcanologists determine, for example, roughly how deep a magma source is, how
fast it is moving, and where on a volcano it might erupt. Such monitoring has
helped scientists anticipate eruptions at Hawaii's Kilauea and Mauna Loa
volcanoes, which deform in predictable ways and at predictable rates.
A USGS team prepares to fly a gas-measuring flight
at Montserrat, August 1995.
One drawback is that studying ground deformation has required scientists to
climb volcanoes to take measurements—a perilous undertaking. But USGS
volcanologists are now testing a prototype of a fully automated
ground-deformation system. Flown aboard satellites or aircraft, the so-called
"synthetic aperture radar" can automatically and continuously transmit
information on a volcano's ground movements to remote observatories. Though it
will not penetrate dense vegetation and is sensitive to moisture, the radar
provides a resolution of less than an inch under ideal conditions. "It's a
tremendous tool because it gives a complete map of ground movements, and we
don't have to go into the field to get it," says Dr. Dan Dzurisin, a geologist
with the USGS Volcano Hazards Program (VHP) who is helping to perfect the new
device. His colleague at the VHP, the volcanologist Dr. Robert Tilling, is
equally optimistic: "We're confident that by the turn of the century, we'll have
such a system and at low enough cost that it can be applied easily everywhere
in the world."
Measuring Vapors
Such is the long-term hope as well for techniques to monitor volcanic gases.
Magma deep underground lies under enormous pressure, which keeps vapors
dissolved. But as magma rises toward the surface, the pressure eases and gases
such as carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide begin to bubble out of the liquid
rock and into the air. Theoretically, changes in concentrations of
CO2 and SO2 emitted by a volcano can be used to predict
eruptions, as can the escalating output of gases in general. The USGS team that
was sent to Pinatubo in the spring of 1991 successfully predicted the June
eruption in part after watching SO2 levels shoot up to unprecedented
levels of 16,500 tons per day.
Alaska's Spurr volcano blows its top
on August 19, 1992.
Monitoring of volcanic gases got its start in the 1950s when enterprising
Japanese researchers put beakers of potassium hydroxide, a strong, basic
solution, on Honshu's Asama volcano, which was beginning to show signs of
erupting. As the highly acidic gases released by the crater seeped through
holes in a crate covering the beakers, they increasingly altered the solution's
composition in the months before a large eruption. Today, volcanologists use
so-called "Japanese boxes" routinely, though again they must check the beakers
manually. To surmount this problem, Dr. Stanley Williams, an Arizona State
University volcanologist who was nearly killed during a small but deadly
eruption of Colombia's Galeras volcano in 1993, is designing an electronic
Japanese box that will automatically and continuously transmit data to a remote
observatory. About the size of a briefcase, the battery-powered unit has tiny
electrochemical sensors that create currents proportional to the amounts of
various volcanic gases in the air.
Concurrently, Williams and others are working on infrared telescopes to
monitor concentrations of gases escaping from volcanic vents. Williams's
version is modeled after the correlation spectrometer, a device originally
developed in the 1970s to monitor SO2 and other toxic gases from
factory smokestacks. His prototype unit measures the amount of infrared light
absorbed by CO2 molecules, from which an estimate of CO2
concentrations in the air can be made. Dr. Kenneth McGee, a volcanologist at
the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington, is perfecting an
infrared spectrometer that he says will detect still other volcanic gases that
absorb infrared light, including hydrochloric acid gas, carbon monoxide,
methane, and water vapor.
Mt. St. Helens erupting, May 18,
1980.
Calling the Next Big One
While volcanologists feel confident that these ever-improving technologies will
enable them to predict when an eruption is about to occur, they still cannot
reliably estimate an impending eruption's size or exact nature. How large will
the eruption be? Will it be explosive like Mt. St. Helens or effusive
like Kilauea? Indeed, will it even open a vent in the surface? To be able to
answer such questions, Tilling and USGS colleague Dr. Peter Lipman argued in a
1993 article in Nature for the need to develop "rugged, reliable
real-time systems" to measure changes not only in seismicity, ground
deformation, and gases, but also in gravitational and electromagnetic fields—in short, equipment to read the gamut of signals given out by a restless
volcano. "There's no magic bullet in predicting volcanic eruptions," says Dr.
Charles Connor, a volcanologist at the Southwest Research Institute in San
Antonia, Texas. "The key thing is to cross-correlate as many different
observations as possible."
Tilling says volcanologists also need to get a better handle on the basic
mechanisms behind precursory signals, such as the long-period earthquakes that
often precede eruptions. Dr. Bernard Chouet, a VHP volcano seismologist, says
these quakes provide a "direct window" into the magmatic fluid moving about
beneath a restless volcano. "These earthquakes are like stress gauges that
light up and reflect the pressurization going on below," he says. Careful
monitoring of such natural gauges can help forecast eruptive activity. The USGS
team that successfully predicted Pinatubo's burst did so in part by watching
the build-up of long-period quakes.
USGS Volcanologist Ken Yamashita surveys on the dome, Mt. St.
Helens, March 1986.
The urgent need to improve methods to call the next Big One holds especially
true for large caldera-forming eruptions. These true earth-shakers explode with
such Herculean force that they leave behind vast, basin-like depressions—calderas—that can stretch many miles across. The largest caldera-forming
eruptions, which fortunately have not occurred in human history, make the
explosive eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 seem like a firecracker. In the
mid-1980s, three volcanic fields believed to hold the potential for one of
these monumental cataclysm—California's Long Valley, Papua New Guinea's
Rabaul, and Italy's Campi Flegrei—turned on almost simultaneously, throwing
the volcanological community into a bit of a frenzy. All three centers calmed
down without further ado, though Rabaul erupted a decade later (see
Planning for Disaster).
Tilling, for one, is confident that such an apocalyptic blast will not come
unheralded. "No volcano is going to suddenly produce one of these humongous
eruptions without giving a lot of signals," he says. "But what will those
signals be?"
Peter Tyson is Online Producer of NOVA. This piece was excerpted and updated
from a feature article by Mr. Tyson that originally appeared in Technology
Review (January 1996). | Calling the Next Big One
While volcanologists feel confident that these ever-improving technologies will
enable them to predict when an eruption is about to occur, they still cannot
reliably estimate an impending eruption's size or exact nature. How large will
the eruption be? Will it be explosive like Mt. St. Helens or effusive
like Kilauea? Indeed, will it even open a vent in the surface? To be able to
answer such questions, Tilling and USGS colleague Dr. Peter Lipman argued in a
1993 article in Nature for the need to develop "rugged, reliable
real-time systems" to measure changes not only in seismicity, ground
deformation, and gases, but also in gravitational and electromagnetic fields—in short, equipment to read the gamut of signals given out by a restless
volcano. "There's no magic bullet in predicting volcanic eruptions," says Dr.
Charles Connor, a volcanologist at the Southwest Research Institute in San
Antonia, Texas. "The key thing is to cross-correlate as many different
observations as possible. "
Tilling says volcanologists also need to get a better handle on the basic
mechanisms behind precursory signals, such as the long-period earthquakes that
often precede eruptions. Dr. Bernard Chouet, a VHP volcano seismologist, says
these quakes provide a "direct window" into the magmatic fluid moving about
beneath a restless volcano. "These earthquakes are like stress gauges that
light up and reflect the pressurization going on below," he says. Careful
monitoring of such natural gauges can help forecast eruptive activity. The USGS
team that successfully predicted Pinatubo's burst did so in part by watching
the build-up of long-period quakes.
USGS Volcanologist Ken Yamashita surveys on the dome, Mt. St.
Helens, March 1986.
| yes |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | yes_statement | we can "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/813910 | How Scientists Forecast Volcanic Eruptions · Frontiers for Young ... | How Scientists Forecast Volcanic Eruptions
Authors and reviewers
Authors
Valerio Acocella teaches different courses on volcanoes at the University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy, where he is Professor. Attracted by their activity and power, he has been studying volcanoes in the five continents, from freezing Iceland to torrid Afar, for more than two decades. He had great fun climbing many volcanoes and meeting colleagues from very different countries, exchanging knowledge, and learning their habits and culture. His daughters have taken part of his time in the last 15 years, so Valerio is now traveling less and focusing on the active volcanoes in Italy, which provide great opportunities to understand how volcanoes work; in particular, Valerio has coordinated large research projects on the major Italian volcanoes, as Etna and Campi Flegrei. The experience of Valerio on volcanoes is summarized in his recent book (Volcano-Tectonic Processes, Springer Editor, 570 pages). *acocella@uniroma3.it
Young Reviewers
Lyra Montessori Lichtental
We are two students from a bilingual Montessori elementary school (with a mixed-age class for 6–12 y) in Vienna, Austria. We are 8 (Tomas) and 9 (Armin) years old (3rd and 4th grade students). We like geography, biology, and math. We also like to learn about geology (volcanoes) and transportation (trains and airplanes). Together, we speak five languages (each of us at least 3 of these): German, English, Spanish, Italian, and Hungarian.
Abstract
Volcanic eruptions are impressive demonstrations of the activity of our planet. While some eruptions may be safely observed from distance, many eruptions, especially if explosive, may be hazardous to the populations and the environment around the volcano, including the animals, plants, and manmade structures. To reduce harm caused by eruptions, scientists called volcanologists attempt to forecast eruptions. Although volcanoes commonly provide several kinds of warnings before erupting, there is no single warning signal that allows volcanologists to accurately predict every eruption. Instead, data from various types of monitoring instruments are combined to help scientists forecast eruptions at least a few days in advance. In the next decades, as volcanologists improve monitoring systems and better understand the processes happening inside volcanoes, more precise eruption forecasts will be possible.
Volcanoes: A Natural Hazard
Our planet experiences several types of natural hazards, including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, tsunamis, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Volcanic eruptions can vary in size, with the largest being the most devastating of natural hazards, capable of impacting the entire planet (Figure 1). Luckily, these destructive events are rare—usually occurring approximately once every 100,000 years—whereas the most frequent eruptions, occurring approximately every week, are mild and impact only small areas.
The explosive eruption destroyed the top and a side of the volcano; it also destroyed the surrounding forest, including the trees in the foreground, leaving a blanket of ash formed by the exploded magma1. (B) The eruption of the Usu volcano (Japan) in 2000 changed the ground below the house, covered the roof with volcanic ash, and pierced the roof with falling bombs of magma.
There are ~600 active volcanoes on Earth, mainly along the boundaries of the mobile tectonic plates that make up the outer shell of our planet. It is estimated that about 800 million people—one-tenth of the world’s population—live near active volcanoes. Volcanic activity has claimed the lives of nearly 300,000 victims in the last four centuries [1]. The last major destructive event was the Nevado del Ruiz eruption in Colombia, in 1985. This eruption was only of moderate size, but it caused more than 23,000 casualties in a matter of minutes. Even if they do not cause human deaths, eruptions can impact the environment, including animals, plants, and man-made structures like buildings, roads, railways, airports, factories, and power plants. During the Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland in 2010, for example, the ash cloud from the eruption spread through the atmosphere and halted the air traffic over Europe for several days, stranding 10 million passengers and resulting in the loss of $5 billion (US).
To reduce the impact of volcanic eruptions on humans and the environment, scientists called volcanologists must be able to forecast when and where volcanoes are going to erupt. Forecasting volcanic eruptions allows people to be alerted so they can evacuate, reducing the negative impact of eruptions on human populations.
How Volcanoes Work
To forecast eruptions, volcanologists must first understand how volcanoes work.
Volcanoes are usually in a silent, “resting” state, when the magma below them does not move or accumulate. Sometimes the magma rises toward the surface and, when it stops rising, it accumulates within the rock that makes up the Earth’s crust. This accumulation of magma eventually forms a magma chamber. The magma chamber can change the shape of the surrounding rock and create fractures in the Earth’s crust that can cause earthquakes. Earthquake activity is called seismicity. The fractures also serve as pathways that allow gases to escape from the magma into the air. This is called degassing. The accumulating magma slowly enlarges the volcano through deformation.
When the volcano passes from a silent phase to an “excited” phase when seismicity, degassing and deformation occur, this is called unrest. The unrest phase can last from days to months, and it is considered a warning from the volcano it is unstable and that there may be an eruption. Most eruptions are preceded by unrest, but not every unrest episode ends in an eruption—sometimes after unrest a volcano may become silent again. So, although unrest does not always precede eruptions, its appearance is the main clue for volcanologists to forecast eruptions.
To make a reliable eruption forecast, volcanologists must understand what exactly happens during unrest, by analyzing the signals sent out by the volcano. Unrest is usually detected and studied using a precise monitoring system, consisting of a group of sensitive instruments that record the real-time activity inside a volcano, particularly the movement of magma. Therefore, monitoring the seismicity, degassing, and deformation produced by the moving magma allows volcanologists to understand what is happening in a volcano during unrest (Figure 2). Mathematical models use this monitoring information to define the size, shape, and location of magma producing the unrest [1].
Figure 2 - Frequently used volcano monitoring techniques include GPS, InSAR, and tiltmeter, which are techniques to measure deformation; surveying, in which volcanologists directly examine the volcano; thermal imaging, which detects temperature variations on the volcano (Image credit: US Geological Survey, USGS; https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp/monitoring.html).
While many volcanoes are monitored, several volcanoes, especially in remote areas, are monitored poorly or not at all. Forecasting eruptions obviously depends on the availability of a monitoring system that can detect unrest.
Current Forecasting Approaches
Volcanologists have used two kinds of approaches to forecast eruptions. First, they have tried to predict for sure (yes or no) whether an eruption is coming. This is called a deterministic approach. More recently, they have been trying to forecast whether an eruption is likely or not, using a percentage of likelihood. This is called a probabilistic approach.
Only when monitoring data collected during unrest show linear behavior eruptions can be predicted by a deterministic approach. The large eruptions of Mount St. Helens (USA) in 1980 and Pinatubo (Philippines) in 1991 were predicted days in advance. Linear behavior means an increase in the volcano’s signals, and both the Mount St. Helens and Pinatubo unrest episodes showed this linear behavior.
Unfortunately, the unrest that precedes many eruptions shows non-linear behavior: an increase in the intensity of the signals is followed by one or more decreases and finally by eruption. Under these erratic conditions, predicting an eruption in a deterministic way is impossible. Non-linear behavior shows us the complexity of the volcanic system, in which many processes, only some of which are detectable by monitoring, happen at the same time. Because of this complexity, forecasting eruptions is usually made using a probabilistic approach, in which the possibility for eruption is expressed as a percentage [2, 3]. This approach, which is also used in weather forecasting, more accurately accounts for the erratic behavior of volcanoes. So, to avoid errors, a wise volcanologist should forecast (probabilistic approach) rather than predict (deterministic approach) eruptions.
In recent decades, some eruptions have been successfully forecasted, while others have not been. Successful forecasting has led to successful evacuations, while inaccurate forecasting has led to evacuations followed by no eruption or to missed evacuations, when eruptions occur before people are evacuated. As a result, volcanology has experienced both successes and confidence in forecasting eruptions, as well as disasters and frustrations. Our capability to forecast eruptions is still limited, with ~20% of eruptions accurately forecasted. Only moderate improvements have been made in the last few decades, despite the wide use and continual improvement of monitoring instruments [4].
Volcano Type Affects Forecasting
There are two types of volcanoes that affect the way eruptions are forecasted: closed-conduit volcanoes and open-conduit volcanoes (Figure 3). Closed-conduit volcanoes have solidified magma in the path through which the magma travels to the surface, which separates the molten magma from the Earth’s surface. This causes magma to accumulate inside the volcano, which increases the pressure and breaks the surrounding rocks, generating fractures and earthquakes, and deforms the surface of the volcano. In closed-conduit volcanoes, unrest consists of seismicity, and surface deformation. Conversely, open-conduit volcanoes, which are less common, have molten magma filling the volcanic conduit, almost reaching the surface. The continuous supply of magma from inside the volcano prevents solidification of the conduit, causing frequent eruptions. In open-conduit volcanoes, magma does not accumulate inside the volcano, so pressure does not build up to fracture the surrounding rock or deform the volcano, although there is frequent degassing through the open conduit. This results in weaker unrest indicators. Therefore, given the stronger signals, forecasting eruptions is usually easier for closed-conduit volcanoes. Nevertheless, some well-monitored and frequently erupting open-conduit volcanoes may still provide enough data for a reliable forecast, such as Mt. Etna (Italy), whose eruptions are currently predicted with a 97% success rate. Since the global forecasting success rate for all volcanoes is ~20%, the forecasting of Mt. Etna is extremely successful.
A single volcano can switch from closed- to open-conduit during its eruptive history.
The Future
Volcanologists are constantly looking for new approaches to improve forecasting, by combining monitoring data with knowledge of volcanic processes. To identify the start of an eruption, recent studies focus on the appearance of specific monitoring signals that are directly related to the rise of magma, rather than its accumulation. This will help researchers to better forecast times when eruption is likely to happen soon. As some volcanoes have multiple eruptive craters scattered over wide areas, researchers also try to forecast the possible locations of future craters, to reduce the impact of eruptions in inhabited areas [1]. These efforts will certainly improve future eruption forecasting, providing more reliable probabilistic estimates and reducing the level of uncertainty or error. Nevertheless, we must remember that uncertainty is a part of any forecast, so future eruption forecasting will be similar to weather forecasting [5].
In summary, while forecasting eruptions is currently a difficult although not impossible task, future studies and research, as well as increased availability of monitoring data, will allow better understanding of how volcanoes work. This in turn will allow a more reliable eruption forecasting, reducing the adverse impact of volcanic activity on the population and environment.
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We will be provided with an authorization token (please note: passwords are not shared with us) and will sync your accounts for you. This means that you will not need to remember your user name and password in the future and you will be able to login with the account you choose to sync, with the click of a button. | In open-conduit volcanoes, magma does not accumulate inside the volcano, so pressure does not build up to fracture the surrounding rock or deform the volcano, although there is frequent degassing through the open conduit. This results in weaker unrest indicators. Therefore, given the stronger signals, forecasting eruptions is usually easier for closed-conduit volcanoes. Nevertheless, some well-monitored and frequently erupting open-conduit volcanoes may still provide enough data for a reliable forecast, such as Mt. Etna (Italy), whose eruptions are currently predicted with a 97% success rate. Since the global forecasting success rate for all volcanoes is ~20%, the forecasting of Mt. Etna is extremely successful.
A single volcano can switch from closed- to open-conduit during its eruptive history.
The Future
Volcanologists are constantly looking for new approaches to improve forecasting, by combining monitoring data with knowledge of volcanic processes. To identify the start of an eruption, recent studies focus on the appearance of specific monitoring signals that are directly related to the rise of magma, rather than its accumulation. This will help researchers to better forecast times when eruption is likely to happen soon. As some volcanoes have multiple eruptive craters scattered over wide areas, researchers also try to forecast the possible locations of future craters, to reduce the impact of eruptions in inhabited areas [1]. These efforts will certainly improve future eruption forecasting, providing more reliable probabilistic estimates and reducing the level of uncertainty or error. Nevertheless, we must remember that uncertainty is a part of any forecast, so future eruption forecasting will be similar to weather forecasting [5].
In summary, while forecasting eruptions is currently a difficult although not impossible task, future studies and research, as well as increased availability of monitoring data, will allow better understanding of how volcanoes work. This in turn will allow a more reliable eruption forecasting, reducing the adverse impact of volcanic activity on the population and environment.
| yes |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | yes_statement | we can "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/09/difficult-predict-volcanic-eruptions/ | You Asked: Why Is it So Hard to Predict Volcanic Eruptions? - You ... | You Asked: Why Is it So Hard to Predict Volcanic Eruptions?
“You Asked” is a series where Earth Institute experts tackle reader questions on science and sustainability. The following questions were submitted for volcanologist Einat Lev following her talk, “Why We Need a Volcanic Eruption of Data.” In the talk, which was filmed as a part of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory’s 2020 Open House at Home, Lev says that more monitoring of volcanoes could help to save lives.
Watch the short talk here, and read Lev’s responses to reader questions below.
Why is it difficult to get real-time eruption information in the Information Age?
Einat Lev is an associate research professor of seismology, geology, and tectonophysics at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research seeks to understand the physical processes influencing the impacts of volcanic eruptions.
The technology to acquire pre-eruption information exists for the most part, but, unfortunately, only very few places have enough sensors already in place. Getting instruments on volcanoes can sometimes be difficult because they can be remote, dangerous, or just complicated to work at (e.g., at national parks or private lands). Usually only one researcher goes to a site, because it can be prohibitively expensive to send a large, multidisciplinary team. So, overall, the technology to get eruption information exists, but it all comes down to economics.
How accurate are the predictions of volcanic eruptions? How much lead time is there between a prediction and an event?
Only about 20% of eruptions have an appropriate increase in the alert level before the eruption occurs. That’s pretty low considering the importance of warning citizens living near active volcanoes. Lead time can range anywhere from hours to days to months. It often varies based on the style of the volcano. For example, some volcanoes give off very few signs before erupting. Other times, you see an uptick in activity and think an eruption is coming soon, but then nothing happens for months.
It is difficult to gather enough data to find clear patterns in this wide range of volcanic behaviors. Many locations do not have adequate data due to financial constraints, but sometimes we are looking at the wrong signals. For example, some volcanoes have only one seismometer on them. If their pre-eruption upticks occur as increases in gas and not in rumbling that can be picked up as seismic waves, then there is inadequate data to predict lead times and for researchers to issue warnings.
Can you predict which volcanoes will have violent eruptions?
The general pattern is that volcanoes with more viscous magmas will have more violent eruptions. To elaborate, volcanoes on subduction zones have more water and silica, which generate viscosity, and their eruptions are more likely to be big and violent. However, it isn’t completely clear cut because predictions also depend on the size of the system and how quickly the magma moves up towards the surface. This is actually an active area of research. We are studying a volcano in Alaska, for example, which has mostly smooth lava eruptions, but every now and then, a violent blow. Researchers are comparing the development of these differing explosions.
How do you study volcanoes that are underwater?
Volcanoes underwater are harder to see directly, but it is actually easier to study their structure because we can view the area from above by sending seismic waves from a boat. These waves even reach the subsurface of the volcano, so we can see a view of what it looks like inside in much more detail and completeness than what we can do on land. Some underwater volcanoes, like Axial Seamount, off the coast of Oregon, are even equipped with cameras and pressure sensors.
Do solar activities or tidal forces have any effect on volcanic eruptions?
I haven’t seen any evidence of a link between solar activity and volcanoes but there is some documentation of a minor impact from tides. If a volcano is very close to erupting, there is a slightly higher likelihood that it will erupt when there is a change in force induced by tides. Maybe someone will find a link with the activity of the sun, that’s the beauty of science; we can just ask a question and run an experiment on it.
How has the pandemic affected volcanology?
The pandemic has severely impacted the ability to do field work and travel, but it has also led to opportunities to interact with colleagues who live far away by inviting them to remote seminars and workshops, so there is a silver lining. As a general trend, I think the pandemic has highlighted the importance of direct and accurate scientific communication. People need to understand what is going on and how science affects what they are experiencing.
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State of the Planet is a forum for discussion on varying viewpoints. The opinions expressed by the authors and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Earth Institute or Columbia University.
This website uses cookies as well as similar tools and technologies to understand visitors' experiences. By continuing to use this website, you consent to Columbia University's usage of cookies and similar technologies, in accordance with the Columbia University Website Cookie Notice.Close | Getting instruments on volcanoes can sometimes be difficult because they can be remote, dangerous, or just complicated to work at (e.g., at national parks or private lands). Usually only one researcher goes to a site, because it can be prohibitively expensive to send a large, multidisciplinary team. So, overall, the technology to get eruption information exists, but it all comes down to economics.
How accurate are the predictions of volcanic eruptions? How much lead time is there between a prediction and an event?
Only about 20% of eruptions have an appropriate increase in the alert level before the eruption occurs. That’s pretty low considering the importance of warning citizens living near active volcanoes. Lead time can range anywhere from hours to days to months. It often varies based on the style of the volcano. For example, some volcanoes give off very few signs before erupting. Other times, you see an uptick in activity and think an eruption is coming soon, but then nothing happens for months.
It is difficult to gather enough data to find clear patterns in this wide range of volcanic behaviors. Many locations do not have adequate data due to financial constraints, but sometimes we are looking at the wrong signals. For example, some volcanoes have only one seismometer on them. If their pre-eruption upticks occur as increases in gas and not in rumbling that can be picked up as seismic waves, then there is inadequate data to predict lead times and for researchers to issue warnings.
Can you predict which volcanoes will have violent eruptions?
The general pattern is that volcanoes with more viscous magmas will have more violent eruptions. To elaborate, volcanoes on subduction zones have more water and silica, which generate viscosity, and their eruptions are more likely to be big and violent. However, it isn’t completely clear cut because predictions also depend on the size of the system and how quickly the magma moves up towards the surface. This is actually an active area of research. We are studying a volcano in Alaska, for example, which has mostly smooth lava eruptions, but every now and then, a violent blow. | no |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | yes_statement | we can "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/volcano-expert-explains-science-behind-kilauea-s-ongoing-eruption-ncna876741 | Volcano expert explains the science behind Kilauea's ongoing ... | Volcano expert explains the science behind Kilauea's ongoing eruption
"We do know something about the laws of nature that any system must obey, including volcanic systems."
A massive fast-moving lava flow consumes everything in its path, as the flames from the remnants of one home burns on the left, while it approaches another on the right in Pahoa, Hawaii on May 19, 2018.Bruce Omori/Paradise Helicopters / EPA
Kilauea has been continuously erupting since 1983 and is expected to remain a threat in the coming days and weeks. But what has its latest violent episode taught us about volcanic eruptions? How are scientists able to tell when a dormant volcano will rumble to life? And how does predicting volcanic eruptions compare to earthquake prediction and weather forecasting?
To learn the answers to these and other questions, NBC News MACH's Denise Chow spoke with Paul Segall, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University and a noted expert on volcanism. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MACH: How difficult is it to predict when a volcano is ramping up activity, or when we might see big eruptions like we’ve seen at Kilauea over the past two weeks?
Segall: Most eruptions — but not all — are preceded by precursory activity. We usually see an increase in the number and frequency of earthquakes. We usually see some evidence of ground deformation. Sometimes we see evidence of gas emission — volcanic gases coming out of the ground. It would be great if it was 100 percent of the time, and it would be great if we had more ability to turn that into specific forecasts as to when something might erupt. But we also have times when activity will build up and nothing will happen. There are false alarms.
Related
Very few volcanoes are monitored as extensively as Kilauea. It's one of the most heavily instrumented. It's kind of a test case for the best scenario. It's also a volcano that erupts very frequently, so it's worth putting a lot of resources there. There are many volcanoes that have not a single seismometer on them, so we wouldn't know except from regional earthquake networks, and the earthquakes would have to get pretty big before they'd be picked up by regional networks.
A lava fountain over the Fissure 22 from Kilauea volcano in Hawaii on May 21, 2018.USGS via Reuters
We do now have the ability of monitoring volcano deformation from space with satellite radars. It's a relatively newer technology, and it's growing very rapidly. The advantage of that is you don't have to go out into the field and put an instrument on the ground. You can just image it from space. There are trade-offs, though, because the satellites don't come overhead every day. And in cases where there's a lot of vegetation — say, jungle areas or if there's a lot of snow and ice, it can be more difficult to do. But that's been a real game-changer in terms of being able to, at least in some sense, look at all the volcanoes in the world, or the majority of them, and if signs of activity were measured, then people could go in and actually put instruments on the ground.
What were some of the signs that Kilauea's eruption was about to become more violent?
The first thing that was noticed is what we call inflation — that the summit of the volcano and the areas around Pu'u’ O'o [one of Kilauea's volcanic cones] were swelling, so it was moving upward and outward like a balloon was being pumped up. That means pressure was increasing.
Lava flow on a road in Pahoa, Hawaii, on May 17, 2018.Kris Burmeister / via Reuters
Even though it was erupting, more material was coming into the volcano than was going out, and that was causing the pressure to increase. That's often followed by some kind of breakout somewhere, either enhanced activity or new eruptive vent. That was going on for, I think, several months. And then, immediately preceding the breakouts in the Leilani Estates area [one of the residential areas affected by the latest Kilauea activity], there were earthquakes migrating into that region. There was evidence of ground tilting, so we knew magma was on the move. We didn't yet know whether it would lead to an eruption. But, of course, once you see that, you're not surprised that it starts erupting.
Related
Are volcanoes like earthquakes in the sense that geologists can look at tension building up on a fault and more or less predict when the next big one will occur?
It's different in a number of respects. With earthquakes, for example, in the San Andreas Fault — I worked on that as well — and we can measure strain building up. But we haven't yet seen anything reliably that indicates a change in behavior before an earthquake. Strain will build up and in some cases for rather large earthquakes, it may be 200 years between events or longer, potentially.
In the Pacific Northwest, we think it may be 500 years between the big magnitude 9 [earthquakes], but we see energy building up at a pretty constant rate, and we've been trying very hard to see if we can find something that indicates an acceleration or a change in behavior that leads to the earthquake, other than foreshocks. We haven't seen anything that's consistent and reliable. There are hints here and there, but nothing that we can reliably point to.
Short-term earthquake forecasting is much, much more challenging, whereas volcanic eruptions can't occur unless magma moves into the subsurface. Unlike earthquake prediction — which in terms of short-term prediction is currently not feasible and may never be feasible on a short timescale — volcano prediction is feasible and is common if volcanoes are instrumented. But not all volcanoes are instrumented. You can't do it if you don't have anything to measure.
Is it possible to predict the severity of a volcanic eruption?
There are a couple ways we can get it. One way is just to know what volcanoes have done in the past. If you have a particular volcano, like Kilauea, we have a fairly long historical record. But you can also go back and look at the deposits from past eruptions and see whether they were passive lava flows or they were explosive ash-forming eruptions. We know, for example, that Kilauea has generated explosive ash-forming eruptions in the past, and part of that is from Hawaiian oral tradition, and part of that is from just mapping the geology, mapping the deposits.
An ash plume rises from the Halemaumau crater within the Kilauea volcano summit caldera at the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on May 9, 2018.Mario Tama / Getty Images
The other piece of information would come from the scale of the activity that we measure. Are we measuring earthquakes in a rather small, localized region? Are the earthquakes extending over a big area of the crust that makes it look like there was a very large system involved? So there's some ways that we can get at this, but it's an evolving science to be able to predict the severity and longevity of an eruption once it starts.
How would you compare our ability to predict volcano eruptions to our ability to forecast storms?
Weather forecasting, in my lifetime, has evolved from largely empirically based to much more computationally and physics based. Nowadays, the way weather forecasting works is you take the temperature, pressure, wind speed, and you assimilate all that information into a computational model and then forecast ahead what we would expect to see. The advantage that meteorologists have is that the weather system is visible with satellite observations. You can see storms and you can track them. Volcano forecasting has largely been an empirically based exercise that we see earthquakes building up, we know that earthquakes built up prior to previous eruptions, and if we have volcanoes that erupt rather frequently, like Kilauea or some of the Iceland volcanoes, you can search for patterns and say, "Oh, we've seen this pattern before and it did this before an eruption, so that indicates an eruption is coming."
That doesn't work so well for volcanoes that haven't erupted in historic times. Yet, we do know something about the laws of nature that any system must obey, including volcanic systems. I hope to see a day when we might be able to get more accurate forecasts. It seems like a logical thing to try to parallel how weather forecasting has evolved over the last 50 years. | [one of the residential areas affected by the latest Kilauea activity], there were earthquakes migrating into that region. There was evidence of ground tilting, so we knew magma was on the move. We didn't yet know whether it would lead to an eruption. But, of course, once you see that, you're not surprised that it starts erupting.
Related
Are volcanoes like earthquakes in the sense that geologists can look at tension building up on a fault and more or less predict when the next big one will occur?
It's different in a number of respects. With earthquakes, for example, in the San Andreas Fault — I worked on that as well — and we can measure strain building up. But we haven't yet seen anything reliably that indicates a change in behavior before an earthquake. Strain will build up and in some cases for rather large earthquakes, it may be 200 years between events or longer, potentially.
In the Pacific Northwest, we think it may be 500 years between the big magnitude 9 [earthquakes], but we see energy building up at a pretty constant rate, and we've been trying very hard to see if we can find something that indicates an acceleration or a change in behavior that leads to the earthquake, other than foreshocks. We haven't seen anything that's consistent and reliable. There are hints here and there, but nothing that we can reliably point to.
Short-term earthquake forecasting is much, much more challenging, whereas volcanic eruptions can't occur unless magma moves into the subsurface. Unlike earthquake prediction — which in terms of short-term prediction is currently not feasible and may never be feasible on a short timescale — volcano prediction is feasible and is common if volcanoes are instrumented. But not all volcanoes are instrumented. You can't do it if you don't have anything to measure.
Is it possible to predict the severity of a volcanic eruption?
There are a couple ways we can get it. One way is just to know what volcanoes have done in the past. If you have a particular volcano, like Kilauea, | yes |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | yes_statement | we can "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://lighthouse.mq.edu.au/article/december-2019/Can-we-predict-when-a-volcano-will-erupt | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | The Lighthouse | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt?
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The recent tragedy in New Zealand highlights the difficulties faced by scientists in forecasting volcanic eruptions. Dr Christina Magill, from Macquarie University's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, explains.
Forty-seven people were on Whakaari/White Island, a popular tourist destination, when the disaster happened at 14:11 local time.
Terrible tragedy: The eruption at Whakaari/White Island, in the Bay of Plenty, sent plumes of ash, steam and rock 12,000ft into the air. Credit: Michael Schade/Twitter.
At the time of writing, New Zealand authorities have confirmed that six people have died, while eight others are feared missing on the island, presumed dead. About 30 people were rescued, with most of them being treated in hospital for serious injuries.
Although the Volcanic Alert Level for Whakaari/White Island had been increased to two (on a scale of five) before the eruption, this indicated only moderate to heightened volcanic unrest – there was no evidence to suggest that the volcano had moved into an eruptive phase.
Although our knowledge of volcanoes and of the precursors leading to eruptions is constantly improving, we must acknowledge the unpredictable nature of these complex systems.
GNS Science, who closely monitor the volcano, last week stated that “observations and data to date suggest that the volcano may be entering a period where eruptive activity is more likely than normal”. But what does this mean?
Volcanic alert levels fluctuate and an increase in alert level does not necessarily indicate that an eruption will occur. New Zealand's alert levels do not reflect the magnitude or style of a future eruption, or indicate when it may occur.
Deadly eruption: About 30 people were rescued from Whakaari/White Island in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, with some tourists pictured being evacuated by boat. Credit: Michael Schade/Twitter.
Volcanoes such as Whakaari/White Island are unpredictable because magma (the molten rock material that originates under the Earth's crust) is close to the surface. Heat and gas from the magma can cause super-heated water in hydrothermal systems to expand rapidly into steam causing a hydrothermal or phreatic eruption. These eruptions can be triggered by just a slight disruption – a small earthquake or an input of gas from below the volcano – and can therefore occur with little or no warning.
Phreatic eruptions are typically small compared to eruptions involving large amounts of fresh magma; however, the impacts are still catastrophic close to the source of explosions. A similar phreatic eruption occurred in 2014 at Mount Ontake, Japan, killing 63 hikers and tourists.
GNS Science have described the Whakaari/White Island eruption as "an impulsive and short-lived event". It immediately increased the Volcanic Alert Level to four, and has since decreased it to level three, adding: "Over the next 24 hours we still estimate an equal likelihood of either no eruption or a smaller/similar-sized eruption that would impact the main crater floor."
Although our knowledge of volcanoes and of the precursors leading to eruptions is constantly improving, we must acknowledge the unpredictable nature of these complex systems. Advanced monitoring and modelling may give us some time to prepare for a major eruption, but we may always be surprised by the timing (but not occurrence) of these smaller eruptions.
Dr Christina Magill is an academic in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, whose research is focused on natural hazard risk assessment. | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt?
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The recent tragedy in New Zealand highlights the difficulties faced by scientists in forecasting volcanic eruptions. Dr Christina Magill, from Macquarie University's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, explains.
Forty-seven people were on Whakaari/White Island, a popular tourist destination, when the disaster happened at 14:11 local time.
Terrible tragedy: The eruption at Whakaari/White Island, in the Bay of Plenty, sent plumes of ash, steam and rock 12,000ft into the air. Credit: Michael Schade/Twitter.
At the time of writing, New Zealand authorities have confirmed that six people have died, while eight others are feared missing on the island, presumed dead. About 30 people were rescued, with most of them being treated in hospital for serious injuries.
Although the Volcanic Alert Level for Whakaari/White Island had been increased to two (on a scale of five) before the eruption, this indicated only moderate to heightened volcanic unrest – there was no evidence to suggest that the volcano had moved into an eruptive phase.
Although our knowledge of volcanoes and of the precursors leading to eruptions is constantly improving, we must acknowledge the unpredictable nature of these complex systems.
GNS Science, who closely monitor the volcano, last week stated that “observations and data to date suggest that the volcano may be entering a period where eruptive activity is more likely than normal”. But what does this mean?
Volcanic alert levels fluctuate and an increase in alert level does not necessarily indicate that an eruption will occur. New Zealand's alert levels do not reflect the magnitude or style of a future eruption, or indicate when it may occur.
Deadly eruption: About 30 people were rescued from Whakaari/White Island in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, with some tourists pictured being evacuated by boat. Credit: Michael Schade/Twitter.
| no |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | yes_statement | we can "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://www.skylinehawaii.com/blog/will-haleakala-erupt-again | Will Haleakala Erupt Again? | Will Haleakalā Erupt Again?
The Hawaiian Islands, including Maui, are located on top of a geographic hot spot. A hot spot is an area within the Earth’s mantle that releases heat. This heat forms magma that is eventually pushed to the surface and released through volcanoes.
The Hawaiian Islands were formed by the largest volcanoes on Earth. This means that some major volcanic activity has happened here throughout history to form the beautiful islands as we know them today.
The largest dormant volcano in the world, Haleakalā, makes up a large part of Maui. Mount Haleakalā is also called the East Maui Volcano. Haleakalā is considered a dormant volcano because it has not erupted in a long time, but it could erupt again in the future.
Haleakalā is a huge shield volcano. A shield volcano is a wide, domed volcano with gently sloping sides. Haleakalā was built almost entirely of lava flows.
When shield volcanoes erupt, they release a highly fluid form of lava called basalt that travels farther than lava erupted from stratovolcanoes. Shield volcanoes are the largest volcanoes on Earth, but they are not very steep. The flowing lava does not pile up, instead, it flows easily downhill which gives Haleakalā its unique shape.
Haleakalā has erupted at least ten times in the past 1,000 years. The last eruption occurred sometime between 1480 and 1600 according to scientific records. The history of Haleakalā and its recent activity indicate that the volcano will erupt again in the future.
Although studies indicate that Haleakalā will erupt again, the volcano is currently dormant. The volcano is currently being monitored as a moderate priority according to the National Volcano Early Warning System. The highest priority volcanoes in Hawaii are Kilauea and Mauna Loa because they are both active volcanoes.
Volcanoes are monitored using a seismograph which records earthquake motion. An increase in the number of earthquakes in a volcano mean that the volcano has become restless. This is an important monitoring tool because a series of earthquakes usually occur before an eruption happens.
Shield volcanoes, like Haleakalā, are usually not explosive when they erupt. So, they do not pose a large risk to people as long as they are not on the rift zones. Instead of exploding, they release a fountain-like flow of lava that forms cinder cones and spatter cones. Both cinder cones and spatter cones from past eruptions can be seen in Haleakalā Crater. These cones resemble mini volcanoes inside the crater.
If Haleakalā does erupt again in the future, the areas that would receive the most volcanic activity are along the southwest and east rift zones. These rift zones are areas where the volcano is cracking or splitting apart. These cracks make the area weak so magma can easily come to the surface here. These rift zones pass from La Perouse Bay, through Haleakalā Crater, and onto Hana.
Erupting shield volcanoes are known for being rare spectacles. An eruption draws in tourists from all over the world. The eruptions are usually ground flows of lava so visitors are able to witness the event from many vantage points all over the volcano. If you have the opportunity to witness a shield volcano eruption, it is important to keep a safe distance from the hot lava.
Lava from shield volcanoes flows like water by choosing the path of least resistance. So, the areas closest to the rift zone are at the greatest risk for receiving lava flows if Haleakalā would erupt in the future.
Scientists predict that Haleakalā will erupt again within the next 500 years. Scientists closely monitor Haleakalā and the other Hawaiian volcanoes everyday to watch for anything could indicate a possible eruption.
About the Author: Skyline Hawai’i is committed to the preservation of Hawaii’s landscape and culture, and we want as many people as possible to experience the natural wonder of the Hawaiian Islands. Learn more about our conservation efforts: www.skylinehawaii.com. | Shield volcanoes are the largest volcanoes on Earth, but they are not very steep. The flowing lava does not pile up, instead, it flows easily downhill which gives Haleakalā its unique shape.
Haleakalā has erupted at least ten times in the past 1,000 years. The last eruption occurred sometime between 1480 and 1600 according to scientific records. The history of Haleakalā and its recent activity indicate that the volcano will erupt again in the future.
Although studies indicate that Haleakalā will erupt again, the volcano is currently dormant. The volcano is currently being monitored as a moderate priority according to the National Volcano Early Warning System. The highest priority volcanoes in Hawaii are Kilauea and Mauna Loa because they are both active volcanoes.
Volcanoes are monitored using a seismograph which records earthquake motion. An increase in the number of earthquakes in a volcano mean that the volcano has become restless. This is an important monitoring tool because a series of earthquakes usually occur before an eruption happens.
Shield volcanoes, like Haleakalā, are usually not explosive when they erupt. So, they do not pose a large risk to people as long as they are not on the rift zones. Instead of exploding, they release a fountain-like flow of lava that forms cinder cones and spatter cones. Both cinder cones and spatter cones from past eruptions can be seen in Haleakalā Crater. These cones resemble mini volcanoes inside the crater.
If Haleakalā does erupt again in the future, the areas that would receive the most volcanic activity are along the southwest and east rift zones. These rift zones are areas where the volcano is cracking or splitting apart. These cracks make the area weak so magma can easily come to the surface here. These rift zones pass from La Perouse Bay, through Haleakalā Crater, and onto Hana.
| yes |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | yes_statement | we can "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://phys.org/news/2023-02-method-scientists-volcanos-erupt.html | New method helps scientists better predict when volcanos will erupt | New method helps scientists better predict when volcanos will erupt
1. Seismicity and La Palma 2021. (A) Canary Islands. (B) Geologic map of La Palma . (C) Details of the historical eruptions of La Palma including the recent 2021 eruption . (D) The 2021 eruption earthquakes colored by depth. (E) Earthquake history of the 2021 eruption . Notice very shallow events just before the beginning (September 9), a bimodal swarm of deep (~20 to 25 km) and shallower (~6 to 12 km) events during the eruption, and a predominately aseismic gap in between. LM denotes the location of the stratigraphic section in the town of Las Manchas. Credit: Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ade7641
Cornell researchers have unearthed precise, microscopic clues to where magma is stored, offering scientists—and government officials in populated areas—a way to better assess the risk of volcanic eruptions.
The new research was published Feb. 8 in Science Advances.
In recent years, scientists have used satellite imagery, earthquake data and GPS to search for ground deformation near active volcanoes, but those techniques can be inaccurate in locating the depth of magma storage. By finding microscopic, carbon dioxide-rich fluids encased in cooled volcanic crystals, scientists can determine accurately, within one hundred meters, where magma is located.
"A fundamental question is where magma is stored in Earth's crust and mantle," said lead author Esteban Gazel, the Charles N. Mellowes Professor in Engineering, in Cornell Engineering. "That location matters because you can gauge the risk of an eruption by pinpointing the specific location of magma, instead of other signals like hydrothermal system of a volcano."
Gazel said speed and precision are essential. "We're demonstrating the enormous potential of this improved technique in terms of its rapidity and unprecedented accuracy," he said. "We can produce data within days of the samples arriving from a site, which provides better, near real-time results."
In volcanic events, magma reaches the Earth's surface and it erupts as lava and—depending on how much gas it contains—it could be explosive in nature. When deposited as part of the fallout of the eruption, fragmented fine-grained material—called tephra—can be collected and quickly evaluated.
Gazel and doctoral student Kyle Dayton, the first author of the paper, "Deep Magma Storage During the 2021 La Palma Eruption," deduced how to use inclusions of carbon dioxide-rich fluids trapped within olivine crystals to precisely indicate depth, as the carbon dioxide density of these inclusions is controlled by pressure.
These fluids can be measured quickly using a calibrated Raman spectroscopy instrument to determine—in terms of kilometers—how far down the magma was stored and the depth of the scorching reservoir.
More precise Raman spectroscopy methods were developed in the Gazel lab. "We improved the precision by an order of magnitude from available geobarometers, from kilometers to meters," he said, "but also the spatial resolution of inclusion measurements from tens of microns, down to one micron compared to previously available microthermometry techniques."
After five decades of dormancy, new vents in the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma in the Canary Islands opened and began erupting Sept. 19, 2021. Weeks later, Gazel and Dayton joined a small, elite team of international researchers to study the volcano.
This Canary Islands research led to Gazel and Dayton to pick through tephra to find crystals, which in turn provide data to improve eruption models and forecasts.
"We're finding how deep magma is stored before an eruption through what the volcano brings up," Dayton said.
"As these volcanic crystals grow, they occasionally, accidentally trap little bubbles of carbon dioxide fluid," she said. "These crystals get exhumed during the volcanic eruption and we search the tephra and look for crystals containing fluid inclusions. Through these tiny accidents we can uncover some of Earth's volcanic secrets from the deep to better understand and prepare for future eruptions."
Citation:
New method helps scientists better predict when volcanos will erupt (2023, February 8)
retrieved 16 August 2023
from https://phys.org/news/2023-02-method-scientists-volcanos-erupt.html
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and Terms of Use. | and we search the tephra and look for crystals containing fluid inclusions. Through these tiny accidents we can uncover some of Earth's volcanic secrets from the deep to better understand and prepare for future eruptions. "
Citation:
New method helps scientists better predict when volcanos will erupt (2023, February 8)
retrieved 16 August 2023
from https://phys.org/news/2023-02-method-scientists-volcanos-erupt.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Let us know if there is a problem with our content
Use this form if you have come across a typo, inaccuracy or would like to send an edit request for the content on this page.
For general inquiries, please use our contact form.
For general feedback, use the public comments section below (please adhere to guidelines).
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New method helps scientists better predict when volcanos will erupt
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| yes |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | no_statement | we cannot "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is not possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-causes-a-volcano-to-erupt-and-how-do-scientists-predict-eruptions/ | What Causes a Volcano to Erupt, and How Do Scientists Predict ... | Editor’s Note (6/4/18): This story is being re-posted in light of the deadly eruption of Guatemala’s Fuego volcano on Sunday (June 3), which covered nearby villages in fast-moving ash flows.
Attila Kilinc, head of the geology department at the University of Cincinnati, offers this answer. Most recently, Professor Kilinc has been studying volcanoes in Hawaii and Montserrat.
When a part of the earth's upper mantle or lower crust melts, magma forms. A volcano is essentially an opening or a vent through which this magma and the dissolved gases it contains are discharged. Although there are several factors triggering a volcanic eruption, three predominate: the buoyancy of the magma, the pressure from the exsolved gases in the magma and the injection of a new batch of magma into an already filled magma chamber. What follows is a brief description of these processes.
As rock inside the earth melts, its mass remains the same while its volume increases--producing a melt that is less dense than the surrounding rock. This lighter magma then rises toward the surface by virtue of its buoyancy. If the density of the magma between the zone of its generation and the surface is less than that of the surrounding and overlying rocks, the magma reaches the surface and erupts.
Magmas of so-called andesitic and rhyolitic compositions also contain dissolved volatiles such as water, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Experiments have shown that the amount of a dissolved gas in magma (its solubility) at atmospheric pressure is zero, but rises with increasing pressure.
For example, in an andesitic magma saturated with water and six kilometers below the surface, about 5 percent of its weight is dissolved water. As this magma moves toward the surface, the solubility of the water in the magma decreases, and so the excess water separates from the magma in the form of bubbles. As the magma moves closer to the surface, more and more water exsolves from the magma, thereby increasing the gas/magma ratio in the conduit. When the volume of bubbles reaches about 75 percent, the magma disintegrates to pyroclasts (partially molten and solid fragments) and erupts explosively.
The third process that causes volcanic eruptions is an injection of new magma into a chamber that is already filled with magma of similar or different composition. This injection forces some of the magma in the chamber to move up in the conduit and erupt at the surface.
Although volcanologists are well aware of these three processes, they cannot yet predict a volcanic eruption. But they have made significant advances in forecasting volcanic eruptions. Forecasting involves probable character and time of an eruption in a monitored volcano. The character of an eruption is based on the prehistoric and historic record of the volcano in question and its volcanic products. For example, a violently erupting volcano that has produced ash fall, ash flow and volcanic mudflows (or lahars) is likely to do the same in the future.
Determining the timing of an eruption in a monitored volcano depends on measuring a number of parameters, including, but not limited to, seismic activity at the volcano (especially depth and frequency of volcanic earthquakes), ground deformations (determined using a tiltmeter and/or GPS, and satellite interferometry), and gas emissions (sampling the amount of sulfur dioxide gas emitted by correlation spectrometer, or COSPEC). An excellent example of successful forecasting occurred in 1991. Volcanologists from the U.S. Geological Survey accurately predicted the June 15 eruption of the Pinatubo Volcano in the Philippines, allowing for the timely evacuation of the Clark Air Base and saving thousands of lives.
Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. | This lighter magma then rises toward the surface by virtue of its buoyancy. If the density of the magma between the zone of its generation and the surface is less than that of the surrounding and overlying rocks, the magma reaches the surface and erupts.
Magmas of so-called andesitic and rhyolitic compositions also contain dissolved volatiles such as water, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Experiments have shown that the amount of a dissolved gas in magma (its solubility) at atmospheric pressure is zero, but rises with increasing pressure.
For example, in an andesitic magma saturated with water and six kilometers below the surface, about 5 percent of its weight is dissolved water. As this magma moves toward the surface, the solubility of the water in the magma decreases, and so the excess water separates from the magma in the form of bubbles. As the magma moves closer to the surface, more and more water exsolves from the magma, thereby increasing the gas/magma ratio in the conduit. When the volume of bubbles reaches about 75 percent, the magma disintegrates to pyroclasts (partially molten and solid fragments) and erupts explosively.
The third process that causes volcanic eruptions is an injection of new magma into a chamber that is already filled with magma of similar or different composition. This injection forces some of the magma in the chamber to move up in the conduit and erupt at the surface.
Although volcanologists are well aware of these three processes, they cannot yet predict a volcanic eruption. But they have made significant advances in forecasting volcanic eruptions. Forecasting involves probable character and time of an eruption in a monitored volcano. The character of an eruption is based on the prehistoric and historic record of the volcano in question and its volcanic products. For example, a violently erupting volcano that has produced ash fall, ash flow and volcanic mudflows (or lahars) is likely to do the same in the future.
| no |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | no_statement | we cannot "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is not possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://www.popsci.com/predict-volcanic-eruption/ | Volcanic eruptions are incredibly hard to predict. Here's why. | Volcanic eruptions are incredibly hard to predict. Here’s why.
The Indonesian volcano Agung on the island of Bali is rumbling, shooting a mix of gases and sharp fragments of ash in a column thousands of feet high into the sky. Airports are closed , and Indonesia’s National Board for Disaster Management announced on Monday the highest alert level for residents in the area, triggering evacuations from the immediate vicinity.
A live video of the eruption is available here:
For locals and volcanologists, it’s deja vu all over again. In September, swarms of earthquakes on the volcano forced area officials to max up the alert level. But the activity remained subdued. A thin cloud of steam erupted from Agung’s innards, but by October, people started returning home.
This week, however, the residents of towns located within five miles of the volcano (and in some cases six) are being forced to evacuate again. They’re not just facing down tremors this time, but also falling ash, rivers of a fast-moving sludge known as lahars, and worries that this eruption might be as destructive as the 1963 event, which killed 1,000 people in the area.
Simon Carn, a volcanologist at Michigan Technological University, says that in addition to being hazardous on a local scale, Agung has a history of global impacts as well. “The 1963 eruption was the largest in Indonesia in the 20th century, and had a small climate impact because the amount of gases emitted was quite large,” Carn says. “It’s interesting to watch a volcano like that reawaken and have the opportunity to make measurements.”
With 139 volcanoes in all, Indonesia is better prepared than many countries to deal with an eruption. But it’s still a dangerous phenomenon. Lahars, ash fall, clouds of superheated gas and ash flowing down a mountainside—these all sound like things that people would like to avoid. But how can residents tell when an eruption is going to happen? The answer, like so much of this world, is complicated.
“It’s hard to predict a volcanic eruption. It’s also hard to predict how an eruption will evolve after it starts,” Carn says. “In these kinds of cases, volcanologists look at the activity of a volcano to see what it did then, and often the best thing you can use to forecast is its previous activity.”
Just like earthquakes, predicting exactly when an individual volcano will erupt—and exactly how large that eruption will be—is still impossible. But deposits left by past eruptions, along with live data from volcanoes around the world, might help volcanologists make better forecasts.
Unlike weather patterns, which tend to occur literally in the open air, the factors that lead to a volcanic eruption unfold deep inside our planet, further down than current technology can reach. So we rely on indirect observations instead. Old deposits of ash and mud can often indicate past eruption patterns. Did this volcano send out streams of lava, or fill the air with caustic bits of rock and glass? Local stones might be able to help untangle the mystery, preserving beds of lava or drifts of ash in layers around the volcano that can be dated to tell exactly when a volcano may have erupted.
Then there’s the shaking. Those swarms of earthquakes back in September were the initial reason scientists raised the alert level at Agung. Seismic activity of that kind usually means magma from miles underneath the Earth’s surface is rising within a volcano. The upward movement causes the overlying rocks to shift, and eventually crack under the mounting pressure.
On the surface, that shaking can be one of the first indications that not everything is status quo under there. Thus, researchers have learned to pay attention to earthquakes near volcanoes. But no two volcanoes are exactly the same, and their behavior differs as well. Some shaking might indicate that an eruption is about to happen, while in other cases, it might not indicate anything happening on the surface at all.
In the case of Agung, earthquakes preceeded the deadly 1963 eruption, followed by lava flows, and then a massive explosive eruption. The current evacuations are designed to get people to a safe distance before an event like that occurs again.
Nowadays, satellites are involved too. GPS technology measures how much the ground over a volcano bulges as magma inside the Earth tries to find an outlet. Carn uses satellite measurements to help measure gases venting out of volcanoes, which might help predict their eruptive behavior in the future.
“It can potentially give advance warning of an eruption if you can see carbon dioxide being released from the magma before it releases the surface,” Carn says.
Satellite predictions are still far from being real-time warning system, with days or weeks passing between measurements. Still, keeping an eye on seismicity, gas emissions, and changes in the shape and movement of the ground, have led to some successful predictions and evacuations. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which had been quiet for nearly 500 years came to life, trembling, then venting steam. Careful analysis of the mountain led to the evacuation of over 60,000 people before it erupted. In 2010, monitoring of activity at Indonesia’s Mount Merapi led to 70,000 people being evacuated before the volcano erupted. In each case, hundreds died (840 at Pinatubo, 350 at Merapi) but without the evacuations, the death toll could have been far worse.
“Even now [at Agung] we don’t know if it’s going to get bigger or gradually wane. It’s difficult to measure how much magma is inside the volcano,” Carn says.
In the future, volcanologists hope that increased monitoring and additional sensors and satellites deployed around the world will make predicting volcanic eruptions easier, though it will never be straightforward, and funding is needed to grow volcano monitoring systems and keep satellites used by scientists to monitor volcanoes aloft.
“Certainly, within the United States there is a great need for volcano monitoring,” Carn says. “Similar things happening at Agung could happen at a U.S. volcano, and we need to be prepared.” | It’s also hard to predict how an eruption will evolve after it starts,” Carn says. “In these kinds of cases, volcanologists look at the activity of a volcano to see what it did then, and often the best thing you can use to forecast is its previous activity.”
Just like earthquakes, predicting exactly when an individual volcano will erupt—and exactly how large that eruption will be—is still impossible. But deposits left by past eruptions, along with live data from volcanoes around the world, might help volcanologists make better forecasts.
Unlike weather patterns, which tend to occur literally in the open air, the factors that lead to a volcanic eruption unfold deep inside our planet, further down than current technology can reach. So we rely on indirect observations instead. Old deposits of ash and mud can often indicate past eruption patterns. Did this volcano send out streams of lava, or fill the air with caustic bits of rock and glass? Local stones might be able to help untangle the mystery, preserving beds of lava or drifts of ash in layers around the volcano that can be dated to tell exactly when a volcano may have erupted.
Then there’s the shaking. Those swarms of earthquakes back in September were the initial reason scientists raised the alert level at Agung. Seismic activity of that kind usually means magma from miles underneath the Earth’s surface is rising within a volcano. The upward movement causes the overlying rocks to shift, and eventually crack under the mounting pressure.
On the surface, that shaking can be one of the first indications that not everything is status quo under there. Thus, researchers have learned to pay attention to earthquakes near volcanoes. But no two volcanoes are exactly the same, and their behavior differs as well. Some shaking might indicate that an eruption is about to happen, while in other cases, it might not indicate anything happening on the surface at all.
In the case of Agung, earthquakes preceeded the deadly 1963 eruption, followed by lava flows, and then a massive explosive eruption. | no |
Volcanology | Can we predict when a volcano will erupt? | no_statement | we cannot "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt".. it is not possible to "predict" when a "volcano" will "erupt". | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/20/new-zealand-scientists-find-tremor-link-that-could-predict-volcanic-eruptions | New Zealand scientists find tremor link that could predict volcanic ... | After the deadly Whakaari eruption in 2019, researchers at the University of Canterbury set out to determine whether patterns in seismic frequency (the shakes felt in the volcano) could help forecast eruptions and prevent the loss of life.
Natural Resources Engineering postdoctoral fellow Dr Alberto Ardid studied recordings from GeoNet seismometers – an instrument that measures ground noises and shaking – prior to 18 eruptions across six active volcanoes around the world, including three in New Zealand; Ruapehu, Tongariro, and Whakaari.
A machine-learning algorithm allowed Dr Ardid to sift through thousands of recordings and highlight particular frequency patterns that occurred regularly before an eruption.
The findings, which are published in Nature Communications, showed that in the three weeks, and then the few days before an eruption, there were similar changes in frequencies within some of the volcanoes.
The shakes would become slower – suggesting there was a blockage in the shallow part of the volcano and that a seal or lid had formed, which traps hot gas, builds pressure, and sometimes triggers an explosion.
“This pattern started to emerge, in our experience, around three weeks before the eruption and it peaks around two and four days before the event,” Ardid said.
“However, it is important to point out that we have observed this sealing mechanism without any eruption related,” he said. Sometimes the pressure will passively release, and other times it can explode. “That’s when it is dangerous.”
The research has picked up that Mount Ruapehu, an active volcano in the country’s North Island, is showing signs of a seal forming, Ardid said. “At this point, we’re able to say that an eruption is much more likely to happen now.”
Over the past month, strong tremors are becoming more frequent, hot gas and liquid is flowing into the crater lake and sulphur slicks are appearing on the battleship grey water near Mount Ruapehu. GeoNet, which monitors New Zealand’s geological hazards, has issued a warning over elevated volcanic unrest, saying the activity in the last four weeks is “the longest period of tremor recorded over the past 20 years”. It cannot predict if the volcano will blow – unrest does not always lead to an eruption.
A tool to definitively predict if a volcano is going to erupt does not exist. As Ardid puts it: “the holy grail of volcanology is trying to anticipate when an eruption is going to happen”. But what this research does is allow scientists to determine with greater accuracy the probability, or likelihood, an eruption will occur.
The research’s co-author, Dr David Dempsey, a Civil and Natural Resources Engineering lecturer at the University, said once the warning system has been through enough testing, and the scientists are confident enough in its accuracy levels, it could be used across the world.
Dempsey hopes they can get the tool to a stage where scientists can say there is a 10-20% chance of an eruption in the next 48 hours. “That would be considered a very, very high level of certainty.”
Determining the relative risk of eruption is important – for example, determining if there is a one-in-10 chance of eruption versus a one-in-1000. “With that information you may or may not decide to delay your visit to a mountain.”
New Zealand has 12 active volcanoes and in many cases, including Mount Ruapehu, are popular tourist destinations, or are bordered by residential areas.
“Active volcanoes, including Whakaari, Ruapehu, Tongariro, and others around the world where visitors and skiers are likely to be nearby, are unpredictable and sometimes hazardous,” Dempsey said. “Early warning systems could save lives and avoid debilitating injuries.” | “This pattern started to emerge, in our experience, around three weeks before the eruption and it peaks around two and four days before the event,” Ardid said.
“However, it is important to point out that we have observed this sealing mechanism without any eruption related,” he said. Sometimes the pressure will passively release, and other times it can explode. “That’s when it is dangerous.”
The research has picked up that Mount Ruapehu, an active volcano in the country’s North Island, is showing signs of a seal forming, Ardid said. “At this point, we’re able to say that an eruption is much more likely to happen now.”
Over the past month, strong tremors are becoming more frequent, hot gas and liquid is flowing into the crater lake and sulphur slicks are appearing on the battleship grey water near Mount Ruapehu. GeoNet, which monitors New Zealand’s geological hazards, has issued a warning over elevated volcanic unrest, saying the activity in the last four weeks is “the longest period of tremor recorded over the past 20 years”. It cannot predict if the volcano will blow – unrest does not always lead to an eruption.
A tool to definitively predict if a volcano is going to erupt does not exist. As Ardid puts it: “the holy grail of volcanology is trying to anticipate when an eruption is going to happen”. But what this research does is allow scientists to determine with greater accuracy the probability, or likelihood, an eruption will occur.
The research’s co-author, Dr David Dempsey, a Civil and Natural Resources Engineering lecturer at the University, said once the warning system has been through enough testing, and the scientists are confident enough in its accuracy levels, it could be used across the world.
Dempsey hopes they can get the tool to a stage where scientists can say there is a 10-20% chance of an eruption in the next 48 hours. | no |
Folklore | Can werewolves be created by a full moon? | yes_statement | a full "moon" can "create" "werewolves".. the creation of "werewolves" can be triggered by a full "moon". | https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/sharks-are-more-likely-to-attack-under-a-full-moon | Sharks pretty much turn into werewolves under a full Moon | Sharks pretty much turn into werewolves under a full Moon
Maybe Sharknado will never actually happen, but sharks morphing into werewolves? Sort of.
They might not grow fur and claws or howl into the night sky, but sharks are much more likely to come after you when the Moon is ominously full. But why is higher lunar illumination making them bite when most shark attacks happen during the daytime? The gravitational pull that affects the tides is thought to be what is really behind the feeding frenzy, and there could be something about the Moon getting brighter that affects them in unknown ways.
Werewolf myths emerged from the strange behavior exhibited by many animals during a full Moon. Anything that lives in the ocean is inevitably going to be affected by the tides, and sharks are no exception, since the Moon’s gravitational field is strong enough to have effects on Earth. Researcher Stephen Midway of the Florida Museum of Natural History coauthored a study, recently published in Frontiers in Marine Science, that sheds some (moon)light on this.
“We do know that the Moon influences the oceans — whether through forces on tides or the Earth’s geomagnetic field,” he said. “Sharks — like many marine organisms — will respond to their environment, so the chance for a lunar influence on sharks is there, but more research is needed.”
Lunar forces having power over the tides is anything but supernatural. Ocean levels rise and fall because the lunar gravitational field pulls at us and creates bulges as it orbits Earth. Because land also bulges, that may at least partly explain your dog acting weird just short of transforming into a werewolf. Ocean bulges are more obvious since oceans are liquid. Not only do high tides happen on the side of Earth directly facing the Moon, but also at the same time on the opposite side, since Earth’s inertia on that side is greater than the Moon’s gravity.
There haven’t been many studies on lunar-fueled shark attacks. Midway and his team looked through 50 years of data on shark attacks from all over the world and found that they are more likely to get vicious when lunar illumination is over 50%. Sharks can be triggered by lunar phases, which doesn’t necessarily mean a full Moon, either. The species most likely to bite humans are usually apex predators (no surprise there) like the infamous Great White in Jaws. If you hit the beach around a certain lunar phase, depending on where you are, it could potentially become a danger zone.
“Different environments and conditions are more suitable for different shark species (although some occur in both), which is why different communities of sharks can be found along different coasts, such as Florida and California,” said Midway.
It is possible that these swimming rows of teeth can have a greater advantage at snapping up prey when tides are stronger and may influence the behavior of what they eat. They could also be in extra-predatory mode when they know an easy meal is around. Lunar illumination also has some sort of influence, making it easier for sharks to see the silhouettes of their prey at night. Moonlight can’t explain daytime attacks on humans. While we are not supposed to be shark bait, since they don’t crave us much, they might still be hungry and mistake us for prey.
Moon phases usually cause behaviors that are specific to a certain species, but not really in sharks. There was one lunar change that affected only — what else? — Great Whites. Attacks by the successors of Bruce are most common in Australia, South Africa, and the west coast of the U.S. If moonlight really does make sharks sink their teeth into something they shouldn’t (meaning humans), it could be because they see a silhouette moving in the water that may register as an animal they actually like to feast on. They don’t just lunge if they smell blood.
“Because many sharks are similar to each other (when compared to other fishes), it is plausible that many or all sharks could have common responses to Moon effects,” Midway said in the study.
Maybe a movie taking this phenomenon into the realm of science fiction should be a thing. Of course, it would have to be called Sharkwolf. | Sharks pretty much turn into werewolves under a full Moon
Maybe Sharknado will never actually happen, but sharks morphing into werewolves? Sort of.
They might not grow fur and claws or howl into the night sky, but sharks are much more likely to come after you when the Moon is ominously full. But why is higher lunar illumination making them bite when most shark attacks happen during the daytime? The gravitational pull that affects the tides is thought to be what is really behind the feeding frenzy, and there could be something about the Moon getting brighter that affects them in unknown ways.
Werewolf myths emerged from the strange behavior exhibited by many animals during a full Moon. Anything that lives in the ocean is inevitably going to be affected by the tides, and sharks are no exception, since the Moon’s gravitational field is strong enough to have effects on Earth. Researcher Stephen Midway of the Florida Museum of Natural History coauthored a study, recently published in Frontiers in Marine Science, that sheds some (moon)light on this.
“We do know that the Moon influences the oceans — whether through forces on tides or the Earth’s geomagnetic field,” he said. “Sharks — like many marine organisms — will respond to their environment, so the chance for a lunar influence on sharks is there, but more research is needed.”
Lunar forces having power over the tides is anything but supernatural. Ocean levels rise and fall because the lunar gravitational field pulls at us and creates bulges as it orbits Earth. Because land also bulges, that may at least partly explain your dog acting weird just short of transforming into a werewolf. Ocean bulges are more obvious since oceans are liquid. Not only do high tides happen on the side of Earth directly facing the Moon, but also at the same time on the opposite side, since Earth’s inertia on that side is greater than the Moon’s gravity.
There haven’t been many studies on lunar-fueled shark attacks. | no |
Folklore | Can werewolves be created by a full moon? | yes_statement | a full "moon" can "create" "werewolves".. the creation of "werewolves" can be triggered by a full "moon". | https://vampirediariesfanon.fandom.com/wiki/Werewolf | Werewolf | Vampire Diaries Fanon Wiki | Fandom | Werewolf
*Transform into hyper-aggressive wolves on the night of a full moon provided the gene has been triggered
Werewolves (also called Lycanthropes, Loup Garou, Beasts, or even just Wolves for short) are a near-extinct supernatural shapeshifting species of individuals who unwillingly transform into large, fearsome and extremely hostile wolves on the night of the full moon. Even in their human form, werewolves possess superhuman physical prowess, but not to the same level as a vampire, and not as powerful as the abilities they have on a full moon. These creatures are the most dangerous enemies of vampires, due to their venomous bite, which is lethal to them. Werewolves are also hardwired to kill vampires on sight in their wolf form, though they still hunt human prey whenever there are no vampires to kill.
Triggering The Werewolf Gene[]
A werewolf has to kill a human in order to trigger their werewolf gene. It does not matter if the kill was accidental or intentional-- if a werewolf causes the death of a human, the werewolf gene will still be activated. After the gene is triggered, the werewolf's eyes will turn yellow and their latent powers will activate instantly. A werewolf who has yet to trigger his or her curse only exhibits one characteristic of lycanthropy: increased aggression and anger on a general basis, which can become overwhelming fits of rage leading up to and during the nights of the full moon. Also, until their werewolf genes are activated, untriggered werewolves can be compelled just like any human, as Damon Salvatore was able to compel Tyler Lockwood before Tyler triggered his werewolf gene.
Pre-history[]
According to Jackson, at least two werewolf packs have been around since what he calls the "beginning," which could be referring to the genesis of the werewolf race. In the episode Home, the spell the Travelers cast to break the Traveler's Curse and undo spirit magic and other non-traditional forms of magic resulted in Tyler Lockwood's werewolf gene being deactivated, returning him to an untriggered werewolf. Because of this revelation, it can be assumed that werewolves were created by Traditional Magic or Nature itself.
It was revealed in The Brothers That Care Forgot that the werewolves' power can be traced back to the myth of the Unification Ceremony, a ritual that bestowed certain unique abilities onto every member of a pack. While most of the history of werewolves remains unknown, it has been said that at the earliest point of their existence, each werewolf bloodline was distinct, and each had their own power; some possessed heightened speed, others had heightened strength, and some even had the ability to sense their enemies from long distances, presumably among other abilities.
The Middle Ages
There is still very little known about the genesis of werewolves and their early history, including who or what created them, why they were created, and how they were created; all that is really known is that they existed before vampires, who were known to be created a little more than 1,000 years ago. Since they call their supernatural condition a curse, it may very well be that werewolves themselves were made by Nature, and the curse itself was magically placed on the original members of their species by witches. However, if this is the case, it has yet to be proven in canon. Werewolves actively populated the New World during the early Middle Ages as Viking invasions began in Europe. Most, if not all, of the land's inhabitants were werewolves and they lived along side one another in villages. They also lived alongside humans, and, to protect their loved ones, they made sure that they had access to natural means of protection during the time that they were changed. One of the most notable locations of a werewolf village was in what is now present-day Mystic Falls. Beneath the area was a series of tunnels that provided protection for the humans while the werewolves were turned on the full moon. One clear rule of the village was that the humans were forbidden from being around the wolves while they were transformed for their own safety.
A notable event in the history of the werewolves comes with the arrival of inhabitants of the "Old World," where a plague had been devastating the population. The newcomers included Mikael, his wife Esther, and Esther's witch mentor and friend, Ayana, as well as Esther and Mikael's young sons Finn and Elijah. Having lost their first-born daughter Freya, the twin sister of Finn, in Europe, Mikael and Esther wanted to be able to raise a family in a place free from illness, and Ayana eventually led them to the New World where they could live in peace. The villagers accepted the new family and they became an integral part of of the village life, with Ayana acting as the local healer and contact with the spirits. Mikael and Esther, desperate to rebuild their family after the loss of Freya, eventually conceived and gave birth to Niklaus, Kol, Rebekah and Henrik, who followed their eldest brother Finn and second-eldest brother Elijah.
However, when Henrik and Niklaus broke their village's rule one full moon night and went to watch the wolves turn, Henrik was accidentally attacked and killed by the turned wolves. Determined to not lose anymore family, but also not wanting to move away again, Mikael convinced Esther to tap into dark magic to perform an modified version of the Immortality Spell in order to turn Mikael and their children into nearly-invulnerable beings. Once turned, Mikael and their children gained enhanced strength, speed, reflexes and healing superior to the werewolves that would ensure their protection, and their new species eventually became known as vampires. However, the ritual had unexpected side effects, and the newly-turned family's lust for blood eventually led them to shatter the peace of their village, unable to resist feeding on the innocent inhabitants of the town. Shortly after turning, Niklaus made his first human kill, which resulted in Esther's darkest secret coming to light: Niklaus was not Mikael's son, but instead was the son of the alpha of their village's werewolf pack. Killing a human activated his werewolf gene, turning him into a vampire/werewolf hybrid. Furious at his wife's betrayal, Mikael slaughtered her lover, Ansel, whose pack was also responsible for Henrik's death, as well as half of the remaining werewolf villagers, igniting the war that still exists to this day between the werewolves and the vampires.
Werewolf Genocide[]
After Mikael decimated the werewolf community, and after Esther died at Niklaus' hands, the Mikaelson siblings returned to the "Old World" and began traveling from country to country as they followed the Normans, feeding on the locals and turning new vampires as they went. The war between vampires and werewolves came to a head when the vampires discovered that the bite of a werewolf was lethal to their kind. This spurred the vampires to preemptively commit mass murders of werewolves to protect
themselves from death at their hands. As a result, the werewolves were driven to near-extinction by these massacres, and vampires who were turned after this werewolf genocide began to believe that werewolves were nothing more than a myth or legend.
In reality, many werewolves had survived and began to reorganize themselves into packs in order to help them evade the vampires. These packs also helped give the werewolves a support system to help them through their very painful transformations each month during the full moon.
Werewolf Casualties[]
A village of werewolves were killed by Mikael sometime in the late 900s/early 1000s, including the pack's Alpha, Ansel.
Lana, the werewolf queen of the Crescent Clan was killed by Mikael in 1919 in the flashbacks during Le Grand Guignol.
Dozens of werewolves (who had been turned into hybrids) were killed by Niklaus Mikaelson in Season Three and Season Four.
Mason Lockwood was killed by Damon Salvatore in Plan B.
Brady was killed by Stefan Salvatore in Crying Wolf.
Stevie and three unknown members of Jules pack were killed by Elijah Mikaelson in Crying Wolf.
Tyler Lockwood was killed by Niklaus Mikaelson in The Reckoning (However, he was turned into a hybrid)
Dwayne was killed by Tyler Lockwood twice in Bloodletting. (He snapped his neck the first time to turn him into a hybrid, and then ripped his heart out to kill him again)
An unknown number of wolves were killed in a werewolf hunt led by Diego in Reigning Pain in New Orleans.
A half dozen unnamed werewolves were killed by Rebekah Mikaelson in Crescent City.
Eve was killed by Oliver in An Unblinking Death, marking the first time in either series that a werewolf was killed by another werewolf.
Numerous unnamed werewolves were killed by a series of explosions in An Unblinking Death, orchestrated by Oliver and Francesca.
Hayley was killed by Monique Deveraux in From a Cradle to a Grave. She was the first werewolf shown on-screen to be killed by a witch, and the eleventh werewolf to be killed in The Originals. (Papa Tunde's attack on the Guerrera family in 1919 was the first instance of witches killing werewolves, though it was not seen on-screen)
Niklaus, Elijah, Marcel, and Hayley killed nearly a dozen werewolves, including all of the Guerrera werewolves, in Rebirth.
Mikael killed several of Esther's moonlight ring-wearing werewolves at Rousseau's in Alive and Kicking.
Elijah and Oliver killed a large number of Esther's moonlight ring-wearing werewolves in a parking lot in Live and Let Die
As many as six Alphas from packs who were interested in pledging their allegiance to the Alpha of the Crescent Wolf Clan, Jackson, were inadvertantly fed on and killed by Gia and her fellow vampire associates after Finn starved them with a spell in The Devil is Damned.
Werewolves in Mystic Falls[]
Werewolves have existed in the area of Mystic Falls, Virginia since the 10th century. When the Mikaelson family moved to the New World after the death of their first-born daughter, Freya, the witch, Esther, felt so alone as a result of Mikael's emotional distance following Freya's death that she began to have an affair with the Alpha of their village's werewolf pack, Ansel. This relationship resulted in the birth of Niklaus, though it was unknown by everyone for years.
Years later, their youngest son Henrik was attacked and killed by a werewolf in Ansel's pack when Henrik and Klaus had sneaked out to watch the wolves shift during the full moon. Mikael, not wanting to lose any more of his children, convinced Esther to use a modified version of the immortality spell to ensure that their family would live forever and remain safe from werewolves. This resulted in the creation of vampirism, as well as the Hybrid Curse, which Esther placed on Klaus to suppress his werewolf side after his first vampire kill resulted in Klaus triggering his werewolf gene. After Mikael learned of Esther's affair with Ansel and his pack's role in Henrik's death, he massacred Ansel and the majority of the werewolf villagers, which set off the rivalry between the werewolves and the vampires that rages on to this day.
Werewolves were presumed to be extinct for centuries until 1864, when George Lockwood at some point triggered his werewolf curse, which resulted in him killing various townsfolk in his wolf form during the full moon. However, he placed the blame for these deaths on Mystic Falls' sizable vampire population, which led the Founding Families to begin to organize a vampire hunt. During the first Founder's Day ball, Katherine Pierce informed George that she knew what he was, and used that information to blackmail him into helping her escape the vampire-hunt that the town was planning. In exchange, George wanted the moonstone Katherine had stolen from Klaus centuries prior. They both helped each other, and once Katherine escaped town, she never spoke to him again.
During the centuries, various Lockwood family members have triggered their werewolf curse, typically due to the anger issues that came as a result of being a werewolf and being provoked into a fight that turned lethal, such as in the case of Mason and Tyler Lockwood. However, there were many Lockwood family members who never learned of their family's werewolf heritage, and who never triggered their werewolf curses, such as Richard Lockwood.
New Orleans Werewolves[]
In New Orleans in the 1900's, a family of werewolves known as the Guerrera family were known to be involved in criminal activity. Members of their crime family made a deal with Elijah and Klaus that would both keep the Mikaelsons' existence in the city a secret, while allowing the Guerreras to profit off of the alcohol that would be smuggled into their ports after Prohibition became law. In the year 1919, many of the Guerreras were killed by Papa Tunde when they refused to cave to his demands, and he put their heads on pikes as a warning to others of the consequences of not cooperating. The rest of the Guerrera Pack was killed in 1925 by Marcel Gerard and his vampire army, save for one member, a baby named Gabriel who was adopted under the name Gabriel Correa.
Decades later, the leaders of the royal Labonair Family, along with the leaders of the other royal werewolf bloodline that composed the Crescent Wolf Clan, wanted their children, Andréa Labonair (also known as Hayley Marshall) and Jackson to get married in order to once again reunite the Crescents in full so that they could take New Orleans back from the vampires. However, it didn't go on as planned, and ultimately, all of the Labonairs except for Hayley were killed in the struggle. Marcel, the leader of the vampires at the time, convinced a witch to curse the remaining Crescent wolves by casting a spell that forced them to stay in their wolf form at all times except for each full moon, when they returned to their human form for several hours. Marcel also gave baby Hayley to Father Kieran so she could be adopted and live in safety outside of the supernatural war in New Orleans.
Decades later, the Originals returned to New Orleans and moved in to the Mikaelson Mansion with the werewolf Hayley Marshall, one of the last surviving members of the Labonair family who was pregnant with Klaus Mikaelson's hybrid child. She soon discovered soon that a werewolf was watching her after the witch Sabine told her that the wolf was drawn to her because of the miracle child she and Klaus created. When a faction of witches tried to kill Hayley and her unborn child, the werewolf following Hayley attacked and killed all the witches, saving her life. When Hayley was stuck at the Bayou with Elijah, someone left a Bible with her family's names and birthdates recorded inside on the porch; it was later revealed that a distant relative of Hayley named Eve had left it for Hayley. Eve later explained that the vampires made a witch curse all the surviving werewolves who bore the crescent-moon-shaped birthmark on their shoulder blades that indicated they were members of the Crescent Wolf Clan. Klaus, desperate to regain control of New Orleans and knowing the vampires didn't trust him, quickly gave he vampires permission to kill all the werewolves to win their favor by assuring them that he would not be using his daughters blood to make more hybrids, but Hayley, afraid for her family, begged Elijah and Rebekah to protect and save them from the vampires. They soon discovered that werewolves from all over America were coming to New Orleans to see Hayley and her yet-unborn hybrid baby for themselves. One of the werewolves from the Northeast Atlantic Clan, Cary, had a ring that identified him as a descendant of Klaus' biological father, and was thus kin to both Klaus and his daughter. With this news, Klaus reconsidered his plan to slaughter the werewolves, and asked Father Kieran to help protect his people in secret. During the first full moon after Hayley had learned about her pack and family, she decided to have a full moon party at the plantation house for the Crescents, as their curse only allowed them to return to their human forms during the few hours the full moon was at its peak. Unknown to anyone, some of the werewolves, including Oliver, had made a deal with some witches that was supposed to result in the werewolves' curse being removed in exchange for them attacking Rebekah. They did this by having Oliver flirt with Rebekah and lead her out to the woods to be attacked by the transformed wolves who weren't under the Crescents' curse. Meanwhile, Hayley finally got to meet Jackson, and he told her some of her family history.
Jackson revealed that he was the wolf that was protecting Hayley, and explained that they were intended to be married in order to unite the Crescent Wolf Clan and take New Orleans back from the vampires. He told her that the other wolves would follow her, and insisted that she was going to be the one who changed everything for them. Jackson then informed her that a witch said they would lift their curse because of Hayley, but Hayley immediately realized that it was a trap, because she hadn't made a deal with any witches. Rebekah was attacked by the werewolves in the woods and incapacitated by their bites (though, as an Original, their bites were not fatal to her). Meanwhile, the witches trapped Jackson and Hayley inside and set the house on fire. The two were only saved by Elijah, who managed to break into the house and escort them to safety at the last minute, at the expense of Klaus and Rebekah, who were being attacked at the same time.
After Elijah ultimately took over control of the city from his brother Klaus, he quickly met with representatives from the vampire, human, and witch factions in order to draw up a new peace treaty. Angry at the werewolves being excluded, Hayley crashed their meeting and insisted that the werewolves be given a seat at the table as well, and threatened them with violence if their demands weren't met. After discussing it with Klaus, Elijah ultimately decided to have a party for all five factions (the Originals, the vampires, the witches, the werewolves, and the humans), and though there was a lot of in-fighting between the groups, they eventually agreed to all sign a peace treaty that pleased everyone, including the werewolves, although they were still banned from the French Quarter.
Unhappy with the fragile peace between the factions, Klaus sought his own agenda by allying himself with the werewolves, with the intention of making a new army of empowered werewolves, using a "moonlight ring" spell of his mother's creation from the late 10th century that involved casting a spell on a black kyanite stone. Any werewolf with this enchanted stone (usually worn in jewelry such as rings) would be able to access their full powers at all times, including strength, speed, and venomous bites that are lethal to vampires. Klaus worked closely with the Crescent wolves and a witch, Genevieve, with whom he had been hooking up, to create the rings, though they ran into obstacles; namely, the interference by the vampires', as Marcel and the other vampires knew that these rings would result in the extinction of vampires. In the end, Klaus was forced to work with Francesca Correa, a well-known matriarch of a drug cartel and casino enterprise, to gain the black kyanite stones that were needed to create the rings.
The majority of the supernatural population of New Orleans, including Klaus and Hayley, were under the impression that Francesca and her many brothers were humans, but they were ultimately revealed to be untriggered Guerrera werewolves who had been pretending to be human while they plotted to take back the city they believed belonged to them. They were also revealed to be working with Genevieve against the Mikaelsons and Hayley, and stole the stones for the Guerrera wolves instead of the Crescents (though Oliver was given a ring for his help in their plan) so they could finally trigger their werewolf genes without being forced to turn on the full moon. They also handed over Hayley and her unborn child to the witches so that they could both be sacrificed on Esther's orders in the name of more power for the witch community. Unbeknownst to them, the baby's hybrid blood remained in Hayley's system, which caused her to transform into a hybrid instead of dying. When Hayley woke up after being killed, she joined the Mikaelson brothers, and the three of them ended up rescuing their baby, who they named Hope, before she could be sacrificed. Still, the Guerrera werewolves, led by Francesca gained control over the city, and banned the vampires from the French Quarter.
After Marcel's defeat, the werewolves became the dominant force of the city. With the death of the witch Elder Genevieve, the last resurrected Harvest girl, Cassie, returned from the dead. Secretly, she was being possessed by the leader of the New Orleans Coven, Esther, the mother of the Originals and creator of the vampire race. Determined to rid the world of her creation, Esther continued Genevieve's alliance with the Guerreras, producing moonlight rings for them. Gradually, more and more werewolves began to join the Guerreras in their new dominion of the city. The first to join were many members of the Crescent Wolf Clan, led by Oliver. The humans did not care much for the change of leadership as long as tourists and the money they bring to the city continued in large numbers. Any vampire who entered the Quarter was sentenced to immediate execution, and no witch or human was allowed to interfere.
The Mikaelsons sealed themselves away from the world in their house, selling their grief to the community while the Guerreras strengthened their hold over the Quarter. However, secretly, they were assessing the lay of the land; Elijah Mikaelson was focused on locating the twelve rings that could incapacitate Klaus so that their bearers would be his first targets. Meanwhile, Marcel was gathering stashes of wolfsbane and making plans for the rebuilding of a vampire community. Once it became clear that the Guerreras did not possess the missing white oak stake, Elijah, Klaus, Hayley, Marcel, Josh, and Joe worked together on a scheme during the full moon that resulted in the group killing eleven of the twelve owners of the moonlight rings forged in Klaus' blood, including Francesca and her brothers, so the rings could be taken and destroyed. The only survivor was Oliver, who Hayley allowed to live because he was a Crescent.
Esther was pleased about Francesca's demise, as it gave her the perfect opportunity to recruit all of the werewolves in the Bayou to her cause, giving her control over both the witches and the werewolves in New Orleans. She knew that Klaus wanted to one day lead the werewolves, so having control over them gave her leverage in her plan to place her childrens' spirits in mortal bodies of witches (or, in Klaus' case, a werewolf.) She had the witches in her new coven working day and night to create dozens and dozens of moonlight rings in order to gain their allegiance. After learning of Esther's plans, Klaus encouraged Hayley to go to the Bayou to reclaim her title of queen of the Crescents and to convince them to join their side instead of Esther's, which she was ultimately able to do. She instructed Oliver to work as a double agent and inform her of Esther's plans, and had the rest of the werewolves move into the compound so they wouldn't have to live in the encampments.
Finn was put in charge of the werewolves his mother recruited, and they planned a scheme to capture Elijah that involved having the young, untriggered teenage werewolves of the pack to kill any humans in the city who weren't aligning with Esther to activate their werewolf genes during the blood moon, which was a rite of passage used in by the werewolf packs in the late 10th and early 11th century. Unwilling to allow their young pack mates to be conscripted into the supernatural war, Hayley, Aiden, and Oliver teamed up with the vampires Marcel, Josh, Gia, and Elijah to help them rescue the children before they could be forced to kill and send them away to a safe house. Oliver and Elijah were chosen to be the decoys to distract Finn and Esther's werewolves while they sneaked the children to safety, only to learn that this was their plan all along. Finn and Esther used their magic to incapacitate them both and captured them.
Oliver was put in stocks as a message to the other wolves of what happens to traitors, and the werewolves were ordered by Finn to spread word that Oliver would be executed for his crimes at midnight. When Hayley heard this news, she went to Marcel and Gia for help rescuing him, knowing that finding Oliver could help them figure out where Elijah was being kept. Cami distracted Finn while Marcel and Gia distracted Finn's guards and assured that Cami wouldn't be harmed, allowing the recently-resurrected Ansel and Hayley to sneak into the lycée to save Oliver. Once he was found and unbound, Ansel held off the werewolves with his blade while Hayley and Oliver went out the back. They ran into another group of werewolves, led by Aiden, who initially intended to capture them both, but after Oliver reminded them of how they were being manipulated and used as slaves for people who want to control them, they eventually relented and allowed them to leave. Unfortunately, when Oliver and Hayley returned to the Bayou, Oliver was eventually stricken by the witches' spell and died despite being freed from captivity.
Physiology[]
Food
Like normal humans, werewolves can eat normal food if they wish. However, because they turn into ferocious beasts during the full moon, they are carnivores. When in wolf form, they can feed on human or vampire body parts and organs, but they are not required to ingest them in order to prolong their existence, like vampires must do with blood. There are no known consequences from abstaining from human or vampire flesh while in werewolf form. It seems that most werewolves do not get to feed on humanoid flesh, because most tend to lock themselves up during the full moon, or are scared or distracted away from their victim before they can eat them. Werewolves have not been seen to attack each other in human or lupine form, but have been known to hunt both human and vampire prey while transformed under the full moon. Jules, for example, was seen to be horrified when she woke up to find she'd slaughtered a group of campers after she had attacked Rose the previous evening. Unstable hybrids also have the urge to attack vampires regardless of what form they are in, as witnessed in The Hybrid when a werewolf, Ray Sutton, instinctively attacked the vampire Damon Salvatore instead of pursuing its first choice, Elena Gilbert.
Appearance[]
Werewolves in their wolf form are quite similar to natural wolves, although unlike natural wolves, werewolves have glowing yellow or orange eyes, wicked fangs, and a much more feral and predatory appearance. They can also be distinguished from regular wolves by their displays of supernatural strength, blurred speed, and size which is comparable to fully grown humans. The fur color of wolf forms differs from one to the other (e.g., Tyler Lockwood's fur color is dark brown, Mason Lockwood's is white and grey, Jules' is light brown with a hint of white, and Hayley's is white and brown). Werewolves appear the same as any other human the rest of the month, aside from their enhanced abilities of speed, strength, and healing.
Werewolf Transformation[]
A werewolf will only transform into a wolf under a full moon. The first transformation is quite slow, and the person is subjected to at least five or six hours of intense, bone-breaking pain before the actual transformation. After the first transformation, the experience does not last nearly as long, but is still painful. During the transformation, the body of the person is twisted in an unnatural manner as bones reshape and shift to form a wolf’s skeleton, causing the person immense physical and psychological pain. Later, the werewolf grows excessive body hair and becomes feral. Their eyes turn yellow, and their teeth elongate into canines, before they finally transform into their wolf shape. A werewolf returns to their human form after a few hours, sometimes sooner, sometimes later. After the first transformation, the werewolf will experience muscle aches. Older werewolves can control themselves to some extent on the night of the full moon, but many find it necessary to dose themselves with wolfsbane to weaken them before they lock themselves up in chains to prevent hurting anyone while they're transformed. The Crescent werewolves have seemed to gain much more control over their actions in wolf form than typical werewolves, most likely as a result spending all of their time in wolf form while they were cursed by Celeste Dubois.
Psychological Characteristics[]
Werewolves are known to be aggressive, strong and fast, even in human form. Tyler Lockwood often had trouble controlling his temper, especially leading up to and during the full moon. Those with the werewolf curse still latent can exhibit some supernatural traits which can be triggered by aggression, along with unusual physical strength for the person's given size and age, but they cannot fully transform, and they also have a tendency to black out when they become overwhelmed in fits of rage. Werewolves seem to have a strong sense of duty and loyalty to protect their own, and feel a responsibility to help their fellow werewolves whenever they can. Also, werewolves have a higher body temperature than humans. When Tyler first activates his curse, he states that his skin feels as if it's on fire. Once a werewolf has triggered their gene, their eyes turn yellow (the eyes of a wolf) while enraged, as Mason's eyes did when he stopped the fight between Tyler and Carter (Brave New World), or when feeling threatened, such as when Hayley's eyes turned yellow while she was defending herself against a group of witches. Activating the curse is also painful, as werewolves have been seen to double over in pain before their eyes change for the first time.
While some werewolves prefer to keep to themselves and keep their beastly natures hidden, most seem to aggregate themselves into packs and residing in areas isolated from general human society so they can run free on the full moons without fear of hurting or killing anyone.
In 1864, George Lockwood attacked several humans and killed them, leaving horrific wounds on the corpses that were so severe that it looked worse than a typical vampire attack. This became evident when Henry told Katherine that the wounds were "worse than anything he had ever seen before." Despite this, and with the cooperation of Katherine Pierce, who was running from the Originals, George was able to convince the Mystic Falls Founder's Council that vampires were responsible, which lead to their round up. It is unknown if George continued his attacks afterward, or if he adapted to his nature.
Code of Loyalty[]
Werewolves are very similar to witches when it comes to their own kind. Unlike vampires, werewolves have an unwavering sense of loyalty, and will often bond with other werewolves they meet. They form packs and work with each other as sort of an extended family. The bond of loyalty between werewolves is so strong that while changed under full moons, the only beings they do not attack are other werewolves (regardless of whether or not they have activated their werewolf gene). This code does seem to extend to Klaus' hybrids, as well. It's possible that another reason why Klaus' hybrids were so loyal, aside for the sire bond between them, was because of their werewolf heritage.
La Luna Sanguinis[]
According to Finn, the werewolves had a ritual a thousand years ago by which, on a blood moon, they would hunt and purposefully trigger their curse by killing a human, willingly enduring the pain of their transformations in exchange for the strength they gained as warriors. This ritual was meant to be a rite of passage, where young werewolves embraced their nature rather than shying away from it; this is in stark contrast to many modern-day werewolves, who do whatever they can to avoid triggering their curses and having to deal with the pain of their monthly transformations.
Powers and Abilities[]
Werewolves' strength and speed are enhanced and are at their peak during time under a full moon. When angered or threatened, these powers and abilities are temporarily enhanced;
Super Strength - Werewolves have supernatural strength, making them far stronger than any human. For example, Tyler accidentally ripped the door off his locker and kicked a trash can several feet with ease right after he triggered his curse. There have been several occasions to suggest that untriggered werewolves possess more strength than any average humans, which would indicate some form of enhanced strength even before the activation of their curse. However, werewolves in their human form are not as strong as a vampire, and have been shown to be far weaker on several occasions. But they've also shown to be strong enough to at least defend themselves, such as when Mason punched Damon across the room, or when Hayley pinned Diego up against a wall. When they are in their wolf form, their powers amplify to a degree that excels that of the non-Original vampires, making them more powerful than non-Original vampires. In wolf form, a werewolf can overpower and kill any non-Original vampire with ease, an example of that being when Mason, in wolf form, tackled and overpowered Caroline, a new vampire at the time, or when Tyler was turning and overpowered Damon, a vampire over 170 years old, or even when Jules, while in wolf form, tackled and bit Rose, a 500+ year old vampire. They can also defeat an Original vampire in small groups, as four of them were able to overwhelm Rebekah enough to attack her, although she killed two of them; another example is an instance when two werewolves, using the stolen moonlight stones, were able to restrain Elijah long enough to incapacitate him with their toxic bites.
Super Speed - Werewolves are much faster than humans. They possess this ability both in and out of transformation with an animalistic quickness; Stevie was able to duck and dodge Damon right before jumping on his back. However, the power is faster at night than in the day, due to the moon's presence, and their speed increases greatly when the werewolf is transformed during the full moon. Mason was able to hunt down Caroline and Stefan in the woods easily while transformed, even despite their vampire-enhanced speed. Some werewolves are shown to become nearly a blur like their vampire enemies; others have not. In wolf form, however, while under the influence of the full moon, they can use their speed to swiftly chase down their choice of prey; even vampires, as their speed rivals that of most vampires or possibly even exceeds it-- during the battle between Elijah and Marcel's army, the fleeing vampires were all caught by the moonlight-ring-empowered werewolves who managed to appear in front of them and set up ambushes.
Super Agility - Werewolves possess superhuman agility. Either in wolf or even in human form, they have demonstrated that they can move, jump very high, climb, flip, and run incredibly fast without difficulty or exhaustion. They can also jump down from incredible heights with almost gravity-defying grace.
Super Durability - Werewolves can take far more trauma than humans and vampires can without nearly as much discomfort or injury. They can also exert themselves for longer periods without tiring.
Healing Factor - Werewolves possess superhuman regenerative abilities, meaning that if they are physically injured, their bodies will heal rapidly. Like vampires, werewolves can heal from the most grievous of injuries, even in human form, albeit more slowly in comparison to vampires. However, unlike vampires, when a werewolf’s neck is broken, they stay dead. Still, while vampires heal faster than werewolves, werewolves are more difficult to injure.
Superhuman Senses - Werewolves have the extremely keen and heightened senses of smell, sight, taste, hearing and touch inherent in all canines. Because they are supernatural and have powers that excel their wolf counterparts, they can hear, see, and smell better than that of regular canines. With this, experienced werewolves such as Jules could sniff out vampires -- something vampires themselves are incapable of --and Tyler could taste vervain placed in his coffee, which would otherwise be impossible, since coffee's intense flavor typically masks the taste of the herb.
Werewolf Bite - A werewolf's venom is extremely lethal to non-Original vampires. While an Original vampire cannot die from the venom, they are not wholly immune to the effects of the bite. For non-Original vampires, the venom acts as an poison of sorts that will enter the bloodstream and deliver the toxin throughout the body, producing discomfort and weakness. All vampires who re bitten will ultimately develop uncontrollable hunger that progresses to delusions, hallucinations, rabid rage, and dementia. After that point, non-Original vampires will finally die, though many are "mercy-killed" before that point.
Full Moon - A werewolf's strength, speed, agility, and all their powers are enhanced and at their peak during a full moon.
Moonlight Ring- The moonlight ring allows a werewolf to use the immense power of their wolf-form, along with making their bites lethal to vampires 24/7, while still remaining in their human forms. The ring allows them to partially shift by accessing only their glowing eyes, their fangs (with werewolf venom), and their enhanced abilities such as super-speed, super-strength, super-agility, and enhanced senses.
Shapeshifting/Transformation Control - During a full moon, they will unwillingly transform from their human form and into their wolf form. However, if a female werewolf is pregnant, they will not turn for nine months as the transformation would kill the baby. After Hayley and Jackson went through the Unification ceremony, every werewolf of the Crescent Moon Clan gained Hayley's ability to transform at will. So they have like hybrids complete control of their transformation and are have been given the strength they would have during a full moon.
Lycanthrope Enhancement - Werewolves are able to make their eyes glow when angry or threatened, but only for a short amount of time. When a werewolf is furious or forced to defend themselves, their anger increases all their power and abilities for a short period of time, which allows them to access some of their powers to give them an edge.
Immunity to Silver - Werewolves are immune to magic bonded to silver. Weapons made of silver might wound them, but the wound still heals at supernatural rates and will not be fatal to them.
Former Powers and Abilities[]
Lie Detection - During a conversation between Jules and Caroline. Jules revealed that there is a werewolf ability allowing werewolves to sense if you're speaking the truth. However, this ability has never been demonstrated by any werewolf, Jules included, so it is possible that she was lying to scare Caroline or was otherwise being hyperbolic.
Weaknesses[]
Vampires and werewolves can be damaged in the same ways humans can, and in most cases will only be briefly weakened. However, werewolves are still mortals, and thus can be killed or incapacitated in various ways.
Mortality-Werewolves can die of old age.
Broken Neck - Breaking a werewolf's neck will result in instant death.
Wolfsbane - When ingested, wolfsbane causes a werewolf to become severely weak and feverish. Also, If a werewolf's skin is exposed to wolfsbane, it will burn them.
Magic - Witches are able to curse and inflict any supernaturals with enhanced healing abilities with aneurysms that cause the blood vessels in their brains to explode and heal over and over again.
Blood Loss - If a werewolf is severely wounded and bleeds out before they can heal, they can die. This was demonstrated when Stefan threw a stake into a werewolf's neck, hitting their carotid artery and causing the werewolf to bleed out and die before they could fully heal. Another instance was when Klaus impaled the werewolf Paige through the chest.
Decapitation - Decapitation will result in instant death for a werewolf.
Presumably Fire - Fire can presumably kill a werewolf. It can also hurt them.
The Devil's Star - The Devil's Star can cause one thousand cuts onto another's body, regardless of species. Though werewolves have enhanced healing, it is likely that being hit with the Devil's Star will result in the werewolf bleeding to death before they can heal.
Suffocation - Unlike vampires, who will eventually heal and reanimate after being suffocated, a werewolf will die from lack of oxygen. This means they can die from drowning or being smothered/asphyxiated.
Physical Trauma - Minor physical injuries such as gunshots, stab wounds and broken bones will cause a werewolf pain and will also slow them down. However, this is only temporary, as they will heal completely within minutes.
Power Suppression Necklace - As seen in Every Mother's Son, Esther made a necklace with the intention to suppress Klaus's anger and powers as an untriggered werewolf, rendering him weakened and giving him enough control over his emotions to avoid being enraged enough to kill someone and trigger his werewolf gene. It is unknown if these types of jewelry would work on a triggered werewolf or a hybrid.
Former Weaknesses[]
Gilbert Device - Invented by Johnathan Gilbert (and enchanted by Emily Bennett), the device was a weapon designed to emit a high-frequency noise that could only be heard by vampires and werewolves, which incapacitated them by giving them intensely painful headaches. It was only meant to be used one time only, and it now no longer works, although it is very unlikely.
Doppelgänger Blood Magic - If a doppelgänger's blood is used in the Magic Purification Spell, the werewolf will come out with an untriggered wolf gene like tyler. Kai absorbed the magic purification spell and as such, it is no longer there.
Known Werewolves[]
Werewolf
Name
Description
Status
Ansel
He was an Alpha werewolf, the lover of Esther Mikaelson, and biological father of Niklaus Mikaelson. He was resurrected by Esther and later killed by Klaus.
Jules was an Alpha werewolf and friend of Mason Lockwood. She and her boyfriend Brady kidnapped Caroline Forbes so that they could leave with Mason's nephew, Tyler, and help him adjust to his new life as a werewolf. She was killed by Klaus as a sacrifice to break the hybrid curse.
William is the Alpha of the Netherwood Pack and the boyfriend of Alexandra Aragon. He took over from Astra after his uncle was killed. He is an efficient leader who cares deeply for his pack. William took Gabriel in after finding him in the woods.
Alive
Gabriel Mason
Gabriel is a member of the Netherwood pack and the boyfriend of second-in-command Feng Qiu. He was taken in by William after his entire family were killed by the Florida vampires, led by Markus. He is loyal to the Netherwood Pack and will do anything asked of him.
Astra was the former Alpha before her cousin William took over the Pack after Astra passed the Alpha title to him. She is best friends with Mason before he was killed, as she later found out that she got pregnant by Mason as she has a son Mason, Jr
Eve is a werewolf relative of Hayley Marshall who lives in the Louisiana bayous with others of her family, and helped shed some light on Klaus' werewolf family. She had never activated the wolf gene. She was killed by Oliver.
Cary is a descendant of Niklaus' Father and relative to Klaus. After he and his friends were rescued by Elijah and Rebekah, his origins were revealed when he was shown to be in possession of Esther's ring.
Myths[]
Silver - Contrary to popular belief, werewolves are not weakened by or allergic to silver, as Mason explained after Damon stabbed him with a silver knife. Mason guessed that the myth was probably started by werewolves. Silver actually has the opposite effect – when a werewolf is wounded by silver, it heals. This is why Klaus can't be neutralized by the white oak daggers.
Wolfsbane - Several myths have surround the use of this herb and its relation to and effects upon werewolves, including the myth that wolfsbane supposedly either causes or cures lycanthropy. These myths are false. | Werewolf
*Transform into hyper-aggressive wolves on the night of a full moon provided the gene has been triggered
Werewolves (also called Lycanthropes, Loup Garou, Beasts, or even just Wolves for short) are a near-extinct supernatural shapeshifting species of individuals who unwillingly transform into large, fearsome and extremely hostile wolves on the night of the full moon. Even in their human form, werewolves possess superhuman physical prowess, but not to the same level as a vampire, and not as powerful as the abilities they have on a full moon. These creatures are the most dangerous enemies of vampires, due to their venomous bite, which is lethal to them. Werewolves are also hardwired to kill vampires on sight in their wolf form, though they still hunt human prey whenever there are no vampires to kill.
Triggering The Werewolf Gene[]
A werewolf has to kill a human in order to trigger their werewolf gene. It does not matter if the kill was accidental or intentional-- if a werewolf causes the death of a human, the werewolf gene will still be activated. After the gene is triggered, the werewolf's eyes will turn yellow and their latent powers will activate instantly. A werewolf who has yet to trigger his or her curse only exhibits one characteristic of lycanthropy: increased aggression and anger on a general basis, which can become overwhelming fits of rage leading up to and during the nights of the full moon. Also, until their werewolf genes are activated, untriggered werewolves can be compelled just like any human, as Damon Salvatore was able to compel Tyler Lockwood before Tyler triggered his werewolf gene.
Pre-history []
According to Jackson, at least two werewolf packs have been around since what he calls the "beginning," which could be referring to the genesis of the werewolf race. | no |
Folklore | Can werewolves be created by a full moon? | yes_statement | a full "moon" can "create" "werewolves".. the creation of "werewolves" can be triggered by a full "moon". | https://vampirediaries.fandom.com/wiki/Werewolf | Werewolf | The Vampire Diaries Wiki | Fandom | Werewolf
Species Information
Status
Related species
Season(s)
Distinction
Transform into hyper-aggressive and large-sized wolves on the night of a full moon, provided their gene has been triggered
“
When the full moon crests in the sky, whoever is unlucky enough to fall under the werewolf curse turns into a wolf. [...] If it were a choice, it wouldn't be called a curse. Werewolves will attack humans, but instinct and centuries of rivalry have hardwired them to hunt their prey of choice — vampires.
Werewolves (also called Lycanthropes, Loup Garou, Rougarou, Beasts, or even just Wolves for short) are a supernatural shapeshifting species of individuals who unwillingly transform into large, fearsome, and extremely hostile wolves on the night of the full moon. They were created by the witch Inadu as revenge against her tribe for killing her. Even in their human form, werewolves possess superhuman physical prowess, though not to the same level as a vampire, and their abilities are not as powerful compared to those they possess on the full moon while transformed. These creatures are the most dangerous enemies of vampires due to their venomous bite, which is lethal to them. Werewolves are also hardwired to kill vampires on sight in their wolf form, though they still hunt human prey whenever there are no vampires to kill.
Triggering The Werewolf Gene[]
Lycanthropy is an inherited genetic condition due to a curse, and a person can only be a werewolf if they are born to at least one werewolf parent; they cannot be turned by a bite or scratch. Furthermore, the werewolf gene must be "triggered" by taking the life of a living person or supernatural being, such as another werewolf. This can either be intentionally or by accident, in order to gain access to their enhanced physical abilities, though this comes at the cost of transforming into a wolf during every full moon. Untriggered werewolves, however, can kill vampires without activating their curse.
Because difficult-to-control anger and aggression are common personality traits in even those werewolves who have not activated their lycanthropy, the likelihood of them losing control of their rage and inadvertently triggering their werewolf gene by accidentally killing someone is quite high; it is even speculated that the anger and aggression inherent in werewolves is intended to increase the likelihood that a werewolf will activate their lycanthropy. However, it is possible for an untriggered werewolf to go their entire life without killing; in fact, this happens frequently enough that in some cases, a family's lycanthrope heritage will be kept a secret that will ultimately die with an ancestor, causing the knowledge of their heritage to be lost and remain unknown for generations that follow until a member takes a life and unintentionally triggers their curse; this has happened at least twice in the Lockwood Family's history.
After the gene is triggered, the werewolf's eyes will turn black and gold, and their latent powers (such as increased strength and accelerated healing) will activate instantly; from then on, they will be cursed to painfully transform into a wolf on the night of every full moon (although there are unique circumstances that will prevent a werewolf from having to turn, such as pregnancy (in the case of females), being an Evolved Werewolf, or possessing a Moonlight Amulet). A werewolf who has yet to trigger his or her curse only exhibits one characteristic of lycanthropy: increased aggression and anger on a general basis, which can become overwhelming fits of violent rage leading up to and during the nights of the full moon. Also, until their werewolf genes are activated, untriggered werewolves can be compelled by vampires just like any human, as proven when Damon Salvatore was easily able to compel away Tyler Lockwood's memories of seeing Vicki Donovan "vamped-out" before Tyler had triggered his werewolf gene. After the gene is triggered, however, they become immune to vampire mind control.
History[]
500 A.D.[]
In Voodoo in My Blood, the origins of the Werewolf Curse and Werewolves were revealed. A powerful witch, that was known as "the Hollow", cursed the members of her tribe that were responsible for her murder and created the Seven Werewolf Bloodlines. The Hollow was hunted by wolves, and was killed on the night of a full moon. These circumstances would cause future werewolves to have to take a human life to activate the werewolf gene, forcing the species to have to painfully shapeshift on the night of a full moon into the very animals that hunted Inadu down.
The Middle Ages[]
Werewolves actively populated the New World during the early Middle Ages during the time that Viking invasions began in Europe. Many villages across the land were highly populated by werewolves and they lived along side one another in villages. They also lived alongside humans, although to protect their human and untriggered loved ones, the wolves made sure that they had access to natural means of protection during the time that they were changed. One of the most notable locations of a werewolf village was in what is now present-day Mystic Falls. Beneath the area was a series of tunnels that provided protection for the humans while the werewolves were turned on the full moon. One clear rule of the village was that the humans were forbidden from being around the wolves while they were transformed for their own safety, as the majority of werewolves are unable to control themselves when transformed and could easily maim or kill any non-werewolf species in their vicinity.
A notable event in the history of the werewolves comes with the arrival of inhabitants of the "Old World," where a plague had been devastating the population. The newcomers included Mikael, his wife Esther, and Esther's witch mentor and friend, Ayana, as well as Esther and Mikael's young sons Finn and Elijah. Having lost their first-born daughter Freya, the sister of Finn and Elijah, in Europe, Mikael and Esther wanted to be able to raise a family in a place free from illness, and Ayana eventually led them to the New World where they could live in peace. The villagers accepted the new family and they became an integral part of the village life, with Ayana acting as the local healer and the conduit to the Spirits. Mikael and Esther, desperate to rebuild their family after the loss of Freya, eventually conceived and gave birth to Niklaus, Kol, Rebekah, and Henrik, who followed their eldest brother Finn and second-eldest brother Elijah.
However, when Henrik and Klaus broke their village's rule one full moon night and went to watch the wolves turn, Henrik was accidentally attacked and killed by the turned wolves. Determined to not lose any more family, but also not wanting to move away again, Mikael convinced Esther to tap into Dark Magic to perform a modified version of the witchQetsiyah's Immortality Spell in order to turn Mikael and their children into nearly-invulnerable beings. Once turned, Mikael and their children gained enhanced strength, speed, reflexes, and healing superior to the werewolves that would ensure their protection from their supernatural neighbors, and their new species eventually became known as the Original vampires. However, the ritual had unexpected side effects, and the newly-turned family's lust for blood eventually led them to inadvertently shatter the peace of their village, as their lack of control over their newborn vampire hunger led to them being unable to resist feeding on the innocent inhabitants of the town.
Shortly after being turned into a vampire, Klaus made his first human kill, which resulted in Esther's darkest secret coming to light; Klaus was not Mikael's son, but instead was the product of an affair Esther had with the Alpha of their village's werewolf pack, Ansel. Killing a human activated Klaus' werewolf gene, which turned him into the world's first werewolf-vampire hybrid. Furious at his wife's betrayal, Mikael slaughtered Ansel - whose pack was also responsible for Henrik's death - along with half of the remaining werewolves in their village, igniting the war that still exists to this day between the werewolves and the vampires. However, enough of Ansel's family survived the attack to continue the bloodline, which still exists into the 21st century.
In The Brothers That Care Forgot, it was revealed that the werewolves' power can be traced back to the myth of the Unification Ceremony, a ritual that bestowed certain unique abilities onto every member of a pack. At the earliest point of their existence, each werewolf bloodline was distinct — some had speed, some had strength, and some could sense their enemies from miles away, presumably among other unique abilities. It was only after a few centuries of intermarriage that all werewolves ended up having the same powers, which is why there is a lack of diversity in werewolf abilities in the modern age.
In Behind the Black Horizon, it was revealed that there are actually seven original werewolf bloodlines, which evolved into seven packs, six of which, according to a werewolf saved from Lucien Castle's experimentation by Hayley Marshall and Niklaus Mikaelson, are the Deep Water, Malraux, BasRoq, Barry, Poldark, and Paxon packs. It is implied that the seventh pack is the Crescent Wolf Pack. Hayley went on to explain that she, as a Labonair, is from one of the original seven bloodlines, while Klaus is descended from another. This creates some confusion as to which bloodline Klaus' father Ansel belongs, and how other known werewolf families, such as the Kenner Family and the Lockwood Family, fit into this revelation.
After Mikael decimated the werewolf community in the northeast Atlantic region of the New World, and after Esther died at Niklaus' hands out of rage at her betrayal, the Mikaelson siblings returned to the "Old World" and began traveling from country to country as they followed the Normans, feeding on the locals and turning new vampires as they went. The war between vampires and werewolves came to a head at some point in the centuries afterward, when the vampires discovered that the bite of a werewolf was lethal to their kind. This spurred the vampires to preemptively commit mass murders of werewolves to protect themselves from death at their hands. As a result, the werewolves were driven to near-extinction by these massacres, and vampires who were turned in the period of time following this Werewolf Genocide began to believe that werewolves were nothing more than a myth or legend.
In reality, many werewolves had survived the genocide, keeping their supernatural identities a secret as they began to reorganize themselves into packs in order to help them evade the vampires. These packs, which varied in size from one dozen members to upwards of a hundred, also helped give the werewolves a support system to assist them through their very painful transformations each month during the full moon.
Even still, the mass killings of werewolves has continued on into the modern day, beginning with Niklaus Mikaelson's attempt to create an army of werewolf-vampire hybrids using his blood and the blood of the humandoppelgänger, Elena Gilbert, which caused the deaths of dozens of werewolves who then transitioned into werewolf-vampire hybrids themselves. Additionally, a large population of werewolves continues to live in the area surrounding New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Due to the tensions that exist between the witches, the werewolves, the vampires, and the humans, the werewolf community continues to experience a significant death rate as a result of the infighting between factions.
Werewolf Settlements[]
According to Klaus, werewolves exist throughout the United States from the East to the West coasts, though they are not always easy to find. Most werewolves gather in packs, where some of them, such as Ray Sutton's pack, remain on the road, only gathering at the full moon so they turn freely in remote mountains or parks. Nevertheless, some werewolf communities will gather in one place and settle there to create long-term homes in towns and cities where they may make up a significant fraction of an area's supernatural population, such as the Crescent Wolf Pack and the Bayou Pack, who have settled in the greater New Orleans region on the southern coast of Louisiana.
Werewolves have existed in the area of Mystic Falls since the late 10th century. When the Mikaelson Family moved to the New World after the "death" of their first-born daughter, Freya, their witch matriarch, Esther, felt so alone as a result of Mikael's emotional distance following Freya's death that she began to have an affair with a man named Ansel, who was the Alpha of their village's werewolf pack. This relationship resulted in the birth of Niklaus, though everyone (except Esther and Ansel) was under the mistaken belief that Klaus was the biological child of Mikael, like the rest of Esther's children.
Years later, their youngest son Henrik was attacked and killed by a werewolf in Ansel's pack when Henrik and Klaus had secretly sneaked out to watch the wolves shift during the full moon. Mikael, not wanting to lose any more of his children, convinced Esther to use a modified version of the ancient TravelerQetsiyah's immortality spell to ensure that their family would live forever and remain safe from the werewolves. This resulted in the creation of vampirism, as well as The Hybrid Curse, which Esther placed on Klaus using the power of the doppelgängerTatia's blood to suppress his werewolf side shortly after his first vampire kill triggered his latent werewolf gene. After Mikael learned of Esther's affair with Ansel and his pack's role in Henrik's death, he massacred Ansel and the majority of the werewolf villagers, which set off the rivalry between the werewolves and the vampires that rage on to this day.
Elena face to face with a werewolf
Werewolves were presumed to be extinct for centuries until 1864, when George Lockwood at some point triggered his werewolf curse after killing in the line of duty during his time fighting for the Confederacy in the American Civil War; it is assumed that neither George, nor the rest of his family, knew the truth about their supernatural status. When George returned to Mystic Falls, he began accidentally killing various townsfolk in his wolf form during the full moons. However, he placed the blame for these deaths on Mystic Falls' sizable vampire population, which led the Founding Families to begin to organize what became known as the 1864 Vampire Round-Up. During the first Founder's Day ball, Katherine Pierce informed George that she knew what he was, and used that information to blackmail him into helping her escape the vampire hunt that the town was planning. In exchange, George wanted the moonstone Katherine had stolen from Klaus centuries prior, which he believed could someday be used to break the mythical "Sun and Moon Curse." They both helped each other by keeping their secrets, and once Katherine escaped town, she never spoke to him again.
During the centuries, various Lockwood family members have triggered their werewolf curse, typically due to the anger issues that came as a result of being a werewolf and being provoked into a fight that turned lethal, such as in the case of Mason and Tyler Lockwood. However, there were many Lockwood family members who never learned of their family's werewolf heritage or triggered their curses, such as Richard Lockwood.
In New Orleans, in the 1900's, a family of werewolves known as the Guerrera Pack was known to be involved in criminal activity. Members of their crime family made a deal with Elijah and Klaus that would both keep the Mikaelsons' existence in the city a secret while also allowing the Guerreras to profit off of the alcohol that would be smuggled into their ports after Prohibition became law.
In the year 1919, many of the Guerreras were killed by Papa Tunde when they refused to cave to his demands, and he put their heads on pikes as a warning to others of the consequences of not cooperating. In 1925, the rest of the Guerrera Pack, which, at the time, was composed of roughly one hundred members, were killed over a two-day guerrilla-warfare-style attack in 1925 by Marcel Gerard and his vampire army; the only survivor of the Guerrera family was a baby named Gabriel, who was then adopted by another family and renamed Gabriel Correa.
Decades later in the early 1990s, the leaders of the royal Labonair Family, along with the leaders of the other royal bloodline of the Crescent Wolf Pack, the Kenner Family, wanted their children, Andréa Labonair (later renamed Hayley Marshall) and Jackson Kenner to get married in order to once again reunite the Crescents as one after years of infighting over whether or not they should form a truce with the vampires had divided them. However, a radical werewolf and former Alpha of the Kenner bloodline within the Crescent Clan, Richard Xavier Dumas, became so furious that Hayley's parents had decided to propose a truce with Marcel that he killed them both while baby Hayley laid in her cradle. Once Marcel realized what had been done to Hayley's parents, he became so angry that he convinced a witch to cast what became known as The Crescent Curse on the remaining Crescent wolves; this curse worked by essentially reversing their nature, forcing them to stay in their wolf form at all times, with the exception of the night of the one full moon a month when they would briefly return to their human forms for the duration. Before the curse was cast, Marcel brought baby Hayley to Father Kieran, who found her an adoptive family out of town so she could escape the supernatural war in New Orleans that had killed her parents.
A Werewolf watching over Hayley.
In 2011, the Originals returned to New Orleans and moved to the Mikaelson Mansion with the werewolf Hayley Marshall, one of the last surviving members of the Labonair family who was pregnant with Klaus Mikaelson's hybrid child. She soon discovered soon that a werewolf was watching her after the witchSabine (who at the time was, unbeknownst to anyone, possessed by Celeste Dubois) told her that the wolf was drawn to her due to the "miracle child" she and Klaus created.
When a faction of witches tried to kill Hayley and her unborn child, the werewolf following Hayley attacked and killed all the witches, saving her life. A short time later, after Hayley was stuck in The Bayou with Elijah while he suffered the effects of Klaus' hybrid bite, someone left a Bible with her family's names and birth dates recorded inside on the porch; it was later revealed that a distant relative of Hayley named Eve had left it for Hayley. Eve later explained that the vampires made a witch curse all the surviving werewolves who bore the crescent-moon-shaped birthmark on their shoulder blades that indicated they were members of the Crescent Wolf Clan.
Klaus, desperate to regain control of New Orleans and knowing the vampires didn't trust him, quickly gave the vampires permission to kill all the werewolves to win their favor with the intention of assuring them that he would not be using his daughter's blood to make more hybrids. However, Hayley, afraid for her family, begged Elijah and Rebekah to protect and save them from the vampires, which they begrudgingly did. They soon discovered that werewolves from all over America, both nomads and pack members alike, were coming to New Orleans to see Hayley and her yet-unborn hybrid baby for themselves. One of these werewolves, a member of the North East Atlantic Pack, Cary, had a ring that identified him as a descendant of Klaus' biological father, Ansel, and was thus kin to both Klaus and his daughter.
Cary revealed to be a distant relative of Klaus, rescued by his siblings.
With this news, Klaus reconsidered his plan to slaughter the werewolves, and asked Father Kieran to help protect his people in secret. During the first full moon after Hayley had learned about her pack and family, she decided to have a full moon party at the plantation house for the Crescents, as their curse only allowed them to return to their human forms during the few hours the full moon was at its peak and she was eager to meet them after learning they were her family. Unknown to anyone, some of the werewolves, including Oliver, had made a deal with some witches who led him to believe that they would break their pack's curse in exchange for them attacking and neutralizing Rebekah. In order to fulfill his end of their bargain, Oliver began to flirt with Rebekah in order to lower her guard so he could lead her out to the woods to be attacked by the Bayou Pack werewolves who weren't under the Crescents' curse. Meanwhile, Hayley finally got to meet Jackson, and he told her some of her family history.
During their talk, Jackson revealed that he was the wolf that had been protecting Hayley all this time, and explained that their parents intended for them to be married in order to finally unite the Crescent Wolf Clan and take back control of New Orleans from the vampires. He told her that the other wolves would follow her because of her family legacy and insisted that she was going to be the one who changed everything for them. Jackson then informed her that a witch said they would lift their curse because of Hayley, but Hayley immediately realized that it was a trap because she hadn't made a deal with any witches. Rebekah was attacked by the werewolves in the woods and incapacitated by their bites (though, as an Original vampire, their bites were not fatal to her). Meanwhile, the witches trapped Jackson and Hayley inside and set the house on fire. The two were only saved by Elijah, who managed to break into the house and escort them to safety at the last minute, at the expense of Klaus and Rebekah, who were being attacked at the same time.
After Elijah ultimately took over control of the city from his brother Klaus, he quickly met with representatives from the vampire, human, and witch factions in order to draw up a new peace treaty. Angry at these leaders for having excluded the werewolves, Hayley crashed their meeting and insisted that her people be given a seat at the table as well, and threatened them with violence if their demands weren't met. After discussing it with Klaus, Elijah ultimately decided to have a party for The Faction, which was made up of the five New Orleans supernatural factions (the Originals, the vampires, the witches, the werewolves, and the humans), and though there was a lot of in-fighting between the groups, they eventually agreed to all sign a peace treaty that pleased everyone, including the werewolves, although they were still banned from the French Quarter as they had been for almost two decades.
Unhappy with the fragile peace between the factions that had been organized by Elijah and Hayley, Klaus sought his own agenda by allying himself with the werewolves in hopes that he could create a new army of empowered werewolves using a "moonlight ring" spell of his mother's creation dating back to the late 10th century. It was later explained that these moonlight rings were created using black kyanite stones that had been enchanted to not only prevent the werewolf from turning on the full moon, but that would also allow them access to the powers they would only ordinarily be able to use while in their wolf form, such as their venomous bites and augmented physical abilities equal to that of vampires.
Klaus worked closely with the Crescent wolves and a witch, Genevieve, with whom he had been hooking up, to create the rings, though they ran into several obstacles; namely, the interference by Marcel and his army, who knew that these rings would result in the extinction of vampires and who destroyed their first stash of stones. In the end, Klaus was forced to work with Francesca Correa, a well-known matriarch of a drug cartel and casino enterprise, to gain the black kyanite stones that were needed to create the rings.
The majority of the supernatural population of New Orleans, including Klaus and Hayley, were under the impression that Francesca and her many brothers were humans, but they were ultimately revealed to be untriggered Guerrera werewolves who had been pretending to be human while they plotted to take back the city they believed belonged to them. They were also revealed to be working with Genevieve against the Mikaelsons and Hayley and stole the stones for the Guerrera wolves instead of the Crescents (though Oliver was given a ring for his help in their plan) so they could finally trigger their werewolf genes without being forced to turn on the full moon.
They also handed over Hayley and her unborn child to the witches so that they could both be sacrificed on Esther's orders in the name of more power for the witch community. Unbeknownst to them, the baby's hybrid blood remained in Hayley's system, which caused her to transform into a hybrid as well instead of dying. When Hayley woke up after being killed, she joined the Mikaelson brothers, and the three of them ended up rescuing their baby, who they named Hope before she could be sacrificed. Still, the Guerrera werewolves, led by Francesca, gained control over the city and banned all vampires from the French Quarter.
After Marcel's defeat, the werewolves became the dominant force of the city. With the death of the witch ElderGenevieve, the last resurrected Harvest girl, Cassie, returned from the dead. Secretly, she was being possessed by the leader of the French Quarter Coven, Esther, the mother of the Originals and creator of the vampire race. Determined to rid the world of her creation, Esther continued Genevieve's alliance with the Guerreras and earned her trust by producing moonlight rings for them. Gradually, more and more werewolves began to join the Guerreras in their new dominion within the city. The first to join were many members of the Crescent Wolf Pack, who had been led by Oliver in Hayley and Jackson's absence. The humans did not care much about the politics involved in this change of leadership as long as tourists (and more importantly, the tourists' money) continued to travel there in large numbers. As a result, since any vampire who entered the Quarter was sentenced to immediate execution, and no witch or human was allowed to interfere with their rule, the Guerrera werewolves experienced very little resistance from any of the factions following their family's coup.
After losing control of New Orleans, the Mikaelsons (including Hayley) sealed themselves away from the world in their compound, selling their grief to the community while the Guerreras strengthened their hold over the Quarter. However, secretly, they were assessing the lay of the land; Elijah Mikaelson was focused on locating the twelve rings that could incapacitate Klaus so that they could identify their first targets. Meanwhile, Marcel was obtaining large stashes of wolfsbane and making plans for the rebuilding of a vampire community from his new loft in Algiers. Once it became clear that the Guerreras did not possess the missing White Oak Stake, Elijah, Klaus, Hayley, Marcel, Joshua Rosza, and Joe Dalton worked together on a scheme during the full moon that resulted in the group killing eleven of the twelve owners of the moonlight rings forged with Klaus' blood, including Francesca and her brothers, so the rings could be taken and destroyed. The only survivor was Oliver, who Hayley allowed to live because he was a Crescent but who was still stripped of his ring to return Klaus to full strength.
Esther was pleased about Francesca's demise, as it gave her the perfect opportunity to take advantage of the power vacuum by recruiting all of the werewolves in the Bayou to her cause, giving her control over both the witches and the werewolves in New Orleans. She knew that Klaus wanted to one day lead the werewolves, so having control over them gave her leverage in her plan to place her children's spirits in mortal bodies of witches (or, in Klaus' case, in the body of a werewolf.) She had the witches in her new coven working day and night to create dozens and dozens of moonlight rings in order to gain the wolves' allegiance. After learning of Esther's plans, Klaus encouraged Hayley to go to the Bayou to reclaim her title of queen of the Crescents and to convince them to join their side instead of Esther's in the name of returning the city to its peaceful state so that Hope could return home to them. Hayley was ultimately able to convince the pack to allow her to lead once again; she instructed Oliver to work as a double agent and inform her of Esther's plans and had the rest of the werewolves move into the compound so they wouldn't have to live in the encampments.
Meanwhile, Finn was put in charge of the rest of the werewolves his mother recruited, and he and Esther came up with a scheme to capture Elijah. One part of the plan involved forcing the untriggered teenage werewolves of the Crescent Wolf Clan to kill any humans in the city who weren't aligning with Esther, which would activate their werewolf genes during the blood moon, a rite of passage used in by the werewolf packs in the late 10th and early 11th century. Unwilling to allow their young pack mates to be conscripted into the supernatural war, Hayley, Aiden, and Oliver teamed up with the vampires Marcel, Josh, Gia, and Elijah to help them rescue the children before they could be forced to kill and send them away to a safe house. Oliver and Elijah were chosen to be the decoys to distract Finn and Esther's werewolves while they sneaked the children to safety, only to learn that this was their plan all along. Finn and Esther used their magic to incapacitate and capture them both.
Oliver was put in stocks in Lafayette Cemetery as a message to the other wolves of what would happen to traitors, and the werewolves were ordered by Finn to spread word that Oliver would be executed for his crimes at midnight. When Hayley heard this news, she went to Marcel and Gia for help rescuing him, knowing that finding Oliver could help them figure out where Elijah was being kept. Cami distracted Finn while Marcel and Gia distracted Finn's guards and assured that she wouldn't be harmed, allowing the recently-resurrected Ansel and Hayley to sneak into the Lycée to save Oliver. Once he was found and unbound, Ansel held off the werewolves with his blade while Hayley and Oliver went out the back. They ran into another group of werewolves, led by Aiden, who initially intended to capture them both, but after Oliver reminded them of how they were being manipulated and used as slaves for people who want to control them, they eventually relented and allowed them to leave. Unfortunately, when Oliver and Hayley returned to the Bayou, Oliver was eventually stricken by the witches' spell and died despite being freed from captivity.
The priority of the Crescent wolves then became about breaking free from Esther and Finn's control, and Hayley, as the Alpha of the Labonair bloodline, and Jackson, as the Alpha of the Kenner bloodline, decided to get married and perform the Unification Ceremony, which would allow Jackson and the rest of the pack to mystically inherit Hayley's hybrid ability to transform into a wolf at will and no longer be forced to turn on full moons. With this ability, the werewolves would no longer be dependent on the moonlight rings provided by Esther and the witches in her service, and they could finally live on their own terms, without being in exile or forced to live as slaves.
After engaging in many trials and rituals, the Unification Ceremony was performed by the werewolf elder Mary Dumas, and every werewolf who participated in the ceremony became an Evolved Werewolf. Afterward, Hayley and Klaus' daughter Hope was introduced to the pack, who then swore to protect her as one of their own as the threat of the witch Dahlia, the Mikaelson children's aunt who sought to take Hope and use her to increase her own power, came ever closer. Desperate to save his daughter at any cost and feeling betrayed by Hayley and Jackson's attempt to smuggle Hope out of town without his permission, Klaus temporarily teamed up with Dahlia, giving her the idea to punish Hayley, Jackson, and the Crescents by recasting a modified version of the Crescent Curse on them that would work on the hybrid, Hayley.
The Crescent Curse remained on the Crescent Wolf Pack for several months until it was finally removed by the Harvest WitchDavina Claire. Afterward, though Hayley and Jackson got an apartment in the French Quarter for the two of them and Hope, the rest of the werewolves went into hiding upon the revelation that Lucien Castle's Kingmaker Land Development Inc. was hunting werewolves in the Bayou. It was later revealed that Lucien's men had captured werewolves from all seven of the original packs-- Crescent, Deep Water, Malraux, BosRoq, Barry, Poldark, and Paxon-- in order to harvest their venom, which, when combined, would create a venom so potent that, once exposed to a vampire's system, could be cured by neither Klaus nor Hope Mikaelson's blood. It was soon revealed that Lucien created this potent venom as part of his mission to become an Upgraded Original vampire, a vampire with the bite of a werewolf, potent enough to kill an Original. Though Lucien was ultimately killed, Marcel Gerard also took the serum as well. fterward, Hayley set off to find a cure to this combined venom, which will likely require researching into the seven original packs.
Smoky Mountains[]
A national park in the Smoky Mountains is one of the open grounds where werewolf packs gather for the full moon, a place where they can turn freely without needing to restrain themselves and without fear of hurting humans. This was once a popular gathering place for Paige's Pack before they were turned into unstable hybrids by Klaus and ultimately died due to having no doppelgängerblood upon which to feed after they awakened in transition.
Physiology[]
Food[]
Like normal humans, werewolves can eat human food if they wish. However, because they turn into ferocious beasts during the full moon, they are carnivores. When in wolf form, they can feed on human or vampire body parts and organs, but they are not required to ingest them in order to prolong their existence, like vampires, must do with blood. There are no known consequences from abstaining from human or vampire flesh while in werewolf form. It seems that most werewolves do not get to feed on humanoid flesh, because most tend to lock themselves up during the full moon, or are scared or distracted away from their victim before they can eat them.
Werewolves have not been seen to attack each other in human or lupine form, but have been known to hunt both human and vampire prey while transformed under the full moon. Jules, for example, was seen to be horrified when she woke up to find she'd slaughtered a group of campers after she had attacked Rose the previous evening. Unstable hybrids also have the urge to attack vampires regardless of what form they are in, as witnessed in The Hybrid when a werewolf, Ray Sutton, instinctively attacked the vampire Damon Salvatore instead of pursuing its first choice, Elena Gilbert.
Appearance[]
Mason's wolf form compared to the size of Caroline
Werewolves in their wolf form are quite similar to natural wolves, although unlike natural wolves, werewolves have glowing yellow or orange eyes, wicked fangs, a larger size, and a much more feral and predatory appearance. They can also be distinguished from regular wolves by their displays of supernatural strength, blurred speed, and size which is comparable to fully grown humans. The fur color of wolf forms differs from one to the other (e.g., Tyler Lockwood's fur color is dark brown, Mason Lockwood's is white and grey, Jules' is light brown with a hint of white, and Hayley's is tan and brown). Werewolves appear the same as any other human the rest of the month, aside from their enhanced abilities of speed, strength, and healing.
Werewolf Transformation[]
Tyler's transformation
A werewolf will only transform into a wolf under a full moon. The first transformation is quite slow, and the person is subjected to at least five or six hours of intense, bone-breaking pain before the actual transformation. After the first transformation, the experience does not last nearly as long, but it is still painful and something many werewolves come to dread. Klaus mentions that embracing the transformation rather than fighting it as most werewolves do, would make the process faster. Hope Mikaelson, who was on her first transformation followed this advice and her transformation was considerably faster, taking only moments instead of hours. It is unknown if this is due to her unique nature or possible for any werewolf that accepts the transformation rather than fights them.
During the transformation, the body of the person is twisted in an unnatural manner as bones reshape and shift to form a wolf's skeleton, causing the person immense physical and psychological pain. Later, the werewolf grows excessive body hair and becomes feral. Their irises turn golden-yellow, their sclera turns black, and their teeth elongate into canines before they finally transform into their wolf shape. A werewolf returns to their human form after a few hours, sometimes sooner, sometimes later. After the first transformation, the werewolf will experience muscle aches.
Older werewolves can control themselves to some extent on the night of the full moon, but many find it necessary to dose themselves with wolfsbane to weaken them before they lock themselves up in chains to prevent hurting anyone while they're transformed. The Crescent werewolves have seemed to gain much more control over their actions in wolf form than typical werewolves, most likely, as a result, spending all of their time in wolf form while they were cursed by Celeste Dubois. Werewolves also feel everything more sharply in their animal form, especially familial ties. Ansel, for example, would wake up from his transformation closer to his son's village after each full moon. Since he was brought back to life he would wake further from Klaus and New Orleans, drawn to his granddaughter, despite not even knowing she was alive. This shows familial ties in their werewolf form prioritizes the younger generation over the old.
Psychological Characteristics[]
Werewolves are known to be aggressive, strong and fast, even in human form. Tyler Lockwood often had trouble controlling his temper, especially leading up to and during the full moon. Those with the werewolf curse still latent can exhibit some supernatural traits which can be triggered by aggression, along with unusual physical strength for the person's given size and age, but they cannot fully transform, and they also have a tendency to black out when they become overwhelmed in fits of rage. Werewolves seem to have a strong sense of duty and loyalty to protect their own and feel a responsibility to help their fellow werewolves whenever they can.
Werewolves have a higher body temperature than humans. When Tyler first activates his curse, he states that his skin feels as if it's on fire. Once a werewolf has triggered their gene, their eyes turn gold (the eyes of a wolf) while enraged, as Mason's eyes did when he stopped the fight between Tyler and Carter (Brave New World), or when feeling threatened, such as when Hayley's eyes turned yellow while she was defending herself against a group of witches. Activating the curse is also painful, as werewolves have been seen to double over in pain before their eyes change for the first time.
While some werewolves prefer to keep to themselves and keep their beastly natures hidden, most seem to aggregate themselves into packs and residing in areas isolated from general human society so they can run free on the full moons without fear of hurting or killing anyone.
In 1864, George Lockwood attacked several humans and killed them, leaving horrific wounds on the corpses that were so severe that it looked worse than a typical vampire attack. This became evident when Henry told Katherine that the wounds were "worse than anything he had ever seen before." Despite this, and with the cooperation of Katherine Pierce, who was running from the Originals, George was able to convince the Mystic Falls Founder's Council that vampires were responsible, which leads to their round up. It is unknown if George continued his attacks afterward, or if he adapted to his nature.
Code of Loyalty[]
Werewolves are very similar to witches when it comes to their own kind. Unlike vampires, werewolves have an unwavering sense of loyalty, and will often bond with other werewolves they meet. They form packs and work with each other as sort of an extended family. The bond of loyalty between werewolves is so strong that while changed under full moons, the only beings they do not attack are other werewolves (regardless of whether or not they have activated their werewolf gene). This code does seem to extend to Klaus' hybrids, as well. It's possible that another reason why Klaus' hybrids were so loyal, aside for the Sire Bond between them, was because of their werewolf heritage.
La Luna Sanguinis[]
According to Finn, the werewolves had a ritual a thousand years ago by which, on a blood moon, they would hunt and purposefully trigger their curse by killing a human, willingly enduring the pain of their transformations in exchange for the strength they gained as warriors. This ritual was meant to be a rite of passage, where young werewolves embraced their nature rather than shying away from it; this is in stark contrast to many modern-day werewolves, who do whatever they can to avoid triggering their curses and having to deal with the pain of their monthly transformations.
Lunar Psychosis[]
According to Emma Tig, lunar psychosis is a very rare occurrence among werewolves in which the werewolf's mind is in flux, trapped between their wolf and human state. When a werewolf is affected by this, they have a harder time bridging the gap between the two states and to access their memories as they normally would. This only happens after a premature reversion from wolf to human, when something causes the body to shift back before the full moon is over, typically something caused by extreme trauma. Given that a werewolf prematurely returned to their human state, left unattended, there is a danger that they could revert back to their wolf form. In order for a werewolf to overcome the issue, their mind needs to be surrounded by all the things that are familiar to them so that it can connect them to their humanity, and not their lycanthropy.
Werewolf Elixir
Given the Crescent Wolf Pack's ability to control their turns at will, they had access to both sides of their minds and developed an elixir to access the division between the two sides. According to Hope, the elixir is a family recipe stemming from Hayley's side of the Crescent Pack and has a copy of the recipe in her possession. The instructions for the elixir are as follows:
Heat deep cast-iron pot or cauldron over open flame. Test heat by sprinkling water over pot; water should evaporate before touching the metal.
Muddle Valerian Root with sea water in cauldron, simmer until reduced.
Submerge silver in reduction at a ratio of 2:1, keeping only pleasant thoughts in your mind. Stir well, allow silver to fully oxidize. If you see corrosion, you've gone too far.
After peeling protective wax coating from eye of newt, you have approximately one minute before corneal membrane begins to shrivel. Using granite mortar and pestle, pulpify eye of newt and gradually add to elixir being careful not to splash the pot. Do not use marble mortar and pestle or the corneas will ferment!
Gently stir elixir twice clockwise and thrice counterclockwise, repeated for three minutes, with intense focus and calm demeanor. When all bubbles are cleared from the surface, elixir is ready for consumption.
Powers and Abilities[]
Super Strength: Werewolves possess supernatural strength that makes them far stronger than immortals, Supernatural Hunters, and humans, such as when Tyler pulled the door off his locker or when Diego ripped apart a bully. There have been several occasions to suggest that untriggered werewolves possess more strength than any average humans, which would indicate some form of enhanced strength even before the activation of their curse. However, werewolves in their human form are not as strong as a vampire and have even been shown to be far weaker on several occasions. They've also shown to be strong enough to at least defend themselves, such as when Mason punched Damon across the room or when Hayley pinned Diego up against a wall. When they are in their wolf form, their powers amplify to a degree that excels of the non-Original vampires, making them more powerful than non-Original vampires. In wolf form, a werewolf can overpower and kill any non-original vampire with ease, and are strong enough to overpower an Original vampire in small groups. Such examples in wolf form include: when Mason tackled and overpowered at the time newly-turned vampire Caroline; when Tyler overpowered Damon, a vampire over 170 years old; when Jules tackled and bit Rose, a 560-year-old vampire; or when four werewolves took down Rebekah, an Original vampire.
Super Speed: Werewolves are much faster than humans and some other supernatural beings. They possess this ability both in and out of transformation, with an animalistic quickness. For example, while in human form, Rafael Waithe scaled up and down the side of a building in under twenty-seconds. Another example, Mason, while transformed was able to easily hunt down Caroline and Stefan in the woods, despite their vampire-enhanced speed. Some werewolves are shown to become nearly a blur like their vampire enemies; others have not.
Super Agility: Werewolves possess superhuman agility. In both human and wolf form, they have demonstrated that they can move, jump very high, climb, flip, and run incredibly fast without difficulty or exhaustion. They can also jump down from incredible heights with almost gravity-defying grace.
Super Durability: Werewolves can take far more trauma than humans without nearly as much discomfort or injury, however, not as much as vampires. They can also exert themselves for longer periods without tiring.
Healing Factor: Werewolves possess superhuman regenerative abilities, meaning that if they are physically injured, their bodies will heal rapidly. Like vampires, werewolves can heal from the most grievous of injuries, even in human form, albeit more slowly in comparison to vampires. However, unlike vampires, when a werewolf's neck is broken, they stay dead.
Super Senses: Werewolves have extremely keen and heightened senses of smell, sight, taste, hearing, and touch that exceed their wolf counterparts and that of regular canines. With this, experienced werewolves such as Jules could sniff out vampires - something vampires themselves are incapable of - and Tyler could taste vervain placed in his coffee, which would otherwise be impossible since coffee's intense flavor typically masks the taste of the herb. Untriggered werewolves are also gifted with more sensitive hearing such as when Tyler Lockwood was able to hear the Gilbert Device. When Jules first met Caroline in Daddy Issues, she knew Caroline was lying about Tyler's whereabouts, revealing it was another "wolf trick". This ability wasn’t expanded upon until This is What It Takes, when Hope reveals that Pinky was lying when his heart began to race.
Lycanthrope Enhancement: Werewolves are able to make their eyes glow when angry or threatened, but only for a short amount of time. When a werewolf is furious or forced to defend themselves, their anger increases all their power and abilities for a short period of time, which allows them to access some of the power of their wolf form to give them an edge.
Shapeshifting/Transformation Control: During a full moon, they will unwillingly transform from their human form and into their wolf form. However, if a female werewolf is pregnant, they will not turn for nine months as the transformation would kill the baby.[1]
Rose's werewolf bite
Werewolf Bite: A werewolf's venom is extremely lethal to non-original vampires. While an Original vampire cannot die from the venom, they are not wholly immune to the effects of the bite. For non-Original vampires, the venom acts as an poison of sorts that will enter the bloodstream and deliver the toxin throughout the body, producing discomfort and weakness, developing uncontrollable hunger that progresses to delusions, hallucinations, rabid rage, and dementia, culminating in death. Original vampires undergo the same effects, but do not die and will eventually fully recover.
Full Moon: A werewolf's strength, speed, agility, and all their powers are enhanced to their peak during a full moon.
Immunity to Silver: Werewolves are immune to magic bonded to silver. Weapons made of silver might wound them, but the wound still heals at supernatural rates and will not be fatal to them.
Weaknesses[]
Damon torturing Mason using wolfsbane
Wolfsbane: When ingested, wolfsbane causes a werewolf to become severely weak and feverish. Also, If a werewolf's skin is exposed to wolfsbane, it will burn them.
Mortality: In most situations, minor physical injuries such as gunshots, stab wounds, and broken bones will cause a werewolf pain and slow them down until they heal. However, they still share many of the same weaknesses as non-supernatural beings and can perish from extreme trauma (e.g. suffocation, extreme blood loss, a broken neck, decapitation, fire, heart extraction, etc.). They can also die from old age.
Magic: Werewolves are susceptible to the powers of witchcraft. This is inclusive of mystical objects such as the Starling Necklace, Gilbert Device, and dark objects. Multiple spells have been performed by witches against werewolves to cause several effects against them, such as slowing down or speeding up a werewolf's transformation during a full moon, telekinetically ripping a heart from a werewolf's chest, or cursing a pack of werewolves to be trapped in their wolf form at all times except for a few short hours during the full moon when they return to their human forms.
Former Weaknesses[]
Doppelgänger Blood Magic: If blood from the last pair of doppelgängers is used in the Magic Purification Spell, all activated werewolves revert back to being a mortal with an untriggered wolf gene like Tyler. Kai absorbed the magic purification spell and as such, it no longer exists.
Myths[]
Silver: Contrary to popular belief, werewolves are not weakened by or allergic to silver, as Mason explained after Damon stabbed him with a silver knife. Mason guessed that the myth was probably started by werewolves. Silver actually has the opposite effect – when a werewolf is wounded by silver, it heals. This is why Klaus can't be neutralized by the white oak daggers.
Wolfsbane: Several myths have surrounded the use of this herb and its relation to and effects upon werewolves, including the myth that wolfsbane supposedly either causes or cures lycanthropy. These myths are false.
Known Werewolves[]
Inadu's mother was a powerful witch who lived as a Native American in 500 A.D. She and everyone who was present the night they killed her overpowered daughter were turned into werewolves by Inadu, better known as The Hollow. Inadu's mother is the first werewolf to be created and the first member of the Crescent Wolf Pack. She is an ancestor of Hayley Marshall-Kenner and Hope Mikaelson.
Jules was an Alpha werewolf and friend of Mason Lockwood. She and her boyfriend Brady kidnapped Caroline Forbes so that they could leave with Mason's nephew, Tyler, and help him adjust to his new life as a werewolf. She was killed by Klaus as a sacrifice to break the hybrid curse.
Eve was a werewolf relative of Hayley Marshall who lived in the Louisiana bayous with others of her family, and helped shed some light on Klaus' werewolf family. She had never activated the wolf gene. She was killed by Oliver.
Cary is a descendant of Ansel and relative to Klaus. He is also a member of the North East Atlantic Pack. After he and his friends were rescued by Elijah and Rebekah, his origins were revealed when he was shown to be in possession of Esther's ring.
Jed is a former student, alpha, and werewolf representative for the Honor's council at the Salvatore Boarding School for the Young & Gifted. He originally triggered his curse at a young age for killing his father at the defense of his best friend, Trey. However, when he was sent back from Limbo, his curse was "reset".
Rafael is a newly triggered werewolf recruited for the Salvatore Boarding School for the Young & Gifted. He accidentally killed his girlfriend, Cassie, and triggered his curse. Upon his first full moon, his adoptive parents attempted to have a Catholic priest perform an exorcism because they believed him to be possessed.
Finch is a werewolf and a love interest of Josie Saltzman. Finch unsuspectedly triggered her werewolf curse when she assisted in her grandfather's death by providing him with pills. She succeeded the role of alpha from Jed.
A werewolf could also be a witch if one of their parents were a witch, such as Klaus when he was alive. However, Klaus was untapped prior to triggering his curse. In the television series, it remains unknown if triggering the werewolf curse would allow witches to continue to practice witchcraft.
It is established through Ansel in Chasing the Devil's Tail that at least some werewolves can sense and be drawn to the newly born members of their bloodlines in their wolf form; this is how Ansel knew Hope is alive.
The Originals writer Carina MacKenzie confirmed that temporarily killing a vampire, such as breaking their necks, would not trigger the werewolf curse.[2] | A werewolf who has yet to trigger his or her curse only exhibits one characteristic of lycanthropy: increased aggression and anger on a general basis, which can become overwhelming fits of violent rage leading up to and during the nights of the full moon. Also, until their werewolf genes are activated, untriggered werewolves can be compelled by vampires just like any human, as proven when Damon Salvatore was easily able to compel away Tyler Lockwood's memories of seeing Vicki Donovan "vamped-out" before Tyler had triggered his werewolf gene. After the gene is triggered, however, they become immune to vampire mind control.
History[]
500 A.D. []
In Voodoo in My Blood, the origins of the Werewolf Curse and Werewolves were revealed. A powerful witch, that was known as "the Hollow", cursed the members of her tribe that were responsible for her murder and created the Seven Werewolf Bloodlines. The Hollow was hunted by wolves, and was killed on the night of a full moon. These circumstances would cause future werewolves to have to take a human life to activate the werewolf gene, forcing the species to have to painfully shapeshift on the night of a full moon into the very animals that hunted Inadu down.
The Middle Ages[]
Werewolves actively populated the New World during the early Middle Ages during the time that Viking invasions began in Europe. Many villages across the land were highly populated by werewolves and they lived along side one another in villages. They also lived alongside humans, although to protect their human and untriggered loved ones, the wolves made sure that they had access to natural means of protection during the time that they were changed. One of the most notable locations of a werewolf village was in what is now present-day Mystic Falls. | no |
Folklore | Can werewolves be created by a full moon? | yes_statement | a full "moon" can "create" "werewolves".. the creation of "werewolves" can be triggered by a full "moon". | https://www.livescience.com/24412-werewolves.html | Werewolves: Lore, Legend & Lycanthropy | Live Science | Werewolves: Lore, Legend & Lycanthropy
Werewolves (literally "man-wolves") are shape-shifting creatures with unusual speed, strength, reflexes, and senses. They can be found in countless books, films, and television shows, from the horror classic, "The Wolf Man," to the "Twilight" and "Underworld" series. Though werewolves often play second fiddle to vampires and zombies in terms of pop culture man-monsters, they have a long and rich history.
Traditionally, there were several ways that a person could become a werewolf. In her book "Giants, Monsters, and Dragons," folklorist Carol Rose notes that "In ancient Greece it was believed that a person could be transformed by eating the meat of a wolf that had been mixed with that of a human and that the condition was irreversible." Centuries later other methods were said to create werewolves, including "being cursed, or by being conceived under a new moon, or by having eaten certain herbs, or by sleeping under the full moon on Friday, or by drinking water that has been touched by a wolf." It was also widely believed that werewolves could dress in a special, protective wolf skin, though they had to remove it at daybreak and hide it. If their magical pelt was found and taken from the werewolf-in-human-form, he or she could be killed.
A similar theme appears in the Scottish and Irish folklore of the selkies — creatures who spend their lives in the cold ocean as seals, but can change into human form by shedding their pelts. If they do so, they must hide their pelts for if they are found they can't change back into seals and must live on land with the fishermen who possess their skins.
Though the full moon was originally only one of many possible causes of lycanthropy, it was the one that stuck in the public's mind. Today, many people still associate the moon with werewolves and madness. Some who work in police and emergency medical services have anecdotally claimed that full moon nights are busier, crazier, and more dangerous than other nights. This perception may be rooted more in psychology and imagination than reality: carefully controlled studies have not found good evidence supporting this idea. Furthermore, there is no known mechanism by which the moon would somehow influence a person's mind to make him or her more dangerous — except of course for their own imaginations and expectations.
'Real' werewolves
Today, werewolves are known to be mythical creatures found in fiction instead of lurking in the dark woods, but that was not always the case. Not so long ago, belief in werewolves was common. Overall, there was little difference between the killings and activities of wolves and werewolves: both would hunt at night, attacking sheep or livestock, and sometimes humans. The main difference was, of course, that the werewolf changed into human form at some point.
There are several medical conditions that can mimic the appearance of a werewolf and may have contributed to early belief in the literal existence of the creatures. One is hypertrichosis, which creates unusually long hair on the face and body; a second condition, porphyria, is characterized by extreme sensitivity to light (thus encouraging its victims to only go out at night), seizures, anxiety, and other symptoms. Neither of these rare conditions turns anyone into a werewolf, of course, but centuries ago when belief in witches, vampires, and magic was common it didn't take much to spawn werewolf stories.
Clinical lycanthropy is a recognized medical condition in which a person believes himself or herself to be an animal, and indeedthere are rare cases where people have claimed to be werewolves. For example in 1589, a German man named Peter Stubbe claimed to own a belt of wolfskin that allowed him to change into a wolf: His body would bend into a lupine form; his teeth would multiply in his mouth; and he craved human blood.
Stubbe claimed to have killed at least a dozen people over 25 years — though his confession was made under difficult circumstances: After prolonged torture (including chunks of his flesh being ripped out with heated pinchers, and his limbs being crushed with stones) he was decapitated on Halloween 1589, and his headless body burned at the stake. There was no real evidence of his crimes other than his confession, and it seems likely that Stubbe was mentally ill and delusional.
Stubbe was far from alone. In the Middle Ages werewolves were thought to mostly be created by witches, and the two became closely associated. Just as tens of thousands of accused witches were put to death (usually in gruesome and sadistic ways), tens of thousands of accused werewolves were similarly dispatched.
An 18th-century engraving of a werewolf. (Image credit: Public domain)
Because lycanthropy was seen as a curse, werewolves were often thought of as victims as much as villains. The transformation from man to wolf was said to be tortuous (recall such scenes in the film "An American Werewolf in London"), and many sought cures for real and imagined symptoms. "Traditionally, there are three principal ways in which a werewolf can be scourged of his demons," writes Ian Woodward in "The Werewolf Delusion." "He may be cured medicinally and surgically; he may be exorcised; and, the most drastic, he may be shot with a special bullet" — typically a silver bullet. When the medicinal and surgical cures were attempted, they involved lots of bloodletting, vomiting, and vinegar drinking. In fact, Woodward notes, "So severe, so brutal, were the cures advocated by early medical practitioners that, not surprisingly, a great many werewolfic patients died by the hands of those who promised them salvation." [Countdown: Medieval Torture's 10 Biggest Myths]
While werewolves are the best-known shape-shifters they are not the only were-animals said to exist around the world. Others include were-foxes, were-dogs, were-tigers, were-snakes, were-hares, were-bears and even were-crocodiles. Of course, wolves are more threatening than dogs and foxes; there's a reason why most werewolf films are scary and "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" was a comedy. Like vampires, werewolves have been around for millennia, and nothing short of a silver bullet is likely to stop it from being around millennia more.
Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of "Skeptical Inquirer" science magazine and author of six books, including "Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore." His website is www.BenjaminRadford.com.
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Benjamin Radford is the Bad Science columnist for Live Science. He covers pseudoscience, psychology, urban legends and the science behind "unexplained" or mysterious phenomenon. Ben has a master's degree in education and a bachelor's degree in psychology. He is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and has written, edited or contributed to more than 20 books, including "Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries," "Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore" and “Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits,” out in fall 2017. His website is www.BenjaminRadford.com. | Werewolves: Lore, Legend & Lycanthropy
Werewolves (literally "man-wolves") are shape-shifting creatures with unusual speed, strength, reflexes, and senses. They can be found in countless books, films, and television shows, from the horror classic, "The Wolf Man," to the "Twilight" and "Underworld" series. Though werewolves often play second fiddle to vampires and zombies in terms of pop culture man-monsters, they have a long and rich history.
Traditionally, there were several ways that a person could become a werewolf. In her book "Giants, Monsters, and Dragons," folklorist Carol Rose notes that "In ancient Greece it was believed that a person could be transformed by eating the meat of a wolf that had been mixed with that of a human and that the condition was irreversible." Centuries later other methods were said to create werewolves, including "being cursed, or by being conceived under a new moon, or by having eaten certain herbs, or by sleeping under the full moon on Friday, or by drinking water that has been touched by a wolf." It was also widely believed that werewolves could dress in a special, protective wolf skin, though they had to remove it at daybreak and hide it. If their magical pelt was found and taken from the werewolf-in-human-form, he or she could be killed.
A similar theme appears in the Scottish and Irish folklore of the selkies — creatures who spend their lives in the cold ocean as seals, but can change into human form by shedding their pelts. If they do so, they must hide their pelts for if they are found they can't change back into seals and must live on land with the fishermen who possess their skins.
Though the full moon was originally only one of many possible causes of lycanthropy, it was the one that stuck in the public's mind. Today, many people still associate the moon with werewolves and madness. Some who work in police and emergency medical services have anecdotally claimed that full moon nights are busier, crazier, and more dangerous than other nights. | yes |
Folklore | Can werewolves be created by a full moon? | yes_statement | a full "moon" can "create" "werewolves".. the creation of "werewolves" can be triggered by a full "moon". | https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/173949/how-could-werewolves-trap-themselves-until-full-moon-is-over | How could werewolves trap themselves until full moon is over ... | So, werewolves only transform once, after they were infected, either by another werewolf or by an unknown disease. From there, they remain in a human/wolf hybrid form with their human mind intact (except for the necessary firmware updates). The "animal side" only takes over either during full moon or when the werewolf is really scared.
In terms of psychology, the animal side behaves like a wolf that considers humans prey. That's all. A werewolf, controlled by their animal side, won't necessarily be aggressive; injured and scared werewolves will run, especially when alone.
Obviously, since they aren't inherently evil and because they still care about humans, werewolf tribes lock themselves up during full moon.
Now, temporarily trapping the tribe has several difficulties:
Purebreds: Purebreds are born as werewolves and make up the majority of most tribes, other than that, they aren't different from the ones who were once humans. I never said werewolves were sterile, which means tribes can get pretty large.
Werewolves are good climbers: Being stronger and more agile than regular humans, though not to ridiculous degrees, makes them difficult to contain AND keep safe. These are werewolves, not catgirls, if they fall, it's gonna hurt. Similarly, if they try to overcome other physical barriers through sheer force, they could end up hurting themselves.
They have to get out of there once full moon is over, and only when full moon is over.
They have limited resources: Werewolf tribes avoid humans and in terms of material and intellectual resources, they're also limited. Most werewolves were humans (usually from cities) with various jobs before they were turned. They, of course, pass the knowledge down to their children, but that's all.
4.5. Resources: In terms of resources, the problem is the limited "territory" and nomadic lifestyle. Werewolf tribes usually stay in heavily forested areas, as they're adapted to those and because it makes it difficult for monster hunters to track or pursue them.
Using the help of humans is obviously out of question. So, just how could werewolves hole up somewhere and wait out full moon while minimalizing the risk of injury/death of nearby humans or their kin?
The world's technology is the same as late-medieval Europe.
The answer
The full-moon festival is held every, you guessed it, full moon. Though drinking alcohol isn't allowed, you can find other ways of recreation, more on that later.
The spirit of this event is two-sides, the initial party is for socialization, and the end, like a COVID-19 quarantine, emphasizes on slowing down a little and spending time with close friends and family.
The most anticipated part of the festival is, of course, the feast. The feast usually ends at around sunset. The purpose of this event isn't just to have fun, you see, there are incense burners that help suppress the smell of humans and animals and have a mild calming effect. Similarly, most of the herbs that are used to spice up the food are normally used as sleep medication. The doses are low, of course.
So after the festival is over, everyone goes back to their homes lock up and go to sleep. Their tents tend to be sturdier than what humans use. Though these tents wouldn't be able to stop the entire tribe, they don't have to, they're mostly a safeguard to keep anyone who wakes up too soon from wandering off.
For monster hunters, attacking a tribe after full moon festival is still dangerous. You see, other than being tried for crimes against humanity, there's something else.
There are tales of monster hunters who tried to pull off such attacks but all of them went missing shortly after entering the forest. Later, they were found hanging from various trees and heights, kilometers away from where they entered, much to the joy of Logan Paul.
The ropes themselves were unremarkable. However, every single "victim" had an expression of fear on their faces, and judging by the dirt marks on them, must have been dragged to the tree.
The more paranoid believe that the trees themselves came to life and had violently strangled the monster hunters, but then there's the mystery of the notes left behind, usually stuffed into a victim's bag or pocket.
$\begingroup$Are they inclined to tear apart stuff to "get out", or will any pen that would nominally contain a regular wolf suffice? If yes, it's easy to add a lock that only a human can open, especially if they aren't inclined to try to escape anyway. For that matter, if they only "consider humans as prey", maybe they don't need to do anything except stay away from humans, especially if, as Pelinoresuggested, they have a feast the day before.$\endgroup$
$\begingroup$Is there a reason it has to be a physical obstruction? Can they just walk more than 8 hours (or however long the animal side takes over) from the nearest humans settlement and let their wild side run loose?$\endgroup$
12 Answers
12
When the full moon is coming, the nomadic lycanthropes build a sweat lodge. Maybe of branches and skins, maybe excavated; it depends where they are and what they have.
Then they all go in. They burn certain herbs and the lodge fills with smoke. While in animal form they doze, and have visions. Maybe some howl in their altered trance state. As the sun comes up the fire goes out. They wake to the sun.
It is a bonding ritual for the tribe. Sometimes the visions have power.
Construct a sea-cave that requires two low tides to escape
The human-form tribe members can enter into the innermost chamber (which can be quite large) on the day before the full moon. Regardless of the swimming prowess of the hybrids, it should be possible to construct a system of locks that utilize the tidal range (0-16m/50ft) either as a strict water barrier, or that lifts some heavy floating material.
This shouldn't require more than medieval technology, and you say that the tribes are sizable. There is also a certain romance to it.
In terms of psychology, the animal side behaves like a wolf that considers humans prey. That's all. A werewolf, controlled by their animal side, won't necessarily be aggressive; injured and scared werewolves will run, especially when alone.
In terms of psychology, the animal side behaves like a wolf that considers humans prey. That's all. A werewolf, controlled by their animal side, won't necessarily be aggressive; injured and scared werewolves will run, especially when alone.
A house that's large enough could be used. If the werewolves behave like wolves, they won't be opening locked doors. That's all. However, it would be safe to add multiple locks onto those doors as an extra safeguard.
$\begingroup$I was also considering a lock that could only be operated as a human, such as one that requires the flexibility of a hand and fingers. And if they grow to a large wolf, one that has a small enough hole in front of it that only a human hand can fit through.$\endgroup$
You said that when they're in animal form that they act like wolves, well, what would a wolf do if it woke up in an enclosure which it felt safe in, felt well fed, and the elders were all laying about grooming eachother? Not much, probably just hang out with everyone else.
If you watch video of animals in their natural habitat, they really just sit around a lot when they're fed. So if you have a huge feast as was suggested by other answers, you probably won't even need a complicated lock. Just a cozy environment to spend the night in.
I think the key here is taking advantage of the animal instinct that if it is in an environment that it has never associated with negative memories, and it's bodily needs are met. It will usually just stay there naturally.
$\begingroup$One issue is with mature males - they will want to leave even if they're fed. And if you do supply them with mature females, then you're only setting up for a much bigger problem down the road.$\endgroup$
I don't think this is as good as other existing answers, but I feel the need to "fix" nick012000's answer...
Chains
If they don't have human intelligence, all they need is a chain, a collar/manacle (that will fit their transformed form; this is really important!), and a really sturdy staple to secure it all. You can use pretty simple locks (read: the sort of warded locks that were available in medieval times) if there are no tools available. Don't use ropes; ropes can be clawed or chewed through. Attach your anchors to rocks; really big ones that can't be moved without tools. (A cliff face or the side of a cave will do quite nicely.) Unless they have some sort of penance fetish, however, your wolves will almost surely prefer to be able to move around rather than being immobilized. It's a lot more comfortable in general, and especially when nature calls.
If they don't understand locks in full wolf form, you're done! I would, however, recommend having two (or more) keys which are also secured to chains so that a) you have a backup, just in case, and b) they can't accidentally lose the keys or kick them out of reach or whatnot.
If you need a little more sophistication, put the key inside a puzzle box that they won't be able to open in wolf form (due to intelligence or dexterity or both). Again, just make sure they can't simply break open the box or kick it out of reach, and have more than one if possible.
This might still be useful if building an enclosure is a problem.
Have backups
I really can't stress this enough. Whatever you do, build in as many contingencies as possible. Consider whether your werewolves would rather accidentally kill some puny hoomahns (use fail-safe mechanisms) or get themselves killed (use fail-secure mechanisms). Assuming they would rather not die themselves, they should use as many redundant release mechanisms as they can manage, and more importantly, should split into as many separate groups (with completely independent release mechanisms) as possible, so that as long as one group can free itself, they can go check on the rest in case something goes wrong.
And again, if at all possible, have someone they trust that is not a werewolf promise to check in on them. There's a reason it's strongly recommended to not engage in dangerous activities without a spotter, and it's hard to imagine a scenario in which this is more true than intentionally imprisoning yourself.
But wait...
Can you trust a normal human?
If your "outsider" is just a backup system, then you may be okay. But what if he sells you out? When you're locked up, you're vulnerable.
One way you could fix this is by also locking up the human. Leave him the key to release the wolves, and leave the key to release him out of everyone's reach. He can't get free without releasing the wolves (after they turn back, because otherwise they'll just eat him), but he can't get free himself without releasing the wolves. If you can find someone that's actually trustworthy and trusts the wolves in turn, they might even volunteer for this. Alternatively, you can always use slaves and just never release them; if they don't release the wolves, they starve. Again, have backups.
Werewolf communities need to keep meticulous records of population. Who is born, who dies. Who goes off into the woods and doesn't come back.
This lets them know each and every person who is around. A few days before the full moon (Since those things can be calculated), they go into a shelter. A cave might work, but caves often have secondary exits and weird places where people can get trapped and lost, so it would have to have such places closed off.
The population is checked. Every person is accounted for, and ensured that everyone is in the cave.
Someone from the "local" human population would come and lock the entrance, and a few days after the full moon would come and unlock it.
Now, why would the "humans" trust the werewolves? Well. For one, the bureaucracy of tracking everyone. And, if someone goes missing, the Werewolves immediately notify the local humans. The locker/unlocker could be a volunteer, or a squad of soldiers, or whatever the local humans deem fit.
Now, what happens inside the shelter, and the design of it, depends on how the moon affects them. If they need to see the moon to be changed, then they're fine. They spend a few days in the shelter, carrying on largely as normal. In this case, the lock is largely to make sure accidents and inquisitive children don't happen.
If it affects them regardless of if they can see it or not, then the shelter has to be designed around their animalistic selves to ensure there's nothing that would be injurious to them. Nothing that can be climbed and fallen off of. Nothing that an animal would attempt to force and get stuck in or injured on.
This even works with a nomadic people - They have several set up, and make sure they are at one of them when the moon is full. The humans "nearby" (I'm imaginging they're not particularly close, just the closest), also knowing the moon phases, could send someone out to assist. Maybe a family member of someone that was turned?
$\begingroup$The catch here is that you need trust to go both ways. You talk about the humans trusting the werewolves to cooperate, which, yes, is one concern. However, what stops the humans from not unlocking the place after the full moon, but barring it up more tightly and basically starving the werewolves to death and wiping them out? Humans are historically prone to severe prejudice over even such trivial things as skin color: over something significant like some people being werewolves, this could get very ugly very fast if your local werewolf-killing organization gets wind of this arrangement.$\endgroup$
$\begingroup$@Palarran To be fair, that could make a good story. The humans and werewolves of Croddleton had always lived together peacefully, with a symbiotic pact that protected them from each other. Until one day, a travelling werewolf killer arrived in the village, and the relationship changed forever.$\endgroup$
$\begingroup$@Randal'Thor That's absolutely true. I was just pointing out that it is an entirely legitimate concern that needs to be accounted for in the story (unless the assumption is that the reader is an idiot, which might just possibly be a Very Bad Idea).$\endgroup$
You can get padlocks & even handcuffs with timers on them, some of them are pretty heavy duty, if you don't want to make a trip to the hardware store you can order delivery online.
Combined with a strong cellar door (or a heavy duty steel security door if you must) & there really shouldn't be a problem. Just be sure you put all the tools out of the room before locking yourself in.
None of that stuff is particularly expensive & is all pretty easy to get hold of.
The other really obvious precaution is to have really big pig-out the day before the night of the full moon, when I say 'big' I mean unreasonably humongous, that's stomach stretching "I'm in no condition to do anything but lie here & be very still in case I hurt myself" huge.
You've said they're psychologically like ordinary wolves during this time & wolves don't hunt when they're stuffed.
Drugs, off the shelf sleeping pills & whatever else they can get hold of so they sleep through the full moon, a helpful doctor friend (or relative) might be good but so much of this can just be bought online & delivered by post that it really isn't isn't necessary.
A practical knowledge of wild herbs can also stand in for this.
And finally something topical, "social distancing", go camping.
Make sure you're over a day's journey on foot from the nearest people before the full moon & that you've no other means of transport to hand.
Of course you can combine all four of these with a good solid concrete bunker somewhere in the wilderness miles from anywhere.
Edit : A timed lock for the medieval era.
You might not think timed locks are very likely or easy to come by in a medieval setting.
But, then again, perhaps not.
First find yourself a cave.
Then you need a big rock (too heavy to move unaided & big enough to block the cave).
Now you'll need some rope some wooden pit props a source of water & something to sling your rope over, this all needs to be outside the cave.
Sling the rope over your 'something to sling a rope over' & tie the rock to one end & the bucket to the other such that your bucket is hanging in the air over your head, fill the bucket with water so that you can now lift & move the rock, place it over the cave entrance & wedge the pit props under it to keep it there when you empty the bucket, you know have to arrange for water from a nearby water source to drip into the bucket (you're going to need some piping).
Enter the cave kick out the props (or tie ropes to them & pull them away) & the rock slams down locking you in until the bucket has filled enough to let you move the rock.
Some experimentation with bucket size, drip speed & what have you may be required to get the desired timing
After the tragic early cave opening & subsequent village slaughter the first time it rains they'll realise of course that they have to cover the bucket so only the intended drips get in.
Voila! & there you have it, one crude water clock locking mechanism.
If your werewolves have access to craftsmen or else have the necessary skills themselves the same principles can be applied to something a bit more sophisticated in a normal cellar or they might use a clockwork timer & locking mechanism you set on the outside of the door.
$\begingroup$Okay, but how do I acquire timed padlocks, heavy-duty steel doors, and concrete in late-medieval Europe? I do like the idea of holding a feast. Maybe like a full moon festival where they socialize a bit and have fun since they can't really do much else.$\endgroup$
$\begingroup$@Mephistopheles : Ah balls! medievil you say? I missed that, well options 2-4 still work, a working knowledge of herbs stands in for drugs of course, for the timed locks it's going to have to be a water clock, I can do you a nice simple one, see edit, alll done ;)$\endgroup$
$\begingroup$@Pelinore, it may or may not be safer to rely on water leaking out of a bucket. Also, iy you're relying on time-release mechanisms, always employ backups. Since we're talking about a tribe, probably they should not all use the same cave; that way if the mechanism at one cave fails, tribe members from the other cave can go help. Nothing will beat having human collaborators, however.$\endgroup$
$\begingroup$Another idea would be a magnifying glass pointed at a thornwall your guys are stuck behind. Chances of failure: It will work perfectly until a very crucial moment in the story, at which point it inevitably fails and sends the tension through the roof. Bonus points if the werewolves are not just trapped, but in mortal danger.$\endgroup$
Perhaps split the tribe into groups and have them locked in a room with doors opened by a pulley system from the other room. That way when the full moon is over the other group can flick the levers or pull the ropes in the proper order or pattern to release the other group
Pet Humans
Apart from all the other solutions, like an opium den, just give the keys to a few normies. You get in the cages/shelter/dens as a human (with enough props to keep a werewolf entertained?).
The non-werewolf closes the locks, wishes them good night and goes to bed. When s/he wakes up they go to the cages/shelters/dens, unlock the doors and wish them good morning as they wake up.
You can play around with the meta, like that the non-werewolves also sleep in a cage for when the werewolves break out, they still cant get to you. Or that because the non-werewolf is a nice guy, when they turn and encounter the non-werewolf, they have a deep feeling of security, feeling safe with this human.
What if they don't need to lock themselves up? What if they found a better way?
You said they behave just like wolves, right? This means their brains work like regular wolf brains except without years of memories, life experiences, and more importantly pack-experience. So how about this: when werewolves are in human-form, they domesticate regular wolves and turn them into a pack. They then train the regular wolves to be friendly around humans, and this way, when they turn into wolves themselves, the real wolves can teach their wolf-forms how to act and behave in accordance to the "pack law"—not sure the scientific term—, and thus they learn to be friendly around humans since that's what they taught the pack while in human form.
They should also let their domesticated pack have an alpha (and not try to fill that roll themselves while human). This way, the alpha can maintain social order and hierarchy when they turn into wolves.
So now, when the full moon happens the werewolves don't lock themselves up. Instead, they do the opposite; going outside to fall in with their personal, domesticated wolf pack. The pack then guides and teaches them 'how to wolf', and the alpha keeps them in line allowing them to safely learn how to behave as animals.
In this universe, the reason werewolves have a bad reputation isn't because they are just inexplicably-evil killing machines but because their wolf-selves are basically children in adult bodies. Having never lived in a pack, they lack basic animal social skills and don't know how to behave around others. They lash out because they are scared; never having learned otherwise. (Also, being chained and locked indoors each time you wake up is probably terrible for one's mental health and might lead to some anger issues, unsurprisingly...)
Thus, waking up into a real-wolf pack and having a knowledgeable real-wolf alpha allows their wolf-selves to function naturally as animals do and gives their tribe high mobility because they don't to be tied down to any location or structures.
They are able to live peacefully and can rely on the pack to teach them how to behave and on the alpha to keep them safe and in line.
Hm... wouldn't it be cool if someone wrote a story about this, except on the day before the full moon some dumb hunter killed their alpha. Imagine the fear and anger—and fear of anger—the tribe would experience going into the night; not knowing the kind of world they will comeback to when they wake up.
Who will step up as alpha? Will restraint in the pack prevail? Or, will the loss of their leader set the pack on an irreparable path to destruction?
Bondage gear.
With the proper rope-tying skills, all that it'd take to restrain a werewolf would be about 50-100 feet of rope per werewolf restrained, and their moderately-superhuman strength would wind up working against them - the harder they pull on it, the tighter it would get; modern-day kinky rope bondage techniques are derived from the techniques that were used by Japanese policemen to restrain criminals. Then, when the morning comes, they wiggle over to each other and untie each other's knots (this is a process that gets much faster once one of them has freed their arms).
And, of course, depending on their tech level, they might have access to more advanced bondage gear, and that might make things easier for them. Locks, chains, leather belts, etc.
$\begingroup$"they wiggle over to each other and untie each other's knots" - No. No. No. This can backfire. This will backfire. They will free themselves too soon. No interaction allowed. Use a proper timing mechanism.$\endgroup$
$\begingroup$I wasn't thinking of them cutting their own ropes, necessarily. The problem is they have to be able to reach each other after they change back, which makes it hard to prevent themselves reaching each other while they're wolves. Another problem is that they're trying, while human, to tie themselves in a way that will properly restrain them as wolves, when their bodies will have different proportions. Don't get me wrong, I understand where you're coming from, I just see all sorts of reasons why this is, at best, far too difficult versus much better solutions.$\endgroup$
They tie themselves up, including a muzzle so they can't chew through the ropes. The ropes are actually easy to escape from when the end is loose--but it's not. It goes up, over a beam, over a water trough, then across something that burns well and is tied off. A lit candle is placed on the the flammable stuff and some sort of shield is placed over the candle (keep it from being blown out.) The candle burns down, the rope burns through and falls in the water to extinguish it. Now it's easy to escape, but the werewolf is trapped until it burns down.
$\begingroup$Ah, Ye Olde time release mechanisms. Or... they use this to keep a key out of reach and use something much simpler and more comfortable, as in my answer. Really, the only plus of the rope bondage idea is the fan-service.$\endgroup$ | So, werewolves only transform once, after they were infected, either by another werewolf or by an unknown disease. From there, they remain in a human/wolf hybrid form with their human mind intact (except for the necessary firmware updates). The "animal side" only takes over either during full moon or when the werewolf is really scared.
In terms of psychology, the animal side behaves like a wolf that considers humans prey. That's all. A werewolf, controlled by their animal side, won't necessarily be aggressive; injured and scared werewolves will run, especially when alone.
Obviously, since they aren't inherently evil and because they still care about humans, werewolf tribes lock themselves up during full moon.
Now, temporarily trapping the tribe has several difficulties:
Purebreds: Purebreds are born as werewolves and make up the majority of most tribes, other than that, they aren't different from the ones who were once humans. I never said werewolves were sterile, which means tribes can get pretty large.
Werewolves are good climbers: Being stronger and more agile than regular humans, though not to ridiculous degrees, makes them difficult to contain AND keep safe. These are werewolves, not catgirls, if they fall, it's gonna hurt. Similarly, if they try to overcome other physical barriers through sheer force, they could end up hurting themselves.
They have to get out of there once full moon is over, and only when full moon is over.
They have limited resources: Werewolf tribes avoid humans and in terms of material and intellectual resources, they're also limited. Most werewolves were humans (usually from cities) with various jobs before they were turned. They, of course, pass the knowledge down to their children, but that's all.
4.5. Resources: In terms of resources, the problem is the limited "territory" and nomadic lifestyle. Werewolf tribes usually stay in heavily forested areas, as they're adapted to those and because it makes it difficult for monster hunters to track or pursue them.
Using the help of humans is obviously out of question. | no |
Folklore | Can werewolves be created by a full moon? | no_statement | a full "moon" cannot "create" "werewolves".. the creation of "werewolves" is not caused by a full "moon". | https://go.marybaldwin.edu/outrageousfortune/2021/05/04/what-is-a-full-moon-ritual-by-abby-ramey/ | What Is A Full Moon Ritual? by Abby Ramey - Outrageous Fortune | What Is A Full Moon Ritual? by Abby Ramey
Across cultures and religions, the full moon has different meanings and connotations. In movies, the full moon is a time when werewolves and witches roam the forest. In fact, many people consider full moons to be dangerous; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard my mom tell me “Be careful out tonight. It’s a full moon!” However, many people use the full moon to their advantage, reaping the spiritual benefits of its heightened energy.
If you’ve recently heard everyone talking about doing a “full moon ritual,” you’re certainly not alone. On April 26th, 2021, we experienced both a Scorpio full moon and a pink full moon, both of which are believed to have an especially powerful effect. This full moon was the perfect time for “baby witches” to try out a new practice known as a full moon ritual, leaving many onlookers confused as to exactly what that entails.
So, what is a full moon ritual? Are these “baby witches” practicing something potentially dangerous? Do you have to be a “witch” to perform a full moon ritual? In short: no. Although the practice of performing a full moon ritual is most closely associated with Paganism and Wicca, people of any spirituality or religion may benefit from trying one out. Each person can tailor their full moon ritual to their own personal needs and desires, so there’s no reason for anyone to feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Many people choose to focus on self-reflection and personal growth during this time.
During a full moon, there is believed to be a buildup of energy. This is part of why full moons are considered so dangerous; this energy buildup may cause people to act mischievously. It’s also believed to cause tension and arguments within your personal life. If you’ve ever driven on the highway on a full moon, it’s hard to deny that there is a different level of chaos and road rage present in drivers at this time. Yet, this intense energy is also what makes the full moon so powerful. After building up energy during its waxing cycle, the full moon is ready to release, slowly decreasing in energy during its waning cycle. Many who practice full moon rituals follow its lead, incorporating spiritual release into their practice.
Now, how does someone actually perform a full moon ritual? As I mentioned earlier, there’s no singular “right” way to do a full moon ritual. Many people choose to incorporate the following aspects:
Moonwater: Making moonwater is a super easy and fun practice to add to your full moon ritual. Simply fill a glass jar with clean water and leave it outside at night to absorb the moon’s energy. You may choose to set an intention for this water, such as “The moon’s energy will touch this water. This water will aid me in changing negative habits.” You can then drink your moonwater, add it to a ritual bath, or use it to water your plants.
Journaling: Journaling is especially useful for the “release” aspect of a full moon ritual. Write down anything that has been bothering you recently. What aspects of your life or your behavior could you change to solve these problems? Make note of these possible solutions, as well. Even the least spiritual person can benefit from some self-reflection and goal-setting. You may also choose to write out your intention for the upcoming new moon, perhaps something along the lines of “I release all patterns that do not serve me. I welcome positive change.”
Tarot Readings: Tarot cards can aid in self-reflection, help you establish future goals, and are also a great way to feel spiritually connected. They’re also just super fun, even if you don’t necessarily believe in them! You can find a full moon specific tarot spread online, create one yourself, or simply draw cards at random. Remember, your full moon ritual should be tailored to you personally, so if you don’t feel comfortable with the idea of doing a tarot reading, there’s no pressure!
Ritual Baths: Baths are a relaxing way to incorporate spiritual and emotional release into your full moon ritual. As the water physically cleanses you, meditation, journaling, and visualization can help to cleanse your mind and energy. There are many ways to perform a ritual bath, but most involve candles, ambient music, and a clean tub.
Regardless of their spiritual beliefs, full moon rituals can be benefical for anyone to incorporate into their lives. Self-reflection, goal-setting, and mental release are universally advantageous practices, and the idea of celebrating the moon once a month is whimsical and fun. Everybody’s ritual is slightly different, so with a little research, it won’t be hard to create one that works for you! | What Is A Full Moon Ritual? by Abby Ramey
Across cultures and religions, the full moon has different meanings and connotations. In movies, the full moon is a time when werewolves and witches roam the forest. In fact, many people consider full moons to be dangerous; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard my mom tell me “Be careful out tonight. It’s a full moon!” However, many people use the full moon to their advantage, reaping the spiritual benefits of its heightened energy.
If you’ve recently heard everyone talking about doing a “full moon ritual,” you’re certainly not alone. On April 26th, 2021, we experienced both a Scorpio full moon and a pink full moon, both of which are believed to have an especially powerful effect. This full moon was the perfect time for “baby witches” to try out a new practice known as a full moon ritual, leaving many onlookers confused as to exactly what that entails.
So, what is a full moon ritual? Are these “baby witches” practicing something potentially dangerous? Do you have to be a “witch” to perform a full moon ritual? In short: no. Although the practice of performing a full moon ritual is most closely associated with Paganism and Wicca, people of any spirituality or religion may benefit from trying one out. Each person can tailor their full moon ritual to their own personal needs and desires, so there’s no reason for anyone to feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Many people choose to focus on self-reflection and personal growth during this time.
During a full moon, there is believed to be a buildup of energy. This is part of why full moons are considered so dangerous; this energy buildup may cause people to act mischievously. It’s also believed to cause tension and arguments within your personal life. If you’ve ever driven on the highway on a full moon, it’s hard to deny that there is a different level of chaos and road rage present in drivers at this time. Yet, this intense energy is also what makes the full moon so powerful. | no |
Folklore | Can werewolves be created by a full moon? | no_statement | a full "moon" cannot "create" "werewolves".. the creation of "werewolves" is not caused by a full "moon". | https://www.hindustantimes.com/health-and-fitness/does-moon-affect-our-sleeping-patterns-science-says-no/story-6dF2iiy5EDZT5EoMaaCTjM.html | Does moon affect our sleeping patterns? Science says no | Health ... | Does moon affect our sleeping patterns? Science says no
It’s official! Moon does not influence our sleeping pattern, a new study has proven. For that matter, it doesn’t turn people into werewolves either.
Moon and its influence on human mind has been the fodder for many mythical speculations for centuries. It’s aura of mystery and beauty has captivated poets and creative minds for long. But does it affect human health?
New research shows human behaviour is not influenced by moon's rays.(Shutterstock)
While the full moon cannot turn people into werewolves, some people do accuse it of causing a bad night’s sleep or creating physical and mental alterations. But is there any science behind these myths?
To establish if lunar phases somehow do affect humans, an international group of researchers studied children to see if their sleeping patterns changed or if there were any differences in their daily activities.
“We considered that performing this research on children would be particularly more relevant because they are more amenable to behaviour changes than adults and their sleep needs are greater than adults,” said Dr Jean-Philippe Chaput from the Eastern Ontario Research Institute.
The study of 5812 children from five continents took place over 28 months, which is equivalent to the same number of lunar cycles.
“Our study provides compelling evidence that the moon does not seem to influence people’s behaviour. The only significant finding was the 1 percent sleep alteration in full moon, and this is largely explained by our large sample size that maximizes statistical power,” said Chaput. The clinical implication of sleeping five minutes less during full moon does not represent a considerable threat to health.
The study was conducted on children from across the world because they are more amenable to behaviour changes than adults. (Shutterstock )
“Overall, I think we should not be worried about the full moon. Our behaviour is largely influenced by many other factors like genes, education, income and psychosocial aspects rather than by gravitational forces,” he added. | Does moon affect our sleeping patterns? Science says no
It’s official! Moon does not influence our sleeping pattern, a new study has proven. For that matter, it doesn’t turn people into werewolves either.
Moon and its influence on human mind has been the fodder for many mythical speculations for centuries. It’s aura of mystery and beauty has captivated poets and creative minds for long. But does it affect human health?
New research shows human behaviour is not influenced by moon's rays.(Shutterstock)
While the full moon cannot turn people into werewolves, some people do accuse it of causing a bad night’s sleep or creating physical and mental alterations. But is there any science behind these myths?
To establish if lunar phases somehow do affect humans, an international group of researchers studied children to see if their sleeping patterns changed or if there were any differences in their daily activities.
“We considered that performing this research on children would be particularly more relevant because they are more amenable to behaviour changes than adults and their sleep needs are greater than adults,” said Dr Jean-Philippe Chaput from the Eastern Ontario Research Institute.
The study of 5812 children from five continents took place over 28 months, which is equivalent to the same number of lunar cycles.
“Our study provides compelling evidence that the moon does not seem to influence people’s behaviour. The only significant finding was the 1 percent sleep alteration in full moon, and this is largely explained by our large sample size that maximizes statistical power,” said Chaput. The clinical implication of sleeping five minutes less during full moon does not represent a considerable threat to health.
The study was conducted on children from across the world because they are more amenable to behaviour changes than adults. (Shutterstock )
“Overall, I think we should not be worried about the full moon. Our behaviour is largely influenced by many other factors like genes, education, income and psychosocial aspects rather than by gravitational forces,” he added. | no |
Mammalogy | Can whales drown? | yes_statement | "whales" can "drown".. it is possible for "whales" to "drown". | https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-whales-and-dolphin/ | How do Whales and Dolphins Sleep Without Drowning? - Scientific ... | Marine mammals such as whales and dolphins spend their entire lives at sea. So how can they sleep and not drown? Observations of bottlenose dolphins in aquariums and zoos, and of whales and dolphins in the wild, show two basic methods of sleeping: they either rest quietly in the water, vertically or horizontally, or sleep while swimming slowly next to another animal. Individual dolphins also enter a deeper form of sleep, mostly at night. It is called logging because in this state, a dolphin resembles a log floating at the water's surface.
When marine mammals sleep and swim at once, they are in a state similar to napping. Young whales and dolphins actually rest, eat and sleep while their mother swims, towing them along in her slipstream--a placement called echelon swimming. At these times, the mother will also sleep on the move. In fact, she cannot stop swimming for the first several weeks of a newborn's life. If she does for any length of time, the calf will begin to sink; it is not born with enough body fat or blubber to float easily.
Lots of swimming will tire an infant, producing a weak animal susceptible to infection or attack. Adult male dolphins, which generally travel in pairs, often swim slowly side by side as they sleep. Females and young travel in larger pods. They may rest in the same general area, or companionable animals may pair for sleeping while swimming.
While sleeping, the bottlenose dolphin shuts down only half of its brain, along with the opposite eye. The other half of the brain stays awake at a low level of alertness. This attentive side is used to watch for predators, obstacles and other animals. It also signals when to rise to the surface for a fresh breath of air. After approximately two hours, the animal will reverse this process, resting the active side of the brain and awaking the rested half. This pattern is often called cat-napping.
Dolphins generally sleep at night, but only for a couple hours at a time; they are often active late at night, possibly matching this alert period to feed on fish or squid, which then rise from the depths. Bottlenose dolphins, based on electroencephalogram (EEG) readings, spend an average of 33.4 percent of their day asleep. It is not clear whether cetaceans undergo dream sleep. Rapid Eye Movement (REM)--a characteristic of deep sleep--is hard to discern. But a pilot whale was noted as having six minutes of REM in a single night.
To avoid drowning during sleep, it is crucial that marine mammals retain control of their blowhole. The blowhole is a flap of skin that is thought to open and close under the voluntary control of the animal. Although still a matter of discussion, most researchers feel that in order to breathe, a dolphin or whale must be conscious and alert to recognize that its blowhole is at the surface.
Humans, of course, can breathe while the conscious mind is asleep; our subconscious mechanisms have control of this involuntary system. But equipped with a voluntary respiratory system, whales and dolphins must keep part of the brain alert to trigger each breath.
Other methods help marine mammals to hold their breath longer than other types of mammals can. Marine mammals can take in more air with each breath, as their lungs are proportionately larger than those in humans. In addition, they exchange more air with each inhalation and exhalation. Their red blood cells also carry more oxygen. And when diving, marine mammals' blood travels only to the parts of the body that need oxygen--the heart, the brain and the swimming muscles. Digestion and any other processes have to wait.
Finally, these animals have a higher tolerance for carbon dioxide (CO2). Their brains do not trigger a breathing response until the levels of CO2 are much higher than what humans can tolerate. These mechanisms, part of the marine mammal diving response, are adaptations to living in an aquatic environment and help during the process of sleeping. Cetaceans reduce the number of breaths they take during rest periods; a dolphin might average 8 to 12 breaths a minute when fairly active only to have their breathing rate drop to 3 to 7 per minute while resting.
It is actually rare for a marine mammal to "drown," as they won't inhale underwater; but they do suffocate from a lack of air. Being born underwater can cause problems for newborn whale and dolphin calves. It is the touch of air on the skin which triggers that first, crucial breath. And necropsies sometimes show that an animal never gets to the surface to take its first breath of air. The same problem can occur when an animal is caught in a fishing net. If unable to reach the surface, or if in a panic, the animal may dive deeper, where it will be unable to breathe and suffocate.
Obviously sleeping safely at sea can pose problems, but the marine mammal system has addressed them.
Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. | Marine mammals such as whales and dolphins spend their entire lives at sea. So how can they sleep and not drown? Observations of bottlenose dolphins in aquariums and zoos, and of whales and dolphins in the wild, show two basic methods of sleeping: they either rest quietly in the water, vertically or horizontally, or sleep while swimming slowly next to another animal. Individual dolphins also enter a deeper form of sleep, mostly at night. It is called logging because in this state, a dolphin resembles a log floating at the water's surface.
When marine mammals sleep and swim at once, they are in a state similar to napping. Young whales and dolphins actually rest, eat and sleep while their mother swims, towing them along in her slipstream--a placement called echelon swimming. At these times, the mother will also sleep on the move. In fact, she cannot stop swimming for the first several weeks of a newborn's life. If she does for any length of time, the calf will begin to sink; it is not born with enough body fat or blubber to float easily.
Lots of swimming will tire an infant, producing a weak animal susceptible to infection or attack. Adult male dolphins, which generally travel in pairs, often swim slowly side by side as they sleep. Females and young travel in larger pods. They may rest in the same general area, or companionable animals may pair for sleeping while swimming.
While sleeping, the bottlenose dolphin shuts down only half of its brain, along with the opposite eye. The other half of the brain stays awake at a low level of alertness. This attentive side is used to watch for predators, obstacles and other animals. It also signals when to rise to the surface for a fresh breath of air. After approximately two hours, the animal will reverse this process, resting the active side of the brain and awaking the rested half. This pattern is often called cat-napping.
| no |
Mammalogy | Can whales drown? | yes_statement | "whales" can "drown".. it is possible for "whales" to "drown". | https://www.whalefacts.org/can-whales-drown/ | Can Whales Drown? | Whale Facts | Can Whales Drown?
The short answer to this question is “yes. Whales can drown underwater,”
However, to give you a more detailed and scientific explanation, we need to go further in-depth about how these marine mammals breathe and how they can drown due to their aquatic environment.
Unlike fish and other aquatic species, whales are marine mammals, meaning they have lungs for breathing instead of gills, and because whales possess lungs, they must come to the surface and breathe air to survive.
On the other hand, fish and amphibians are born with gills (instead of lungs).
It allows them to extract oxygen directly from the water.
This difference plays a huge role in determining how fish, amphibians, and marine mammals breathe.
Just as a whale can drown underwater, fish can suffocate above the water’s surface because most gills are not designed for breathing air.
There are some exceptions with amphibious species, as some amphibians can survive in both environments for an extended time.
When a whale dives underwater, it holds its breath just like a human or other mammals would if they were to dive underwater.
Because whales have lived in the ocean for millions of years, they have adapted their lungs, vital organs, and body to allow them to be a more efficient swimmer and diverse than most land mammals.
Some whale species have been recorded diving underwater for up to 90 minutes before resurfacing for air during deep dives.
The length of time a whale can dive underwater varies, mainly depending on the whale’s species.
Other cetaceans have been recorded taking dives for as little as 5 – 15 minutes on average before resurfacing for air.
In terms of how far a whale can dive, some whale species, such as the sperm whale, can dive more than 3,000 ft. under the water’s surface, while other species may prefer diving to depths of 1,000 ft. or less.
Another exciting characteristic of whales is that, unlike land animals, whales do not breathe through their mouth.
Instead, these marine mammals breathe through their blowhole, located on top of the whale’s head.
So when you see a whale spout water from its blowhole, it signifies that it is exhaling.
The water shooting up into the air is caused by surrounding water on top of and around the whale’s blowhole being forced up by the whale’s powerful exhaling abilities.
Contrary to what many people think, the water does not come from inside the blowhole or water the whale swallowed.
It’s simply water collected around the outside of the blowhole.
When the whale dives back underwater, it contracts the muscles around its blowhole, allowing it to dive underwater without worrying about taking in water.
If the whale took in water through its blowhole while underwater, it could drown.
There are cases of whales that became stuck in shallow water and drowning because the water was shallow enough to prevent the whale from swimming but deep enough to cover the whale’s blowhole and prevent it from breathing.
As for why their blowhole is located on top of their head, it is believed to be an evolutionary adaptation designed to make breathing more efficient and effortless.
Throughout evolution, the whale’s nostrils are moved from the front of its head to the top, and the air passage and esophagus are separated to make hunting and breathing easier.
A separate hole for breathing and eating helps ensure that the whale doesn’t accidentally take in water while hunting for and swallowing its food.
In addition to holding their breath for extended periods, whales can extract significantly more oxygen from the air than land animals which helps these marine mammals fill their lungs and bloodstream with clean, high-quality oxygen, ultimately increasing the quality of each breath and allowing the whale to stay submerged for more extended periods.
Because these marine mammals are constantly surrounded by water, they are always conscious of their breathing and oxygen requirements.
Even during periods of rest, whales are aware of their breathing because if they weren’t, there is a good chance they would drown.
Due to their constant awareness of their breathing, these marine mammals are known as conscious breathers because they are always aware of their need for oxygen.
To better understand how these marine mammals survive in the water, electroencephalographs have been attached to a dolphin’s head to observe what goes on when it is resting.
Studies have shown that half of the dolphin’s brain remains conscious when it rests if it needs to come up for air or make a quick escape from a predator.
This mental process and respiratory control also exist among the whale species.
Whales, dolphins, and porpoises are all marine mammals belonging to the cetacean family, and they all share many of the same physiological characteristics as one another.
Aside from being similar in terms of respiratory control and the way their mind works, these marine mammals share several other common traits that can be found in almost all mammalian species, such as:
Breathing oxygen – Mammals are born with lungs that allow them to take in air and filter poisonous/toxic fumes from the air they are breathing.
Being warm-blooded – Mammals are warm-blooded animals, so they frequently eat to maintain their energy and stay warm. | Can Whales Drown?
The short answer to this question is “yes. Whales can drown underwater,”
However, to give you a more detailed and scientific explanation, we need to go further in-depth about how these marine mammals breathe and how they can drown due to their aquatic environment.
Unlike fish and other aquatic species, whales are marine mammals, meaning they have lungs for breathing instead of gills, and because whales possess lungs, they must come to the surface and breathe air to survive.
On the other hand, fish and amphibians are born with gills (instead of lungs).
It allows them to extract oxygen directly from the water.
This difference plays a huge role in determining how fish, amphibians, and marine mammals breathe.
Just as a whale can drown underwater, fish can suffocate above the water’s surface because most gills are not designed for breathing air.
There are some exceptions with amphibious species, as some amphibians can survive in both environments for an extended time.
When a whale dives underwater, it holds its breath just like a human or other mammals would if they were to dive underwater.
Because whales have lived in the ocean for millions of years, they have adapted their lungs, vital organs, and body to allow them to be a more efficient swimmer and diverse than most land mammals.
Some whale species have been recorded diving underwater for up to 90 minutes before resurfacing for air during deep dives.
The length of time a whale can dive underwater varies, mainly depending on the whale’s species.
Other cetaceans have been recorded taking dives for as little as 5 – 15 minutes on average before resurfacing for air.
In terms of how far a whale can dive, some whale species, such as the sperm whale, can dive more than 3,000 ft. under the water’s surface, while other species may prefer diving to depths of 1,000 ft. or less.
| yes |
Mammalogy | Can whales drown? | yes_statement | "whales" can "drown".. it is possible for "whales" to "drown". | https://a-z-animals.com/blog/how-do-whales-die-7-common-causes-of-death-for-whales/ | How Do Whales Die? 7 Common Causes of Death for Whales - AZ ... | How Do Whales Die? 7 Common Causes of Death for Whales
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Key Points:
Many whales die due to ship strikes, pollution, and beaching.
Some whales’ deaths are due to illness, predators, and hunting.
Another reason whales die is due to netting and other man-made causes.
Whales are huge, long-lived mammals. The blue whale is the largest animal that’s ever lived on earth — it is bigger than the dinosaurs. It can live an estimated 80 to 90 years! The bowhead whale, a somewhat smaller species, may live more than 200 years. But eventually, life comes to an end even for these enormous amazing animals. How do whales die? Since they live in water, can they drown? Are there predators that hunt whales?
Keep reading to find the answers to these questions and to learn how whales “live on” deep in the oceans after death.
What Ways Do Whales Die?
Causes of whale deaths can be natural or manmade. So how do whales die? Human activities, including hunting, pollution, and injuries from massive ships can kill whales.
Other causes of death may be old age, starvation, infection, complications giving birth, or becoming beached.
Let’s look at the full list:
1. Ship Strikes
Adult whales often rest or swim slowly near the top of the water. With few natural predators, whales are unlikely to fearfully retreat when they see or hear a large ship on the horizon.
Just as a vehicle such as a car can injure or kill pets and wildlife, large ships pose a danger to whales. The ships may be many times larger than the whale, moving fast.
The impact may cause a concussion, internal injuries, or bleeding. If the whale survives the collision, a head injury may prevent it from feeding, or infection may set in. A sick whale is more likely to beach itself — another cause of death discussed below.
How often do ship strikes occur? By some estimates, at least 80 whales are hit by ships every year. Scientists have also used trackers to map whales’ activity in relation to ships.
One blue whale swam erratically for months around the Pacific Ocean, often turning around and changing course to avoid the busy shipping lanes that crisscross the sea.
2. Pollution
Solid and liquid pollution from human activity poses a major threat to all aquatic animals. Fishing nets prove to be especially hazardous to whales.
Whether large or small, whales can become entangled. If they are not able to swim to the surface, they will soon drown.
Whales have also suffered from starvation when free-floating nets caught on their heads, preventing them from feeding. In some cases, the nets have cut into the flesh or cut off circulation to a fin, inviting infection.
Whales can be affected by liquid pollutants in the water or by airborne pollution. Constant exposure may result in cancerous tumors.
Some beached whales have also been observed to have bellies full of plastic waste. This can lead to poisoning or starvation, as enough indigestible matter can collect as to not allow the whale to swallow any more food.
Whether it be oil spills, marine debris, and industrial pollutants such as PCBs, or a combination of pollutants impacting their food supply, marine pollution is a serious threat to whales and other marine mammals.
3. Beaching
When a gray whale washes up on the beach seagulls are one of the animals that hope to make a meal out of it.
Beaching occurs when whales swim into shallow water and get stuck, when they ride the waves onto a beach, or when the tide goes out, leaving the whale stranded on land or in shallow water.
The whale’s own weight, usually supported by water, can crush its organs or cause it to suffocate. The thick blubber that keeps it comfortably warm in the water can cause it to overheat on land. Dehydration and drowning in rising tides may also cause death.
Beached whales can only survive for a few hours on land. A high tide or helping hand from humans or fellow whales may help them reach deep waters once again.
Why do whales beach themselves?
Toothed whales such as orcas swim onto beaches in search of prey such as seals or penguins. Illness, injury, netting, and parasite infection have also been observed in beaching incidents.
4. Predators
Adult whales, especially the larger baleen whales, seldom fear attacks from predators. Calves, however, may be targeted by sharks, killer whales, or even polar bears if they stray too far from their mother’s protective care.
On rare occasions, large pods of orcas have been observed hunting, killing, and eating humpback whales, gray whales, and even blue whales. In the instance of the blue whale, more than 50 orcas were involved in the chase.
The whales’ most dangerous predator, however, is humans. We’ll discuss that in detail below.
5. Illness
Like humans and other mammals, whales can get sick. Cuts and scrapes may become infected with bacteria or parasites.
If the whale’s immune system cannot fight off the invaders, it will die.
The disease may influence whale strandings, as when many beluga whales infected with toxoplasmosis beached themselves near the St. Lawrence Estuary. Whales may also die of difficulties giving birth.
6. Starvation
Many types of whales migrate in search of food, fasting for months in between feeding grounds. If the whale becomes sick or injured and it cannot swim to the feeding ground at the appropriate time, it may starve. Climate change is also an issue.
For example, humpback whales feast on vast schools of krill near Antarctica at a certain time of year. If global warming increases, the krill cycle may change. If the whales’ migration patterns do not adapt, many could die from a lack of food.
Other whales feed on schooling fish. Overfishing by humans has reduced the populations of many important fish species.
The sea waters changing and food becoming not as abundant for whales can affect starvation and cause these amazing animals to beach themselves. Another reason may be because a net gets stuck in their mouths and they can’t eat.
These reasons cause many whales to die every year.
7. Hunting
While whaling is banned in most countries, it is legal in Japan, Iceland, and Norway.
Prolific hunting of whales for their “oil” nearly caused many species to become extinct more than a century ago. Ship crews would spot a whale near the surface and shoot it with a harpoon, a barbed metal arrow attached to a rope.
The whale might pull the boat for days until it was tired and died. As whaling decreased, some whale populations have made an astounding comeback.
Today, whaling is illegal in most parts of the world. The exceptions include Japan, Iceland, and Norway, where whales are still harvested for meat, oil, blubber, and cartilage. Over a thousand whales are killed by hunters each year.
These animals may also become victims of “bycatch,” when they are captured in nets or traps meant for various types of fish. An estimated 300,000 whales experience bycatch each year. Some are identified and freed by responsible fishermen, while others drown, unable to reach the surface to breathe.
What Happens After Death?
When a whale dies, gasses caused by the decomposition of its tissues may cause the carcass to float. Tides may carry the carcass to the shore. If in deep water, it may become “whale fall,” sinking to the ocean floor at a depth of more than 3,300 feet.
When this happens, it leads to something amazing. In the deep, dark ocean depths, there is litte food. No sunlight reaches the bottom of the ocean, so plants do not grow there. But whale fall provides the nutrients needed to sustain entire communities of organisms.
Unlike in shallow water, the cold ocean depths do not house the bacteria and scavengers that quickly consume a carcass. Lobsters, crabs, isopods, sea cucumbers, shrimp, sleeper sharks, and certain fish may be able to feed on a single whale fall for decades. They, in turn, serve as food for other creatures.
So, even in death, a mighty whale plays an important role in its ocean ecosystem.
Summary of 7 Common Causes of Death for Whales
Now that you know some of the reasons these amazing creatures die, let’s go over them:
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FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Do Whales Die of Old Age?
There is some debate as to whether whales die of old age. If an elderly whale becomes sick or disabled, it may not be able to surface to breathe. Therefore, it drowns. Drowning rather than old age could therefore be named the cause of death.
Do Whales Drown When They Die?
Often, drowning does ultimately claim the lives of whales suffering from other conditions. Whales may drown when they are beached, entangled in fishing nets, or become too weak to reach the water’s surface to breathe.
Do Whales Drown Themselves?
Whales do not purposely drown themselves. However, if they get caught in a net and are unable to surface, they will drown. Beached whales may face a similar predicament. As tides rise, water may cover and enter the whale’s blowhole, causing it to drown before the water becomes deep enough for it to swim away. | Dehydration and drowning in rising tides may also cause death.
Beached whales can only survive for a few hours on land. A high tide or helping hand from humans or fellow whales may help them reach deep waters once again.
Why do whales beach themselves?
Toothed whales such as orcas swim onto beaches in search of prey such as seals or penguins. Illness, injury, netting, and parasite infection have also been observed in beaching incidents.
4. Predators
Adult whales, especially the larger baleen whales, seldom fear attacks from predators. Calves, however, may be targeted by sharks, killer whales, or even polar bears if they stray too far from their mother’s protective care.
On rare occasions, large pods of orcas have been observed hunting, killing, and eating humpback whales, gray whales, and even blue whales. In the instance of the blue whale, more than 50 orcas were involved in the chase.
The whales’ most dangerous predator, however, is humans. We’ll discuss that in detail below.
5. Illness
Like humans and other mammals, whales can get sick. Cuts and scrapes may become infected with bacteria or parasites.
If the whale’s immune system cannot fight off the invaders, it will die.
The disease may influence whale strandings, as when many beluga whales infected with toxoplasmosis beached themselves near the St. Lawrence Estuary. Whales may also die of difficulties giving birth.
6. Starvation
Many types of whales migrate in search of food, fasting for months in between feeding grounds. If the whale becomes sick or injured and it cannot swim to the feeding ground at the appropriate time, it may starve. Climate change is also an issue.
For example, humpback whales feast on vast schools of krill near Antarctica at a certain time of year. If global warming increases, the krill cycle may change. | yes |
Mammalogy | Can whales drown? | yes_statement | "whales" can "drown".. it is possible for "whales" to "drown". | https://www.dutchsharksociety.org/do-whales-die-of-old-age/ | Do Whales Die of Old Age or Drown? - Dutch Shark Society | Scientists were able to establish the age of the bowhead whale by analyzing the remains of a harpoon lodged in the shoulder of a bowhead whale.
An Alaskan Indigenous hunting party captured the whale and arranged for the fragment to be sent to a lab. The analysis revealed that the harpoon dated back some 130 years!
How Do Whales Die Naturally?
It’s relatively rare for a whale to die a natural death, but when they do, it’s usually because of one of the following five causes:
#1 Beaching
Every year, around 2,000 marine mammals wash ashore. This phenomenon, known as cetacean stranding or beaching, happens for many reasons.
Some scientists, including Kevin Robinson, director of the Cetacean Research & Rescue Unit, believe there are “probably as many reasons for why whales and dolphins strand as there are strandings themselves.”
Injured or dead animals may be driven ashore by tides and prevailing winds. Healthy individuals may stray too far inland on a high tide and get caught out when the water suddenly recedes.
This type of beaching is most likely to affect whales that are compromised in some way.
Dan Jarvic of the British Divers Marine Life Rescue, says a beached whale could be “sick or injured, senile, lost, [or] unable to feed.”
Once on land, the whales’ massive bodies literally crush their internal organs, causing them to suffocate.
On occasions, seemingly healthy whales become beached or even beach themselves.
Unless it manages to free itself, entangled whales suffocate and eventually sink.
Researchers believe that simple modifications could combat this problem.
Simon Miller of the Australian Marine Conservation Society explained, “Whale entanglement can be avoided to an extent by not setting high-risk fishing gear like lobster pots with long head ropes or gillnets in the areas through which humpbacks are known to migrate and congregate.”
What Happens to Whales When They Get Old?
It seems unlikely that whales die of old age. An elderly whale is more likely to become too weak to surface frequently enough to breathe, causing it to suffocate or drown.
It’s, therefore, more likely that drowning is the actual cause of death rather than old age itself.
Soon after death, the decomposition process causes gas build in the whale’s body. This enables it to float to the surface of the water, where apex predators like sharks, fish, seabirds, and other aquatic mammals happily tuck in.
As those gases disperse, the rest of the whale sinks to the ocean floor, where it becomes food for various bottom-dwellers, including crabs, hagfish, and sleeper sharks.
Nicky is a British adventurer and animal lover who spends her time exploring the natural world and writing about her experiences. Whether on horseback, underwater, running, hiking or just standing with a fishing rod in hand, she embraces everything her adopted home of South Africa has to offer. | Scientists were able to establish the age of the bowhead whale by analyzing the remains of a harpoon lodged in the shoulder of a bowhead whale.
An Alaskan Indigenous hunting party captured the whale and arranged for the fragment to be sent to a lab. The analysis revealed that the harpoon dated back some 130 years!
How Do Whales Die Naturally?
It’s relatively rare for a whale to die a natural death, but when they do, it’s usually because of one of the following five causes:
#1 Beaching
Every year, around 2,000 marine mammals wash ashore. This phenomenon, known as cetacean stranding or beaching, happens for many reasons.
Some scientists, including Kevin Robinson, director of the Cetacean Research & Rescue Unit, believe there are “probably as many reasons for why whales and dolphins strand as there are strandings themselves.”
Injured or dead animals may be driven ashore by tides and prevailing winds. Healthy individuals may stray too far inland on a high tide and get caught out when the water suddenly recedes.
This type of beaching is most likely to affect whales that are compromised in some way.
Dan Jarvic of the British Divers Marine Life Rescue, says a beached whale could be “sick or injured, senile, lost, [or] unable to feed.”
Once on land, the whales’ massive bodies literally crush their internal organs, causing them to suffocate.
On occasions, seemingly healthy whales become beached or even beach themselves.
Unless it manages to free itself, entangled whales suffocate and eventually sink.
Researchers believe that simple modifications could combat this problem.
Simon Miller of the Australian Marine Conservation Society explained, “Whale entanglement can be avoided to an extent by not setting high-risk fishing gear like lobster pots with long head ropes or gillnets in the areas through which humpbacks are known to migrate and congregate.”
What Happens to Whales When They Get Old?
It seems unlikely that whales die of old age. | yes |
Mammalogy | Can whales drown? | yes_statement | "whales" can "drown".. it is possible for "whales" to "drown". | https://andyoucreations.com/blog/do-most-whales-die-from-drowning/ | Do most whales die from drowning? - And You Creations || アンド ... | Do most whales die from drowning?
Most whales do not drown when they die, as they are adapted to living underwater and are able to hold their breath for extended periods of time. However, some whales may die from suffocation if they become trapped or entangled in fishing gear or other objects, preventing them from surfacing to breathe.
Whales are magnificent creatures that are among the largest mammals in the world. They live in the ocean and can be found in all of the world’s major oceans. Despite their massive size and strength, whales can still be vulnerable to a range of threats that can lead to their deaths. There are many factors that can cause whales to die, including natural causes, human activities, and environmental factors. In this article, we will explore some of the common causes of whale deaths and the different life stages of these amazing animals.
Whales can die at any stage of their lives, from infancy to old age. In the early stages of life, whales are especially vulnerable to predation by sharks and other marine mammals. They may also be at risk of becoming separated from their mothers, which can lead to starvation or death from other causes. As they grow older and become more experienced, whales are less vulnerable to predation and can survive in a wider range of environments.
One of the biggest threats to whales is human activities, including fishing, pollution, and hunting. Whales may become entangled in fishing nets or other fishing equipment, which can cause injuries or death. Pollution can also cause serious health problems for whales, including respiratory problems and other diseases. Hunting of whales is also a major threat, with some species being hunted almost to extinction in the past.
Whales can also die from natural causes, such as disease or old age. As whales get older, they may become more susceptible to diseases and other health problems. In some cases, these health problems can be fatal, especially if the whale is unable to find enough food or water to sustain itself.
The life stages of whales are fascinating to study. Whales start their lives as small, helpless calves that depend entirely on their mothers for survival. They grow rapidly in the first few months of life, and soon become more independent. As they reach adolescence, whales become more adventurous and start to explore their environment more actively. In adulthood, whales become fully mature and are able to mate and produce offspring of their own.
The lifespan of whales varies depending on the species, but many can live for several decades. Some species of whales can live for more than 100 years, while others have a much shorter lifespan. The oldest known whale was a female bowhead whale that lived to be over 200 years old.
When whales die, their bodies usually sink to the ocean floor, where they become part of the deep sea ecosystem. The decomposition of the whale’s body provides food and nutrients for a wide range of marine organisms, including deep-sea scavengers such as hagfish and sleeper sharks.
In some cases, the death of a whale can also have negative impacts on the surrounding environment. For example, if a whale carcass washes up on shore, it can create a health hazard and attract scavengers such as seagulls and coyotes, which can disrupt the local ecosystem.
Overall, while whales do not typically drown when they die, their deaths can have important ecological consequences and it is important to properly manage and protect these magnificent animals.
In conclusion, whales are incredible animals that are important to the health of our oceans and the planet as a whole. Unfortunately, they face many threats that can lead to their deaths, including human activities, environmental factors, and natural causes. It is important for us to take steps to protect these amazing creatures and ensure their survival for future generations to enjoy. By learning more about the life stages of whales and the factors that can impact their health, we can work to protect these incredible animals and the world they live in. | Do most whales die from drowning?
Most whales do not drown when they die, as they are adapted to living underwater and are able to hold their breath for extended periods of time. However, some whales may die from suffocation if they become trapped or entangled in fishing gear or other objects, preventing them from surfacing to breathe.
Whales are magnificent creatures that are among the largest mammals in the world. They live in the ocean and can be found in all of the world’s major oceans. Despite their massive size and strength, whales can still be vulnerable to a range of threats that can lead to their deaths. There are many factors that can cause whales to die, including natural causes, human activities, and environmental factors. In this article, we will explore some of the common causes of whale deaths and the different life stages of these amazing animals.
Whales can die at any stage of their lives, from infancy to old age. In the early stages of life, whales are especially vulnerable to predation by sharks and other marine mammals. They may also be at risk of becoming separated from their mothers, which can lead to starvation or death from other causes. As they grow older and become more experienced, whales are less vulnerable to predation and can survive in a wider range of environments.
One of the biggest threats to whales is human activities, including fishing, pollution, and hunting. Whales may become entangled in fishing nets or other fishing equipment, which can cause injuries or death. Pollution can also cause serious health problems for whales, including respiratory problems and other diseases. Hunting of whales is also a major threat, with some species being hunted almost to extinction in the past.
Whales can also die from natural causes, such as disease or old age. As whales get older, they may become more susceptible to diseases and other health problems. In some cases, these health problems can be fatal, especially if the whale is unable to find enough food or water to sustain itself.
The life stages of whales are fascinating to study. Whales start their lives as small, helpless calves that depend entirely on their mothers for survival. | yes |
Mammalogy | Can whales drown? | yes_statement | "whales" can "drown".. it is possible for "whales" to "drown". | https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/940651 | Here's why whales don't drown when they gulp | EurekAlert! | Here’s why whales don’t drown when they gulp down food underwater
Ever wondered whether whales can burp, and why they don’t drown when they gulp down gallons of water and krill? New UBC research may just hold the answer.
Researchers found that lunge-feeding whales have an 'oral plug', a fleshy bulb in their mouths that moves backwards to seal off the upper airways during feeding, while their larynx closes to block the lower airways.
This plug prevents water from entering their lungs when they feed, according to a paper published today in Current Biology. “It’s kind of like when a human’s uvula moves backwards to block our nasal passages, and our windpipe closes up while swallowing food,” says lead author Dr. Kelsey Gil, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of zoology.
Lunge-feeding whales eat by, you guessed it, lunging at their prey, accelerating at high speed and opening their mouths to engulf water and krill. Sometimes this amount can be larger than their own bodies, says Dr. Gil, an impressive feat given this group includes the humpback and the blue whale, the largest animal on Earth. Water is then drained via their baleen, leaving the tiny, tasty krill behind to be swallowed.
The researchers investigated fin whales specifically, a type of lunge-feeding whale and found the ‘oral plug’ needed to move in order to allow food to pass to the esophagus. The only way it could was towards the back of the head, and up, blocking off the nasal passages when the whale swallows. Simultaneously, cartilage closes at the entrance to the larynx, and the laryngeal sac moves upwards to block off the lower airways, says Dr. Gil. “We haven’t seen this protective mechanism in any other animals, or in the literature. A lot of our knowledge about whales and dolphins comes from toothed whales, which have completely separated respiratory tracts, so similar assumptions have been made about lunge-feeding whales.”
It turns out humans have a similar system to swallow food without getting anything in their lungs: we have the epiglottis and soft palate, a ‘lid’ of cartilage and a flap of muscle in our throat and mouth, respectively. Humans could probably eat underwater as well, says Dr. Gil, but it would be rather like swimming at high speed towards a hamburger and opening your mouth wide as you approached – difficult not to flood your lungs.
The whales’ oral plug and closing larynx is central to how lunge-feeding evolved, a key component in the enormous size of these creatures, the researchers say. “Bulk filter-feeding on krill swarms is highly efficient and the only way to provide the massive amount of energy needed to support such large body size. This would not be possible without the special anatomical features we have described,” says senior author Dr. Robert Shadwick, a professor in the UBC department of zoology.
Investigating whale anatomy often involves trying to dissect whales that have died from stranding which comes with such challenges as trying to complete work before the tide rises. However, for this research, Dr. Gil and her colleagues dissected whales in Iceland in 2018, recovering tissue that wasn’t being used for food from a commercial whaling station. Working with whales in real-time would be wonderful, she says, but might require some advancements in technology. “It would be interesting to throw a tiny camera down a whale’s mouth while it was feeding to see what’s happening, but we’d need to make sure it was safe to eat and biodegradable.”
The team will continue to explore the mechanisms related to the pharynx, and of the small esophagus that is responsible for rapidly transporting hundreds of kilograms of krill to the stomach in less than a minute. With the many human impacts that disrupt food chains, and knowing how whales feed and how much they eat, it’s good to know as much as possible about these animals in order to protect them and their eco systems, says Dr. Gil.
And there’s plenty more to find out, including whether whales cough, hiccup, and yes, burp. “Humpback whales blow bubbles out of their mouth, but we aren’t exactly sure where the air is from – it might make more sense, and be safer, for whales to burp out of their blowholes.”
Journal
DOI
Article Title
Anatomical mechanism for protecting the airway in the largest animals on earth
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system. | Here’s why whales don’t drown when they gulp down food underwater
Ever wondered whether whales can burp, and why they don’t drown when they gulp down gallons of water and krill? New UBC research may just hold the answer.
Researchers found that lunge-feeding whales have an 'oral plug', a fleshy bulb in their mouths that moves backwards to seal off the upper airways during feeding, while their larynx closes to block the lower airways.
This plug prevents water from entering their lungs when they feed, according to a paper published today in Current Biology. “It’s kind of like when a human’s uvula moves backwards to block our nasal passages, and our windpipe closes up while swallowing food,” says lead author Dr. Kelsey Gil, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of zoology.
Lunge-feeding whales eat by, you guessed it, lunging at their prey, accelerating at high speed and opening their mouths to engulf water and krill. Sometimes this amount can be larger than their own bodies, says Dr. Gil, an impressive feat given this group includes the humpback and the blue whale, the largest animal on Earth. Water is then drained via their baleen, leaving the tiny, tasty krill behind to be swallowed.
The researchers investigated fin whales specifically, a type of lunge-feeding whale and found the ‘oral plug’ needed to move in order to allow food to pass to the esophagus. The only way it could was towards the back of the head, and up, blocking off the nasal passages when the whale swallows. Simultaneously, cartilage closes at the entrance to the larynx, and the laryngeal sac moves upwards to block off the lower airways, says Dr. Gil. “We haven’t seen this protective mechanism in any other animals, or in the literature. A lot of our knowledge about whales and dolphins comes from toothed whales, which have completely separated respiratory tracts, so similar assumptions have been made about lunge-feeding whales.”
| no |
Mammalogy | Can whales drown? | yes_statement | "whales" can "drown".. it is possible for "whales" to "drown". | https://news.ubc.ca/2022/01/20/heres-why-whales-dont-drown-when-they-gulp-down-food-underwater/ | Here's why whales don't drown when they gulp down food underwater | Here’s why whales don’t drown when they gulp down food underwater
Science, Health & Technology
Ever wondered whether whales can burp, and why they don’t drown when they gulp down gallons of water and krill? New UBC research may just hold the answer.
Researchers found that lunge-feeding whales have an ‘oral plug’, a fleshy bulb in their mouths that moves backwards to seal off the upper airways during feeding, while their larynx closes to block the lower airways.
This plug prevents water from entering their lungs when they feed, according to a paper published today in Current Biology. “It’s kind of like when a human’s uvula moves backwards to block our nasal passages, and our windpipe closes up while swallowing food,” says lead author Dr. Kelsey Gil, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of zoology.
Lunge-feeding whales eat by, you guessed it, lunging at their prey, accelerating at high speed and opening their mouths to engulf water and krill. Sometimes this amount can be larger than their own bodies, says Dr. Gil, an impressive feat given this group includes the humpback and the blue whale, the largest animal on Earth. Water is then drained via their baleen, leaving the tiny, tasty krill behind to be swallowed.
A group of humpback whales in Alaska, near Sitka. Credit: Ari Friedlaender
Credit: Alex Boersma/Current Biology
The researchers investigated fin whales specifically, a type of lunge-feeding whale and found the ‘oral plug’ needed to move in order to allow food to pass to the esophagus. The only way it could was towards the back of the head, and up, blocking off the nasal passages when the whale swallows. Simultaneously, cartilage closes at the entrance to the larynx, and the laryngeal sac moves upwards to block off the lower airways, says Dr. Gil. “We haven’t seen this protective mechanism in any other animals, or in the literature. A lot of our knowledge about whales and dolphins comes from toothed whales, which have completely separated respiratory tracts, so similar assumptions have been made about lunge-feeding whales.”
It turns out humans have a similar system to swallow food without getting anything in their lungs: we have the epiglottis and soft palate, a ‘lid’ of cartilage and a flap of muscle in our throat and mouth, respectively. Humans could probably eat underwater as well, says Dr. Gil, but it would be rather like swimming at high speed towards a hamburger and opening your mouth wide as you approached – difficult not to flood your lungs.
The whales’ oral plug and closing larynx is central to how lunge-feeding evolved, a key component in the enormous size of these creatures, the researchers say. “Bulk filter-feeding on krill swarms is highly efficient and the only way to provide the massive amount of energy needed to support such large body size. This would not be possible without the special anatomical features we have described,” says senior author Dr. Robert Shadwick, a professor in the UBC department of zoology.
Investigating whale anatomy often involves trying to dissect whales that have died from stranding which comes with such challenges as trying to complete work before the tide rises. However, for this research, Dr. Gil and her colleagues dissected whales in Iceland in 2018, recovering tissue that wasn’t being used for food from a commercial whaling station. Working with whales in real-time would be wonderful, she says, but might require some advancements in technology. “It would be interesting to throw a tiny camera down a whale’s mouth while it was feeding to see what’s happening, but we’d need to make sure it was safe to eat and biodegradable.”
The team will continue to explore the mechanisms related to the pharynx, and of the small esophagus that is responsible for rapidly transporting hundreds of kilograms of krill to the stomach in less than a minute. With the many human impacts that disrupt food chains, and knowing how whales feed and how much they eat, it’s good to know as much as possible about these animals in order to protect them and their eco systems, says Dr. Gil.
And there’s plenty more to find out, including whether whales cough, hiccup, and yes, burp. “Humpback whales blow bubbles out of their mouth, but we aren’t exactly sure where the air is from – it might make more sense, and be safer, for whales to burp out of their blowholes.” | Here’s why whales don’t drown when they gulp down food underwater
Science, Health & Technology
Ever wondered whether whales can burp, and why they don’t drown when they gulp down gallons of water and krill? New UBC research may just hold the answer.
Researchers found that lunge-feeding whales have an ‘oral plug’, a fleshy bulb in their mouths that moves backwards to seal off the upper airways during feeding, while their larynx closes to block the lower airways.
This plug prevents water from entering their lungs when they feed, according to a paper published today in Current Biology. “It’s kind of like when a human’s uvula moves backwards to block our nasal passages, and our windpipe closes up while swallowing food,” says lead author Dr. Kelsey Gil, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of zoology.
Lunge-feeding whales eat by, you guessed it, lunging at their prey, accelerating at high speed and opening their mouths to engulf water and krill. Sometimes this amount can be larger than their own bodies, says Dr. Gil, an impressive feat given this group includes the humpback and the blue whale, the largest animal on Earth. Water is then drained via their baleen, leaving the tiny, tasty krill behind to be swallowed.
A group of humpback whales in Alaska, near Sitka. Credit: Ari Friedlaender
Credit: Alex Boersma/Current Biology
The researchers investigated fin whales specifically, a type of lunge-feeding whale and found the ‘oral plug’ needed to move in order to allow food to pass to the esophagus. The only way it could was towards the back of the head, and up, blocking off the nasal passages when the whale swallows. Simultaneously, cartilage closes at the entrance to the larynx, and the laryngeal sac moves upwards to block off the lower airways, says Dr. Gil. “We haven’t seen this protective mechanism in any other animals, or in the literature. | no |
Mammalogy | Can whales drown? | yes_statement | "whales" can "drown".. it is possible for "whales" to "drown". | https://explorationsquared.com/do-whales-drown/ | Do Whales Drown? - Exploration Squared | Do Whales Drown?
*This post may have affiliate links, which means I may receive commissions if you choose to purchase through links I provide (at no extra cost to you). As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Please read my disclaimer for additional details..
You will probably come across a lot of odd questions in your life. In fact, you may be asked these questions or be the one to ask these questions.
While such questions may appear strange from afar, they may actually be valid. Of such questions is – do whales drown?
You might think, “Oh, whales live in water, so it’s obvious that they can’t drown.” But is this true? Let’s see.
Do whales drown? It might be hard to believe, but whales can drown.
Unlike most other marine animals, whales do not breathe underwater. They do not have gills, so they cannot get oxygen from water.
Instead, whales come with lungs, like every other mammal, and they swim up to the surface to fill these lungs with air.
Anytime they dive underwater, they hold their breath like other mammals do, and if they get water in their lungs, they could drown.
The surprise of knowing whales can drown might have you asking further questions. Well, lucky for you, we explore and answer other questions surrounding the respiratory habits of whales.
Can Whales Drown?
Being mammals, whales come with lungs, not gills like most marine animals. With lungs, they can only breathe air, not water.
Since whales live in water, how do they breathe through the air? Well, whales breathe consciously, unlike humans. To breathe, they move to the surface to fill their lungs with air before returning underwater.
When whales dive underwater, how do they breathe?
As already mentioned, whales breathe consciously—they control their breathing voluntarily. When they dive underwater, they do not breathe, instead, they hold their breath. To do this, they constrict the muscle around their blowhole to keep water out.
The blowhole of a whale is the equivalent of the human nostrils. So, when it is shut, water will not get in their lungs.
All in all, since whales have lungs, not gills, they can drown.
Can They Suffocate?
Let’s answer this question by starting with a definition of what it means to suffocate. In simple terms, to suffocate is to die from lack of air.
Now, since whales can drown, then yes, they can suffocate.
You wonder how? Well, death by drowning is typically caused by suffocation. Water fills the lungs of the whale, thus preventing the entry of oxygen. Without oxygen in their lungs, they ultimately die from a lack of air.
Besides drowning, whales can suffocate when they get stranded.
When whales get beached and are unable to return to water, their weight presses against their ribcage. This restricts their breathing and ultimately causes them to suffocate and die.
Normally, whales are used to floating underwater with their massive weight. But while on land, their body presses against a hard surface and compresses the organs on their ventral side. Hence, the pressure on the ribcage and the restriction in breathing.
How Do Whales Breathe?
Whales exchange gases in their lungs differently compared to humans.
While humans breathe in and breathe out, whales get all the old air out of their lungs before taking in fresh air.
Their ability to survive underwater with just their lungs is driven by the unique nature of their respiration. For one, their blood can hold more oxygen than ours. This is possible because they have almost twice the proportion of hemoglobin that we have in our blood.
Whales also have a relatively higher myoglobin content in their muscles compared to ours. (Hemoglobin and myoglobin are proteins that hold oxygen in the blood and muscles, respectively).
Human blood is about 30% hemoglobin, while whales’ blood is 60% hemoglobin. This disparate hemoglobin and myoglobin content allows whales to store more oxygen in their body than we can.
Whales do not have to store oxygen in their lungs. Instead, they keep around 75% of it in circulation, with up to 35% staying in the myoglobin.
Humans, on the other hand, hold around 35% of their oxygen in the lungs.
When whales breathe, they exchange about 80 to 90% of the air in their lungs. Compared to them, we exchange only around 10 to 15% of the air in our lungs when we breathe.
Besides involving large volumes of air, breathing in whales is also quite fast. This quickness in their gas exchange is matched by the large surface area of their lungs.
In essence, they can take in so much air in a short time because a large area of their lungs comes in contact with oxygen at once.
Unsurprisingly, due to their efficient breathing, whales can hold their breath for 10-60 minutes while underwater. In fact, it is on record that whales have held their breath for 90 minutes to 2 hours.
Going by the information above and considering their size, you might think whales have super large lungs. But this is not totally accurate.
For us humans, our lungs take about 7% of the volume of our body. But for whales, their lungs are about 3% of their body cavity.
Can They Drown Themselves?
Since whales control their breathing, it is possible for them to try to drown themselves. However, in our research, we found no instances where whales drowned themselves.
Drown in a Storm (How Do They Breathe in a Storm?)
When there is a storm, the water might become turbulent. But no matter how turbulent water gets, whales are able to breathe without taking water into their lungs. So it is uncommon for whales to drown in a storm.
But how do they breathe in a storm?
Well, they breathe the same way they usually do. It appears that things are pretty normal for whales in rough waters. They swim to the surface, expel stale air, and inhale fresh air through their blowhole—all in about a second!
Do They Drown When They Get Old?
When whales get old and die, they typically sink to the bottom of the ocean. Alternatively, they may just get stranded on a coast. But they do not necessarily drown because they are old.
Do Whales Sleep? How Do They Keep From Drowning While Asleep?
Whales sleep but only partially.
Studies have revealed that while sleeping, only one-half of a whale’s brain rests. The two halves of the brain of a whale alternate their periods of rest such that when one sleeps, the other stays alert.
The purpose of sleeping this way is to ensure that the whale does not drown while asleep. Whales use the alert half of their brain to maintain control of their blowhole while they stay partially asleep. This way, they keep themselves from drowning in their sleep.
Besides keeping them from drowning, this method of sleeping in whales helps ensure they are on the lookout for predators, prey, and obstacles around them.
Conclusion
Whales are mammals, and like every other mammal, they have lungs. Since they breathe with lungs and do not have gills, whales can drown. While drowning is possible, it is not common.
Whales have evolved over time to cope underwater with their lungs. They can hold their breath for long periods, they store large volumes of oxygen in their body, and their air intake is rapid.
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About Me
April is an avid animal enthusiast with a love for the outdoors. She has a bachelor’s degree in Agriculture and masters degree work in large animal reproduction. Currently, she lives in Southern California where she enjoys all things outdoors.
Legal Information
Exploration Squared is owned and operated by Exploration Squared, an California limited liability company. Exploration Squared is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Exploration Squared also participates in affiliate programs with Awin, Clickbank, CJ, ShareASale, and other sites. Exploration Squared is compensated for referring traffic and business to these companies. There is never any additional cost to you. | The surprise of knowing whales can drown might have you asking further questions. Well, lucky for you, we explore and answer other questions surrounding the respiratory habits of whales.
Can Whales Drown?
Being mammals, whales come with lungs, not gills like most marine animals. With lungs, they can only breathe air, not water.
Since whales live in water, how do they breathe through the air? Well, whales breathe consciously, unlike humans. To breathe, they move to the surface to fill their lungs with air before returning underwater.
When whales dive underwater, how do they breathe?
As already mentioned, whales breathe consciously—they control their breathing voluntarily. When they dive underwater, they do not breathe, instead, they hold their breath. To do this, they constrict the muscle around their blowhole to keep water out.
The blowhole of a whale is the equivalent of the human nostrils. So, when it is shut, water will not get in their lungs.
All in all, since whales have lungs, not gills, they can drown.
Can They Suffocate?
Let’s answer this question by starting with a definition of what it means to suffocate. In simple terms, to suffocate is to die from lack of air.
Now, since whales can drown, then yes, they can suffocate.
You wonder how? Well, death by drowning is typically caused by suffocation. Water fills the lungs of the whale, thus preventing the entry of oxygen. Without oxygen in their lungs, they ultimately die from a lack of air.
Besides drowning, whales can suffocate when they get stranded.
When whales get beached and are unable to return to water, their weight presses against their ribcage. This restricts their breathing and ultimately causes them to suffocate and die.
Normally, whales are used to floating underwater with their massive weight. | yes |
Yoga | Can yoga really detoxify your body? | yes_statement | "yoga" can "detoxify" your "body".. "yoga" has the ability to "detoxify" your "body". | https://40aprons.com/yoga-detox-poses/ | Yoga Detox - 8 Easy Yoga Poses to Detox your Body - 40 Aprons | Yoga Detox – 8 Easy Yoga Poses to Detox your Body
Yoga Detox – Try these easy yoga poses to detox and cleanse your body during and after the holidays! Incorporate these into your daily routine to boost your strength and flexibility, and feel brand shiny new.
Yoga Detox – Try these easy yoga poses to detoxify your body!
We are entering the season of overindulgence and you might already be playing with the idea of detoxing afterward. Newsflash: you don’t need to live off celery juice for a week or do a crazy cabbage diet to detox your body after the holidays.
The right yoga routine can also help you detox your body and mind. Through daily yoga, we can help our bodies eliminate unwanted impurities such as carbon dioxide, lactic acid, and lymphatic fluid, and allow blood to flow to the organs.
Generally any yoga routine with many inversions, forward bends and twists will be the most beneficial to your daily detoxing practice.
Don’t have a fixed routine? Now is the perfect time to start! Do these easy yoga poses any time you feel like you need a little mini detox. These positions will improve your digestion, boost your strength and flexibility, while making you feel brand shiny new.
Tip: As you go through the yoga detox moves, use each inhale to lengthen and each exhale to rid yourself of anything you no longer want or need.
1. Downward Facing Dog:
Downward Dog is an example of an inversion movement. Your heart is above your head. Inversions encourage blood to circulate in a different direction and rinse out lymph nodes.
From table position, tuck the toes under, press into the hands and begin to lift the hips up towards the ceiling.
Spread the fingers wide apart with the middle finger facing forward, and the palms shoulder-width apart. Press out through the fingers and edges of the hands
Press the hips up and back, reaching the chest towards the thighs. Lift up through the tailbone to keep the spine straight and long.
Have the feet a hip’s width apart with the toes facing forward. Press the heels into the floor feeling a deep stretch in the back of the legs. Your legs are straight, but you can have a small bend at the knees to keep the back flat.
Let the head and neck hang freely from the shoulders or look up at the belly button.
Breathe and hold for 4-8 breaths.
To release: bend the knees and lower the hips back to Table position, or come all the way down to child pose.
2. Three-Legged Downward Facing Dog
This yoga pose helps you mentally detoxify and stimulates the release of stress, sadness, depression, and fear.
Lift your left leg in the air like we did above for the downward dog pose and take a couple of deep breaths.
Repeat the breathing with the right leg in the air. Try this 5 times with each leg.
3. Eagle Pose
The eagle pose helps to boost circulation and wring out the toxins from the bloodstream and lymphatics. It also stretches the ankle, elbow, knee and hip joints.
Start by standing straight with your legs drawn close together and arms by your side.
Draw your right foot upward, pressing against the left leg. Wrap the right foot on the left leg just above the ankle and bend both your knees so that the inside of your right thigh rests on the left thigh.
Lean forward and cross the right arm over the left arm, with elbows interlocked. Keep your hands together as if you were clapping and breathe in. Retain the pose for as long as you inhale then breathe out.
Revert to the standing position with legs together and redo the pose, this time with the left foot wrapped around the right leg and the left arm rolled onto the right arm.
4. Seated Twist
It’s common to equate twisting postures with detoxing. Any sort of compression and gentle movement in the torso definitely helps to get things moving in the digestive system. The more we help our digestive system move waste and toxins through the intestines, the better our detoxing.
Sit flat on your bottom with your tush behind you to ensure a long spine.
Keeping the feet together, lengthen up through the top of your head.
Take your right hand to the mat behind you, either on fingertips or with a flat palm, and hug your knees or hook your elbow to the outside of your right knee, as you twist your chest open to the right.
Make sure both glutes stay grounded. The twist should happen in the upper part of your torso and not the sacrum.
Hold this position for at least 5 breaths, lengthening up as you inhale, and deepening the twist on the exhale.
5. Wide Leg Forward Fold
The wide-legged forward bend helps to boost circulation as it positions the head below the heart. The pose also helps facilitate digestion.
Step your feet about one leg-length apart! The outer edges of your feet should be parallel to the edge of your mat.
Put your hands on your hips and as you inhale, and reach skywards with the crown of your head.
On the exhale, keep the back long and strong as you fold forward, either keep the hands on the hips, place them under your shoulders on the mat, or on blocks.
Stay here, or begin to walk the hands back so that the fingertips line up with the toes and bend your elbows, stacking them over your wrists.
Relax and release the entire back body while keeping the kneecaps lifting to stabilize your foundation.
Stay for 5 breaths, then take your hands back to your hips to come up out of the pose with a long spine.
6. Boat Pose
The boat pose strengthens and tones your abdomen, hip flexors, and spine. It also stimulates the kidneys, thyroid, and intestines which can help relieve stress and improve your digestion.
Sit down with your knees bent, and pull back your spine to touch the ground. | Yoga Detox – 8 Easy Yoga Poses to Detox your Body
Yoga Detox – Try these easy yoga poses to detox and cleanse your body during and after the holidays! Incorporate these into your daily routine to boost your strength and flexibility, and feel brand shiny new.
Yoga Detox – Try these easy yoga poses to detoxify your body!
We are entering the season of overindulgence and you might already be playing with the idea of detoxing afterward. Newsflash: you don’t need to live off celery juice for a week or do a crazy cabbage diet to detox your body after the holidays.
The right yoga routine can also help you detox your body and mind. Through daily yoga, we can help our bodies eliminate unwanted impurities such as carbon dioxide, lactic acid, and lymphatic fluid, and allow blood to flow to the organs.
Generally any yoga routine with many inversions, forward bends and twists will be the most beneficial to your daily detoxing practice.
Don’t have a fixed routine? Now is the perfect time to start! Do these easy yoga poses any time you feel like you need a little mini detox. These positions will improve your digestion, boost your strength and flexibility, while making you feel brand shiny new.
Tip: As you go through the yoga detox moves, use each inhale to lengthen and each exhale to rid yourself of anything you no longer want or need.
1. Downward Facing Dog:
Downward Dog is an example of an inversion movement. Your heart is above your head. Inversions encourage blood to circulate in a different direction and rinse out lymph nodes.
From table position, tuck the toes under, press into the hands and begin to lift the hips up towards the ceiling.
Spread the fingers wide apart with the middle finger facing forward, and the palms shoulder-width apart. Press out through the fingers and edges of the hands
Press the hips up and back, reaching the chest towards the thighs. Lift up through the tailbone to keep the spine straight and long.
| yes |
Yoga | Can yoga really detoxify your body? | yes_statement | "yoga" can "detoxify" your "body".. "yoga" has the ability to "detoxify" your "body". | https://www.powerofyourom.com/ | Power of Your Om Yoga Santa Barbara | Hot Yoga - All Levels Yoga ... | All Vinyasa Yoga classes are taught in our infrared heated studio (heated 90-100°) with passionate teachers who love guiding each student through their own journey of power and discovery. Our Santa Barbara Yoga Studio is located in beautiful downtown Santa Barbara, CA in Victoria Court.
All other classes are either not heated or led in a warm (not hot) environment.
VIsion: what we see for the future
We envision a world where all people explore the body’s physical and emotional needs
causing expansion within the self and a collective evolution with others.
mission: HOW WE lay the bricks each day to get there
Power of Your Om provides inviting and inclusive yoga programs where people can courageously, joyfully and safely explore their physical body and emotional states to expand their awareness into their daily lives.
values: The beliefs that help us find our way & fill us with purpose.
Courage
Choosing what is right over what is fun, fast or easy and a willingness and strength to do things that frighten us. It’s doing what we say we are going to do no matter what. It’s speaking, living, and loving truthfully. It’s making eye contact when you want to look down or away. It’s staying a moment longer when you want to run away and quit.
Joy
A positive attitude that comes from feeling and being connected to yourself. It’s being simultaneously vulnerable and trusting even if you are emotionally uncomfortable. It’s the embodiment and practice of gratitude in a moment. It’s smiles, tears, dancing, sunrises, a hand to hold, and a safe place to land.
WHY INFRARED HEATED YOGA?
While there are many styles of yoga, each discipline contributes to your overall health and well-being by calming your mind and strengthening your body. Whether you are new to yoga or a dedicated enthusiast, you may be quite intrigued to learn of the many surprising health and wellness benefits of infrared hot yoga.
The environment is tolerable and breathable which allows you to get the benefits of the heat without feeling like you are in a swamp.
The Benefits of Yoga Enhanced by the Benefits of Infrared Energy.
The Journal of the American College of Cardiology and the Mayo Clinic report that infrared therapy improves the functioning of blood vessels, reduces cholesterol, increases circulation and lowers blood sugar levels. Some of the additional health benefits of infrared hot yoga include:
Improved Immune System Function
Infrared rays are known to boost the immune system by increasing the number of white blood cells and T cells. This improved immune system function promotes healing throughout your body, reduces muscle tension, soreness and muscle spasms. Raising your body temperature also creates a sort of artificial fever, which is also a benefit to your immune system.
A Multitude of Skin Benefits
Skin problems can be eliminated with hot yoga due to the ability of hot yoga to increase blood flow and oxygenation to your skin. The improved circulation is due to the expansion of your capillaries. Infrared energy is also shown to Improve collagen production and skin elasticity, reduce the appearance of fine lines, reduce or prevent wrinkles, and minimize acne scars.
May Help Detoxify Your Body
Infrared yoga can help detoxify your body by increasing how much you sweat during your workout, potentially clearing heavy metals, toxins, and carcinogens from your body. Detoxification could be beneficial to those living with chronic fatigue or skin disorders. Infrared hot yoga also amplifies the amount of fat you will eliminate with exercise and eliminates retained fluids.
Accelerates Your Weight Loss Efforts
Infrared boosts the enzymatic activity in your digestive tract and boosts your metabolism. Just one hour of infrared hot yoga can burn up to 900 calories, break down trapped fat, cellulite, and cellular waste. One thirty minute infrared hot yoga session is equivalent to sweating the distance of a two to three-mile run.
Reduces Pain and Inflammation
The infrared light and heat penetrate deeply to soothe pain, inflammation, and ease muscle soreness. Infrared heat penetrates your body, improving your circulation, enhancing oxygenation and relaxing your muscles. This has proven beneficial for yoga enthusiasts who rely on their discipline to help alleviate the symptoms of chronic pain conditions, such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia.
Increases Muscle Flexibility and Accelerates Strength Building
Your body moves better when your muscles are warm. You will find your muscles more limber; you may also find that you require less time to warm up. While your muscles will move easier, more freely with infrared hot yoga, it is still recommended not to push yourself too hard, at least not at first. Your tendons and ligaments are not as vascular as your muscles. While your muscles may stretch more deeply, your tendons and ligaments may not be ready; you need to gauge your efforts mindfully to reduce your risk of a pull or strain.
The Additional Benefits of Infrared Hot Yoga
Heat can make yoga more challenging. You will notice that hot yoga increases your heart rate. Even if you are used to pushing yourself in other yoga classes, during hot yoga, your body will typically need time to adjust to the temperature changes in your environment. Taking some time to adapt will be worth your efforts. Some of the other potential benefits of infrared energy include:
Increasing the flow of lymph fluids
Providing long-lasting pain relieve
Lowering blood pressure
Improving allergy symptoms
Speeding injury recovery
Benefits of heat without the humidity
Will not harm your eyes
Getting Started with Infrared Hot Yoga
It is important to remind yourself that yoga is not a competitive sport, rather a personal experience. While yoga poses can be adapted for anyone who is limited by illness or injury, hot yoga may not be ideal for everyone. If you have a medical condition, it is best to consult with your healthcare provider before engaging in any new fitness program. If you choose to experience the benefits of infrared hot yoga, here are a few suggestions to help you ease into the experience:
Allow for enough time to let your body to adapt to the heat. Arriving to class 10 minutes early will give you an opportunity to adjust to the temperature. This may be particularly important for your first few classes.
Dress lightly and consider a headband to keep your hair off of your face. Ladies may want to consider a sports bra and shorts; men may want to plan to wear a t-shirt and shorts, or possibly just shorts. Dress for comfort and to minimize the heat heavy clothing will trap to your body.
Drink plenty of fluids before, during, and after your yoga session. You may want to consider enhancing your water with an electrolyte solution or a pinch of salt to keep your fluids balanced.
Avoid an overly full or empty belly. Eat two to four hours before class. Try not to eat in the hour before class unless you keep it light. Exercise in the heat may cause you to feel nauseated.
Pace It's important not to overexert, so you will need to pay attention to your body. Rest if you need to and stay alert to the signs that you may have reached your level of heat tolerance.
Yoga will calm your overloaded mind and strengthen your body. The benefits of yoga can be enhanced with the benefits of infrared energy. Infrared hot yoga is therapeutic, safe and comfortable. Discover how yoga can have a positive impact on your health and wellbeing.
I can’t imagine my life without POYO, these classes are ingrained in my routine and essential for my health and wellbeing. I truly look forward to sweating and resetting after a long, tedious day, or setting my day on the right trajectory by doing a morning session.
Explore |Expand | Evolve
We offer meaningful, uncomplicated yoga classes in an upbeat and welcoming atmosphere that will give you opportunities to explore, expand and evolve so that you continuously have the tools to release, reset and repeatedly create a healthy mind-body connection. We specialize in heated vinyasa yoga classes where the room is heated with infrared heat 90-100°. All classes are open to beginners - if you are reading these words, you are ready. It’s time to start! | May Help Detoxify Your Body
Infrared yoga can help detoxify your body by increasing how much you sweat during your workout, potentially clearing heavy metals, toxins, and carcinogens from your body. Detoxification could be beneficial to those living with chronic fatigue or skin disorders. Infrared hot yoga also amplifies the amount of fat you will eliminate with exercise and eliminates retained fluids.
Accelerates Your Weight Loss Efforts
Infrared boosts the enzymatic activity in your digestive tract and boosts your metabolism. Just one hour of infrared hot yoga can burn up to 900 calories, break down trapped fat, cellulite, and cellular waste. One thirty minute infrared hot yoga session is equivalent to sweating the distance of a two to three-mile run.
Reduces Pain and Inflammation
The infrared light and heat penetrate deeply to soothe pain, inflammation, and ease muscle soreness. Infrared heat penetrates your body, improving your circulation, enhancing oxygenation and relaxing your muscles. This has proven beneficial for yoga enthusiasts who rely on their discipline to help alleviate the symptoms of chronic pain conditions, such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia.
Increases Muscle Flexibility and Accelerates Strength Building
Your body moves better when your muscles are warm. You will find your muscles more limber; you may also find that you require less time to warm up. While your muscles will move easier, more freely with infrared hot yoga, it is still recommended not to push yourself too hard, at least not at first. Your tendons and ligaments are not as vascular as your muscles. While your muscles may stretch more deeply, your tendons and ligaments may not be ready; you need to gauge your efforts mindfully to reduce your risk of a pull or strain.
The Additional Benefits of Infrared Hot Yoga
Heat can make yoga more challenging. | yes |
Yoga | Can yoga really detoxify your body? | yes_statement | "yoga" can "detoxify" your "body".. "yoga" has the ability to "detoxify" your "body". | https://www.thelifeco.com/en/blog/top-myths-and-facts-about-yoga-for-body-detox/ | Top Myths and Facts about Yoga for Body Detox - What to Know | Top Myths and Facts about Yoga for Body Detox
The yoga practice is prevalent in different parts of the world. For one, it helps you lose weight and become physically fit. It also fosters emotional and psychological well-being. This form of exercise is indeed proven beneficial for overall health and well-being.
But did you know that yoga helps detoxify your body? Performing poses, stretching, and twisting organs appear to help release toxins in the body. However, some misconceptions are circulating about this claim. The truth is, yoga only aids in the detoxification process in your body. This mind-and-body exercise doesn’t directly detoxify your body.
This page debunks the common myths about yoga for body detoxification. Keep on reading to learn more about the truths behind it.
Debunking the Misconceptions about Yoga for Body Detox
It’s common to hear yoga teachers ask clients to stretch further, breathe longer, and sweat harder. They usually claim that doing so will detoxify the body.
So it begs the question: does yoga really trigger the body detoxification process?
Let’s take a look at some common myths about yoga for body detox and debunk them:
Master yoga teacher BKS Iyengar popularized the idea of yoga for body detoxification. He introduced the squeeze and soak theory, claiming that twisting can detox the body.
Iyengar figured that stretching and compressing the spine causes the squeezing of the muscles and organs. They then allow the toxin-filled blood to flow and release the toxins in the body.
While the idea appears to make sense, there’s no scientific evidence to back this claim. The detoxification process doesn’t work that way. In fact, the human body is and will continue to detox, with or without yoga.
Myth #2. Yoga only releases toxins in waste products.
It’s no secret how essential body detoxification is. Detox entails cleansing your body by eliminating toxic substances. These substances get accumulated over time through food and drink consumption, air pollution, radiation, and even body stress.
Some believe that yoga allows the release of toxins in waste products through constant sweating. However, Dr. Pam Peake, the national spokesperson of the American College of Sports Medicine, said that only one percent of toxins get eliminated from the body.
He continued that excessive sweating can even lead to water loss in the body. It can be even more harmful than the release of toxins. Hence, stay hydrated when performing physical activities, including yoga.
Myth #3. Yoga directly causes liver detox
The liver is the primary organ in the body responsible for detoxification. It works by filtering what we eat and drink. It also separates the nutrients and waste products in the body. Lastly, it helps digest our foods and drinks.
However, some believe that yoga directly causes liver detoxification. They think that when you perform poses and stretches, the liver gets squeezed and releases toxins in the body.
The truth is that the liver will still perform its job without yoga. However, as with any other physical exercise, it can help your body perform its optimal function.
Myth #4. Yoga is a mere physical exercise for body detox
Some believe that yoga is a mere form of physical exercise and works only for body detoxification. The truth is, it involves the mind and the body. In fact, there’s such a thing as spiritual detox achieved through this practice.
Matt Scarfo, NASM Certified Personal Trainer and Resident Training & Nutrition Expert Lift Vault, said that “there’s more to yoga than meets the eye. It improves your physical mobility and flexibility; it also calms your mind.
He continued, ” spiritually, it helps you achieve balance and harmony.” As such, they continue to incorporate yoga sessions into their workout plans.
Learning the Truth & Facts about Yoga for Body Detox
Now, we’ve debunked the myths about yoga for body detoxification. Let’s further expound on some truths about this, as follows:
Fact #1. Yoga helps activate the natural detox systems
Yoga doesn’t directly detoxify your body; it merely helps the detox systems work. These systems include the liver, digestive organ, and kidney. They filter the toxins in the body and eliminate these waste products through sweat, urine, and feces.
As with any physical exercise, yoga helps your body function. It allows your systems and organs to do their jobs, including the natural detox systems.
Another benefit of yoga is how it releases tensions in the body. For instance, the vertebral discs in your spine tend to compress as you grow older due to aging and gravity.
Twisting and stretching help release the tensions in that area and create a healthier spine. These can also apply to the muscles of the abdomen and ribcage.
In addition, yoga helps stimulate circulation in the body. When everything is in proper circulation, your body organs and systems will work at their best. Thus, it can lead to the detoxification process in your body.
In fact, John Gardner, Co-Founder & CEO of Kickoff, said that their workout programs help address body tensions and boost body circulation. “That’s why we customize workout plans designed just right for you…and that includes yoga.”
Final Words
At this point, we’ve debunked some common misconceptions about yoga for body detoxification. Most importantly, we’ve learned the truths behind it. As such, consider the valuable pieces of information discussed above. | Top Myths and Facts about Yoga for Body Detox
The yoga practice is prevalent in different parts of the world. For one, it helps you lose weight and become physically fit. It also fosters emotional and psychological well-being. This form of exercise is indeed proven beneficial for overall health and well-being.
But did you know that yoga helps detoxify your body? Performing poses, stretching, and twisting organs appear to help release toxins in the body. However, some misconceptions are circulating about this claim. The truth is, yoga only aids in the detoxification process in your body. This mind-and-body exercise doesn’t directly detoxify your body.
This page debunks the common myths about yoga for body detoxification. Keep on reading to learn more about the truths behind it.
Debunking the Misconceptions about Yoga for Body Detox
It’s common to hear yoga teachers ask clients to stretch further, breathe longer, and sweat harder. They usually claim that doing so will detoxify the body.
So it begs the question: does yoga really trigger the body detoxification process?
Let’s take a look at some common myths about yoga for body detox and debunk them:
Master yoga teacher BKS Iyengar popularized the idea of yoga for body detoxification. He introduced the squeeze and soak theory, claiming that twisting can detox the body.
Iyengar figured that stretching and compressing the spine causes the squeezing of the muscles and organs. They then allow the toxin-filled blood to flow and release the toxins in the body.
While the idea appears to make sense, there’s no scientific evidence to back this claim. The detoxification process doesn’t work that way. In fact, the human body is and will continue to detox, with or without yoga.
Myth #2. Yoga only releases toxins in waste products.
It’s no secret how essential body detoxification is. Detox entails cleansing your body by eliminating toxic substances. These substances get accumulated over time through food and drink consumption, | no |
Yoga | Can yoga really detoxify your body? | yes_statement | "yoga" can "detoxify" your "body".. "yoga" has the ability to "detoxify" your "body". | https://www.theguardian.com/science/sifting-the-evidence/2014/jan/13/demystifying-detox-can-yoga-really-cleanse-the-liver | Demystifying detox: Can yoga really cleanse the liver? | Science ... | Demystifying detox: Can yoga really cleanse the liver?
January is the month for detox myths, including yoga to 'cleanse the liver' and 'rinse the spine'. Ouch!
Nicole Slavin
Mon 13 Jan 2014 07.00 ESTLast modified on Wed 20 Sep 2017 15.23 EDT
If there’s one word that seems ubiquitous every January, it’s "detox". Anyone hoping to wash away the excesses of the holiday season will look for ways to be better and healthier, at least than they were the year before. The fact is, detoxing isn’t a thing. It is well dressed (and well marketed) pseudoscience. It is hard to pinpoint a single culprit responsible for this piece of bad physiology that persists. Who knows where the origins of this misnomer lay, but recently it’s been seen more and more in the ever-growing yoga industry.
One benefit of yoga’s visibility and popularity is the variety of styles and methods available for one to get a stretch on. Classes offered nowadays can range from more traditional yoga styles that honour its cultural or spiritual origins, to ones that cater to a more fitness-orientated crowd. It’s possible to find "hot" yoga, where the studio is warmed to 40C, there’s even yoga for "dudes". For the ultra-warrior, there is a fusion of Boxing Yoga, and the latest addition to the myriad of ways to stretch is disco-yoga! Regardless of whether you’re seeking the reverent or the physical, one thing still abounds in many yoga studios: bad science.
Type "yoga" and "detox" into any search engine and the claims you’ll find will be quite staggering. One yoga posture (or asana in Sanskrit) that seems to bear the brunt of being super magical and "detoxifying" is the spinal twist, performed in poses like Ardha Matsyendrasana (Half Lord Fish Pose). Some claims associated with this particular pose are reasonable, such as releasing muscles around the spine and lower back to ease pain or increase flexibility, for which there is some evidence.
But other claims are ridiculous, such as claims it can "rinse the spine". I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty happy with my cerebrospinal fluid un-rinsed, thanks. One of the more frequently made claims is that spinal twists detox the spine and subsequently massage the liver in order to increase its ability to detoxify (ie do its job). The sources of this myth are so numerous that a quick internet search will bring back hundreds, if not thousands, of hits. But it's simply not true.
The liver is astounding, and after the skin, it's the body's largest organ. It has evolved to put up with a great deal of biological abuse, and the way it works is nothing short of incredible. Because of its size and connection to two very large blood vessels, the liver is well situated to receive whatever comes through your intestinal tract, the good, bad or ugly. It takes on a bouncer-like job and keeps unwanted items, or toxins (such as byproducts from pharmaceuticals, or environmental carcinogens) from getting into the bloodstream; basically the liver has got your blood’s back.
The blood that comes into the liver from the spleen and gastrointestinal tract is greeted by Kupffer cells, a kind of macrophage (quite literally, "big eater"). They’re not picky and will, in plain English, eat the flotsam and jetsam right out of your blood by digesting these undesirable particles. They do the first pass of "toxin flushing", after which anything not caught here gets further broken down by enzymes produced by Hepatocytes, which are sensitive to blood sugar levels.
So what does the Ardha Matsyendrasana twist do? When performed correctly, after a proper warm-up and with attention to alignment, this humble but adaptable twist both strengthens and releases a host of muscles from your rhomboids (associated with the scapula) to your hamstrings, with a lot in between including both internal and external obliques and spinal extensors. Not to mention it feels pretty good too (one hopes).
One thing it’s not doing is directly affecting the cellular or biochemical workings of the liver, which are the primary mechanisms of "detoxification". And I don’t even know what "massaging the liver" means. If you’re manipulating your internal organs, you’re more likely to cause damage than improve their function.
Will practicing yoga, or exercising in general, get your cardiovascular system working? Yes. Does this have an impact on blood flow? Yes. Does change in blood flow impact on the other organ systems of the body? Yes. Can eating healthily, avoiding fatty food, alcohol etc give the liver a "break" from the demanding work of detoxing? Yes, it can. Does this mean you can make your liver work faster, better, stronger through an exercise or specific product/food/ritual? No, you can’t.
The best detox advice I know is:
Possess a (hopefully healthy) liver. Limit intake of high fat foods, excess calories, alcohol etc to maintain said healthy liver. And, of course, though it won’t "detoxify" you directly, do exercise.
To quote Sir Liam Donaldson, former Chief Medical Officer, in his 2009 report on the state of public health: “The potential benefits of physical activity to health are huge. If a medication existed which had a similar effect, it would be regarded as a ‘wonder drug’ or ‘miracle cure’.”
Namaste.
Nicole Slavin is a 200 Yoga Alliance-registered yoga teacherand holds a BSc in physiology and pharmacology. She can be found on Twitter @schrokit | Demystifying detox: Can yoga really cleanse the liver?
January is the month for detox myths, including yoga to 'cleanse the liver' and 'rinse the spine'. Ouch!
Nicole Slavin
Mon 13 Jan 2014 07.00 ESTLast modified on Wed 20 Sep 2017 15.23 EDT
If there’s one word that seems ubiquitous every January, it’s "detox". Anyone hoping to wash away the excesses of the holiday season will look for ways to be better and healthier, at least than they were the year before. The fact is, detoxing isn’t a thing. It is well dressed (and well marketed) pseudoscience. It is hard to pinpoint a single culprit responsible for this piece of bad physiology that persists. Who knows where the origins of this misnomer lay, but recently it’s been seen more and more in the ever-growing yoga industry.
One benefit of yoga’s visibility and popularity is the variety of styles and methods available for one to get a stretch on. Classes offered nowadays can range from more traditional yoga styles that honour its cultural or spiritual origins, to ones that cater to a more fitness-orientated crowd. It’s possible to find "hot" yoga, where the studio is warmed to 40C, there’s even yoga for "dudes". For the ultra-warrior, there is a fusion of Boxing Yoga, and the latest addition to the myriad of ways to stretch is disco-yoga! Regardless of whether you’re seeking the reverent or the physical, one thing still abounds in many yoga studios: bad science.
Type "yoga" and "detox" into any search engine and the claims you’ll find will be quite staggering. One yoga posture (or asana in Sanskrit) that seems to bear the brunt of being super magical and "detoxifying" is the spinal twist, performed in poses like Ardha Matsyendrasana (Half Lord Fish Pose). | no |
Yoga | Can yoga really detoxify your body? | yes_statement | "yoga" can "detoxify" your "body".. "yoga" has the ability to "detoxify" your "body". | https://tintyoga.com/magazine/can-yoga-twists-really-detox-your-body/ | Can Yoga Twists Really Detox Your Body? - TINT Yoga | Can Yoga Twists Really Detox Your Body?
Especially at the beginning of a new year or with the arrival of spring, everyone wants to become healthier, fitter, slimmer – you name it. So why not start the transformation process by detoxing your body first to get rid of all traces of your previous unhealthy lifestyle?
If you’re attending yoga classes on a regular basis, you will certainly have heard the claim that yoga poses, especially yoga twists, detox your body. And you’ve probably also heard the exact opposite: that yoga does not detox anything at all. What should you believe? And why should you practice yoga twists anyway?
1. Can Yoga Twists Really Detox Your Body?
It is often said that twisting postures cleanse or detoxify the internal organs, in particular, the liver. The idea that yoga twists can detox the body was popularized by the famous yoga teacher B.K.S. Iyengar. According to him, twisting poses compressed the muscles and organs, blocking the flow of blood. When releasing the poses, the blood flows back into those areas, improving circulation.
However, the liver has its own natural detox process, which is mainly a cellular process. Doing yoga twists and other yoga poses doesn’t actually detox organs. The concept of cleansing and detox rather is a metaphor for practices that improve already existing detoxification processes in the body by contributing to overall health. Our organs, such as the liver, kidneys, and the skin, are perfectly capable of detoxing on their own, provided that they’re healthy. They filter toxins, including substances from food, alcohol, and medications, from our blood.
Does this mean that yoga twists are useless? Well, you certainly can’t compensate excessive alcohol consumption with some extra rounds of Ardha Matsyendrasana the next morning. However, twists are an important part of a balanced yoga practice as they improve circulation – which certainly is beneficial to your internal organs.
But you’re not actually “wringing out” your liver every time you perform a Revolved Triangle pose. While this pose certainly strengthens and releases quite a number of muscles in your body, it does not affect the biochemical processes in the liver.
It rather is the case that any form of physical activity – not just yoga – supports the functionality of the organs in performing their normal detox processes. Apart from that, exercising in general gets your cardiovascular system going, improves your blood flow and, thereby, has a positive impact on your body’s systems and processes.
Besides, people who regularly practice yoga (or do any other form of exercise) usually have adapted healthier lifestyle habits such as healthy eating, little to no alcohol consumption, enough sleep and reduced stress levels. All this works towards optimal organ functioning, ensuring that the body’s own detoxification processes can work at their highest level.
So, roll out your yoga mat and practice a few rounds of yoga twists. Your body will appreciate it.
2. 5 Foundations of Yoga Twists
When it comes to yoga twists, it’s important to observe some elemental alignment principles that help you to twist deeper and, thus, benefit even more from these poses. Learn 5 steps to deepen your yoga twists from TINT instructor Matt Giordano as he takes you on a journey through the core in his 90-minute Detox Flow.
2.1. Set Stable Foundations
The first step should always be setting stable foundations for your twist. Start by bending the knees to tilt the pelvis anteriorly. Then, lift the belly up by letting the ribcage move up toward the chin and the belly squeeze in like a muscular corset wrapping around your waist. Imagine you’re slurping up a smoothie to lift the belly up. Lifting the abdomen also elongates the spine, giving you more space to move. This makes twisting a bit easier.
When you lift your ribcage up, imagine you’re stepping up stairs: Lift up the right ribs first and then lift up the left ribcage above the level of the right ribs. Keep that lifting and move the right ribcage further up again and so on.
At the same time, you move the pubic bone down so that the belly elongates. You will feel the transverse abdominal muscles sucking the waistline in and giving you the space to rise.
1. Elevate the abdomen.
As you breathe, you want to keep your abdomen in. This requires you to breathe through the sides of the ribs or maybe even the back of the heart.
2.2. Round the Spine
The first step when you get into a twisting pose is rounding the spine.
2. Round the spine.
2.3. Arch the Spine
Once you’re in the twist, arch the spine on an exhale to get deeper into the twist.
3. Arch the spine.
2.4. Sidebend Up
Elongate the underside of your waistline to sidebend your torso upward and twist even more.
4. Sidebend up.
2.5. Sidebend Down
Lengthen the side of the waistline that is facing the sky to sidebend the torso down and go deeper into the twist.
5. Sidebend down.
Return to step 1 and repeat the actions again until you’re as deep in the twist as you can.
These steps help you create your maximum twist. They enable you to identify where the tight spots are in your body and spine. When you root down through the legs and create the movements of elongation, rounding, arching, and sidebending, you will be able to perform deeper twists.
If you’re looking for more guidance on your yoga practice, check out our free collection of yoga class plans, which provides detailed descriptions of different yoga class themes that are suitable for various level. You’ll find, for example, yoga for beginners, an evening yoga practice, or a morning yoga sequence. You can use this ebook for your own practice or if you need inspiration for your teaching.
3. 12 Yoga Twists Your Body Will Love
Warm Up First
Before you start moving your body into deep yoga twists, warm up the body with some gentle movement and easier, more subtle twisting poses. You can do this, for example, with Matt Giordano‘s Detox Flow on TINT. After a short warm-up sequence, he guides you through a variety of yoga twists. This Detox Flow combines both movement and technique to help you let go of unwanted tension from the body and mind.
1. Runner’s Twist with Backbend
From Mountain pose (Tadasana), bow down into a Forward Fold (Uttanasana) and step the left leg back into a Runner’s Lunge. Come onto your fingertips and squeeze the shins isometrically toward each other so that you feel a slight lift in the hips. Root the right heel firmly down into the yoga mat.
With that action of pressing down, draw the outer right hip back and under. Place the left hand further to the left side and back a few inches. Take the right hand behind the head and arch the back so that the chest faces the front of the yoga mat. Elongate the waistline by drawing the belly up toward the ribcage.
Take a full breath here before you release the hands back down onto the ground. Repeat on the opposite side.
Arch your spine in Runner’s Twist.
2. Crooked Monkey
Start in Warrior 2 and bring both hands back onto the yoga mat, placing the back knee down for a Low Lunge position. Heel-toe the front foot further outward and bring the left hand further out in the opposite direction. Place the right hand onto the back of the head and arch the spine into a little backbend. If available to you, reach back for your back foot with the top hand for a thigh stretch.
This will awaken the muscles in the core and the iliopsoas. The latter attaches to a number of muscles in your lower back and loosening it up helps to release tension in this area.
To go deeper into this pose, instead of just stretching deeper, start engaging the muscles by pulling the back knee isometrically forward until you feel the front of your hip flexor engaging. At the same time, kick your back foot into your hand to engage the quadriceps. If you can, you can now try to bring the foot closer in toward your buttocks.
Release the pose and transition into Downward-Facing Dog and step into Warrior 2 with the left leg to repeat the previous poses on the opposite side. Then, step back into Downward-Facing Dog and return to Mountain pose.
Target your iliopsoas with Crooked Monkey pose.
3. Low Lunge with Sidebend
From Tadasana, bow down into Ardha Uttanasana (Half Forward Fold) and step the left leg back, placing the knee down onto the yoga mat. If available, use a yoga block (or a thick book or something similar) for this next pose as this will make it easier accessible. Otherwise, you can simply come onto your fingertips.
Put the yoga block on the outside of your right hip and place the right hand onto the block. The left hand rests on top of the front knee. Gather strength in the legs by pulling the back knee forward and the front foot back until you feel the pelvis slightly lifting.
From that strength in the legs, draw the abdomen in and up as if you were trying to climb the ribcage up. Let the left ribs poke up to the sky and take the left arm up and over the ear to sidebend over to the right side. This pose is a combination of Reverse Warrior and Low Lunge.
Release the pose after a few breaths and step forward into Uttanasana and then step the opposite foot back, repeating the same pose on the other side.
Combine Reverse Warrior and Low Lunge.
4. Runner’s Twist with Arms Extended
From Uttanasana, step the left leg back again and, this time, keep the knee lifted. Place the left fingertips onto the yoga mat and the right hand onto your right knee to prepare for a twist.
The tendency in this twist is that the left hip drops toward the ground. Do your best to lift it up. It doesn’t have to be level with the right hip, but a little lifted so that the twist is not only happening at the pelvis but also at the spine.
Use your right hand to push it down and turn your chest toward the sky. Take the right hand all the way up and pull yourself up from the wrist so that there’s an expansion all the way through the fingertips.
After a few breaths, step forward and lift halfway into Ardha Uttanasana and then step the opposite foot back to repeat this Runner’s Twist on the other side.
Expand through the fingertips in Runner’s Twist.
5. Revolved Chair Pose
Come to the front of your yoga mat and bend the knees for Chair pose (Utkatasana). Keep the feet about hip-width apart and tilt the pelvis anteriorly to create an arch in the lower back.
Place the hands on top of the right knee. Lift the abdominals up by alternating between raising the right ribs up and the left ribs up. Once you feel you’re elongated as much as you can, take the left elbow across to the right knee. Use the right hand to push down and lift the chest up. Then place the right palm on top of the left palm to come into a Revolved Chairpose.
To counteract the tendency of the left hip tends to come forward, consciously take it back. Try to turn the belly toward the sky to the right so that the belly button moves to the right. You can turn your head to either just face to the right side or even up toward the sky if that feels comfortable. Maintain the pose for a few breaths and unwind on an inhale, taking the fingertips down onto the ground.
Bend the knees for Chair pose again and, this time, twist to the left side and repeat the same actions here for Revolved Chair pose on the left. Return to Uttanasana at the end.
Twist and strengthen in Revolved Chair pose.
6. Revolved Low Lunge
From Uttanasana, lift halfway into Ardha Uttanasana and step the left leg back. Place the left knee down onto the yoga mat and let your hands rest on top of your right knee.
Start by establishing a rounded position by rounding your back and pulling the ribcage back. Keep this rounded back as you bring your left elbow across to the right thigh. Keep the right hand on the thigh at the beginning to push into your thigh.
Now, create an arched position by elongating up and moving the chest away from the hips. As a next step, start to sidebend by taking the right ribcage toward the right hip. Then, sidebend back the other way and turn your chest at the same time.
Place your right palm on top of your left one and repeat the previous actions: Draw the belly up, round your body into the pose, arch back and twist a little bit more and, lastly, sidebend up and down for the final twist. Stay for a few breaths.
Release this deep twist by bringing both hands back onto the yoga mat on either side of your front foot. Take a moment here to observe how you feel and then step forward into Uttanasana. Lift halfway again and step the right foot back to repeat the pose on the opposite side.
Enjoy a deep twist in Revolved Low Lunge.
7. Revolved Hand to Knee or Big Toe Pose
From Uttanasana, place both hands onto your hips and rise up to stand in Mountain pose (Tadasana). Lift the right knee up toward your chest. Bend the knee of the left leg (the standing leg) slightly to anteriorly tilt the pelvis.
Place the left hand on the outside of the right knee and repeat the same actions you did in the previous poses: Lift the abdomen up to create some length in the waist and then turn the chest. You can place the right hand either on your hip or extend it back. Lift the belly button up and turn it to the right.
You can either stay here or take hold of the outer edge of the right foot and extend the leg out. Note that the tendency here is that you lean backward. To counteract this, move your hips back and push your foot against that action into your hand.
You will probably also notice how your left shoulder pokes out. Try to consciously move the shoulder back. Now you can choose whether you want to keep the standing leg slightly bent or straighten it if that feels more stable.
Hold the pose for a few breaths and then return to center and repeat the pose twisting to the left side.
Chose whether you want to keep the knee bent or straighten the leg.
If you’re looking for more guidance on your yoga practice, we’ve created something special for you: a free eBook that contains yoga class plans ready to use for your classes. The eBook offers different classes for different levels, where you can find the asanas along with their descriptions in a logical order.
8. Prayer’s Twist
From Uttanasana, lift halfway and step the left foot back. This time, keep the hips elevated and the back leg strong. Root the right outer hip down into the heel and place the hands onto your right knee. Hinge slightly forward and round the upper back. Make sure your legs are really solid and stable.
Take the left elbow across to the right thigh. Draw the belly in and turn it to the right and up. Arch the back to increase your range of motion. As you exhale, sidebend up and, on the inhale, sidebend back down to increasingly deepen the twist. When you can’t go any deeper anymore, place the right palm onto the left and lift the chest.
On an exhale, return to center and into your Forward Fold again. Give your body a few moments of rest here before repeating the twist on the opposite side.
Remember the 5 steps to get deeper into twists.
9. Revolved Half Moon
Start from Downward-Facing Dog and step the right foot forward between your hands. Take the hands about one foot further toward the front of your yoga mat. Lift the left leg up and straighten the right leg to come into a supported Warrior 3.
Try to keep the left hip lifted and take the right arm up to the sky. Root the right heel down into the ground to level the hips. Arch your back and elongate to get deeper into the twist.
Take a few deep breaths here before you release both hands down to the ground and step back into Downward-Facing Dog. Repeat the twist on the opposite side.
Twist and balance in Revolved Half Moon.
10. Side Angle Pose
For an open yoga twist, start in Downward-Facing dog and lift the right leg up. Step the right foot forward between the hands and rise up into a High Lunge position. Open the arms to the sides and come into Warrior 2.
On an inhalation, lean back towards your back leg for Reverse Warrior, stretching the right side of the waistline. On the next exhale, place the right forearm on the right thigh and the left hand onto the hip for Side Angle pose.
Root the right heel straight into the ground until you feel the right buttock engage. Try to move the right pelvis slightly underneath and keep that strength in the right hip. Slide the right fingertips down on the inside of your right leg and place them next to your right foot. Reach the left arm up to the sky by turning the belly upward.
To deepen the twist, round the back first and turn and arch the back on an exhale to open up. Then slightly sidebend up to the sky and, as you twist, sidebend down toward the ground. Stay in the pose for a few big breaths and release the hands to the ground on an exhale. Take a few breaths in Child’s pose before you repeat the pose with the left leg in front.
Practice Side Angle pose as an open twist.
11. Ardha Matsyendrasana
Come into a seated position and take the right leg over the left one. In seated poses, it’s particularly important to anteriorly tilt the pelvis to arch the back. Move the top of the sacrum further in to get a more pronounced arch in the lumbar spine. This is important because the natural curves of your spine will create the most depth in your twist.
Root the heel of the top leg down into the ground and lift the belly. Take the right hand back behind you to support yourself and place the left hand onto your top knee. Round the back first and, on an inhale, arch the back and twist. Lift up and turn the right side of the waistline and then lift up and turn the left side.
Stay for a few breaths in the twist and take a counter-twist tp the left side before repeating Ardha Matsyendrasana on the opposite side.
Unwind in a seated twist.
12. Supine Spinal Twist
Finish your twisting practice with a supine spinal twist. Lie down onto your back, bend the knees and place your feet onto the ground. Shift the hips to the right side of your yoga mat and straighten the left leg. Take the right knee across the body for the spinal twist.
Here, the anterior tilt of the pelvis becomes particularly important because the tailbone tends to tuck underneath, causing the lumbar spine going into the opposite curve. In order to avoid this, move the hips back and the belly forward so that the lumbar spine is arched.
Lengthen the belly and turn the belly button toward the right shoulder. Lift the underside of the waistline up and away from the ground to create more space.
Hold the pose for a few breaths and return to center. Repeat the twist on the opposite side.
Finish your twisting practice with a supine spinal twist.
If you’re looking for more features to make your yoga practice or yoga teaching easier, have a look at our free collection of Yoga Class Plans, which provides free sample yoga class plans for various different class types and levels. Each class contains a sequence of asanas along with their description and is a great tool if preparation time is short and you just want to roll out your mat or start teaching. | Can Yoga Twists Really Detox Your Body?
Especially at the beginning of a new year or with the arrival of spring, everyone wants to become healthier, fitter, slimmer – you name it. So why not start the transformation process by detoxing your body first to get rid of all traces of your previous unhealthy lifestyle?
If you’re attending yoga classes on a regular basis, you will certainly have heard the claim that yoga poses, especially yoga twists, detox your body. And you’ve probably also heard the exact opposite: that yoga does not detox anything at all. What should you believe? And why should you practice yoga twists anyway?
1. Can Yoga Twists Really Detox Your Body?
It is often said that twisting postures cleanse or detoxify the internal organs, in particular, the liver. The idea that yoga twists can detox the body was popularized by the famous yoga teacher B.K.S. Iyengar. According to him, twisting poses compressed the muscles and organs, blocking the flow of blood. When releasing the poses, the blood flows back into those areas, improving circulation.
However, the liver has its own natural detox process, which is mainly a cellular process. Doing yoga twists and other yoga poses doesn’t actually detox organs. The concept of cleansing and detox rather is a metaphor for practices that improve already existing detoxification processes in the body by contributing to overall health. Our organs, such as the liver, kidneys, and the skin, are perfectly capable of detoxing on their own, provided that they’re healthy. They filter toxins, including substances from food, alcohol, and medications, from our blood.
Does this mean that yoga twists are useless? Well, you certainly can’t compensate excessive alcohol consumption with some extra rounds of Ardha Matsyendrasana the next morning. However, twists are an important part of a balanced yoga practice as they improve circulation – which certainly is beneficial to your internal organs.
| no |
Yoga | Can yoga really detoxify your body? | yes_statement | "yoga" can "detoxify" your "body".. "yoga" has the ability to "detoxify" your "body". | https://www.bottegayoga.com/benifits-of-infrared-heat | Benifits Of Infrared Heat | Bottega Yoga | South Kingstown | Phone: 860-389-6996
Benefits of Infrared Heat
The Journal of the American College of Cardiology and the Mayo Clinic report that infrared therapy improves the functioning of blood vessels, reduces cholesterol, increases circulation and lowers blood sugar levels. Some of the additional health benefits of infrared hot yoga include:
Improved Immune System Function
Infrared rays are known to boost the immune system by increasing the number of white blood cells and T cells. This improved immune system function promotes healing throughout your body, reduces muscle tension, soreness and muscle spasms. Raising your body temperature also creates a sort of artificial fever, which is also a benefit to your immune system.
A Multitude of Skin Benefits
Skin problems can be eliminated due to the ability of hot yoga to increase blood flow and oxygenation to your skin. The improved circulation is due to the expansion of your capillaries. Infrared energy is also shown to Improve collagen production and skin elasticity, reduce the appearance of fine lines, reduce or prevent wrinkles, and minimize acne scars.
May Help Detoxify Your Body
Infrared yoga can help detoxify your body by increasing how much you sweat during your workout, potentially clearing heavy metals, toxins, and carcinogens from your body. Detoxification could be beneficial to those living with chronic fatigue or skin disorders. Infrared hot yoga also amplifies the amount of fat you will eliminate with exercise and eliminates retained fluids.
Accelerates Your Weight Loss Efforts
Infrared boosts the enzymatic activity in your digestive tract and boosts your metabolism. Just one hour of infrared hot yoga can burn up to 900 calories, break down trapped fat, cellulite, and cellular waste. One thirty minute infrared hot yoga session is equivalent to sweating the distance of a two to three-mile run.
Reduces Pain and Inflammation
The infrared light and heat penetrate deeply to soothe pain, inflammation, and ease muscle soreness. Infrared heat penetrates your body, improving your circulation, enhancing oxygenation and relaxing your muscles. This has proven beneficial for yoga enthusiasts who rely on their discipline to help alleviate the symptoms of chronic pain conditions, such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia.
Increases Muscle Flexibility and Accelerates Strength Building
Your body moves better when your muscles are warm. You will find your muscles more limber; you may also find that you require less time to warm up. While your muscles will move easier, more freely with infrared hot yoga, it is still recommended not to push yourself too hard, at least not at first. Your tendons and ligaments are not as vascular as your muscles. While your muscles may stretch more deeply, your tendons and ligaments may not be ready; you need to gauge your efforts mindfully to reduce your risk of a pull or strain.
The Additional Benefits of Infrared Hot Yoga
Heat can make yoga more challenging. You will notice that hot yoga increases your heart rate. Even if you are used to pushing yourself in other yoga classes, during hot yoga, your body will typically need time to adjust to the temperature changes in your environment. Taking some time to adapt will be worth your efforts. Some of the other potential benefits of infrared energy include: | May Help Detoxify Your Body
Infrared yoga can help detoxify your body by increasing how much you sweat during your workout, potentially clearing heavy metals, toxins, and carcinogens from your body. Detoxification could be beneficial to those living with chronic fatigue or skin disorders. Infrared hot yoga also amplifies the amount of fat you will eliminate with exercise and eliminates retained fluids.
Accelerates Your Weight Loss Efforts
Infrared boosts the enzymatic activity in your digestive tract and boosts your metabolism. Just one hour of infrared hot yoga can burn up to 900 calories, break down trapped fat, cellulite, and cellular waste. One thirty minute infrared hot yoga session is equivalent to sweating the distance of a two to three-mile run.
Reduces Pain and Inflammation
The infrared light and heat penetrate deeply to soothe pain, inflammation, and ease muscle soreness. Infrared heat penetrates your body, improving your circulation, enhancing oxygenation and relaxing your muscles. This has proven beneficial for yoga enthusiasts who rely on their discipline to help alleviate the symptoms of chronic pain conditions, such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia.
Increases Muscle Flexibility and Accelerates Strength Building
Your body moves better when your muscles are warm. You will find your muscles more limber; you may also find that you require less time to warm up. While your muscles will move easier, more freely with infrared hot yoga, it is still recommended not to push yourself too hard, at least not at first. Your tendons and ligaments are not as vascular as your muscles. While your muscles may stretch more deeply, your tendons and ligaments may not be ready; you need to gauge your efforts mindfully to reduce your risk of a pull or strain.
The Additional Benefits of Infrared Hot Yoga
Heat can make yoga more challenging. | yes |
Yoga | Can yoga really detoxify your body? | no_statement | "yoga" cannot "detoxify" your "body".. detoxification of the "body" is not achieved through "yoga". | https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/05/detox-myth-health-diet-science-ignorance | You can't detox your body. It's a myth. So how do you get healthy ... | You can’t detox your body. It’s a myth. So how do you get healthy?
There’s no such thing as ‘detoxing’. In medical terms, it’s a nonsense. Diet and exercise is the only way to get healthy. But which of the latest fad regimes can really make a difference? We look at the facts
Whether it’s cucumbers splashing into water or models sitting smugly next to a pile of vegetables, it’s tough not to be sucked in by the detox industry. The idea that you can wash away your calorific sins is the perfect antidote to our fast-food lifestyles and alcohol-lubricated social lives. But before you dust off that juicer or take the first tentative steps towards a colonic irrigation clinic, there’s something you should know: detoxing – the idea that you can flush your system of impurities and leave your organs squeaky clean and raring to go – is a scam. It’s a pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things.
“Let’s be clear,” says Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University, “there are two types of detox: one is respectable and the other isn’t.” The respectable one, he says, is the medical treatment of people with life-threatening drug addictions. “The other is the word being hijacked by entrepreneurs, quacks and charlatans to sell a bogus treatment that allegedly detoxifies your body of toxins you’re supposed to have accumulated.”
If toxins did build up in a way your body couldn’t excrete, he says, you’d likely be dead or in need of serious medical intervention. “The healthy body has kidneys, a liver, skin, even lungs that are detoxifying as we speak,” he says. “There is no known way – certainly not through detox treatments – to make something that works perfectly well in a healthy body work better.”
With celebrity advocates from Gwyneth Paltrow to Oprah Winfrey, detoxing has become big business. Rich Peppiatt thinks he’s found the solution to our detoxing obsession … and it tastes a bit like liquified animal. Guardian
Much of the sales patter revolves around “toxins”: poisonous substances that you ingest or inhale. But it’s not clear exactly what these toxins are. If they were named they could be measured before and after treatment to test effectiveness. Yet, much like floaters in your eye, try to focus on these toxins and they scamper from view. In 2009, a network of scientists assembled by the UK charity Sense about Science contacted the manufacturers of 15 products sold in pharmacies and supermarkets that claimed to detoxify. The products ranged from dietary supplements to smoothies and shampoos. When the scientists asked for evidence behind the claims, not one of the manufacturers could define what they meant by detoxification, let alone name the toxins.
Yet, inexplicably, the shelves of health food stores are still packed with products bearing the word “detox” – it’s the marketing equivalent of drawing go-faster stripes on your car. You can buy detoxifying tablets, tinctures, tea bags, face masks, bath salts, hair brushes, shampoos, body gels and even hair straighteners. Yoga, luxury retreats, and massages will also all erroneously promise to detoxify. You can go on a seven-day detox diet and you’ll probably lose weight, but that’s nothing to do with toxins, it’s because you would have starved yourself for a week.
Then there’s colonic irrigation. Its proponents will tell you that mischievous plaques of impacted poo can lurk in your colon for months or years and pump disease-causing toxins back into your system. Pay them a small fee, though, and they’ll insert a hose up your bottom and wash them all away. Unfortunately for them – and possibly fortunately for you – no doctor has ever seen one of these mythical plaques, and many warn against having the procedure done, saying that it can perforate your bowel.
Other tactics are more insidious. Some colon-cleansing tablets contain a polymerising agent that turns your faeces into something like a plastic, so that when a massive rubbery poo snake slithers into your toilet you can stare back at it and feel vindicated in your purchase. Detoxing foot pads turn brown overnight with what manufacturers claim is toxic sludge drawn from your body. This sludge is nothing of the sort – a substance in the pads turns brown when it mixes with water from your sweat.
“It’s a scandal,” fumes Ernst. “It’s criminal exploitation of the gullible man on the street and it sort of keys into something that we all would love to have – a simple remedy that frees us of our sins, so to speak. It’s nice to think that it could exist but unfortunately it doesn’t.”
Spinach and broccoli smoothie.
That the concept of detoxification is so nebulous might be why it has evaded public suspicion. When most of us utter the word detox, it’s usually when we’re bleary eyed and stumbling out of the wrong end of a heavy weekend. In this case, surely, a detox from alcohol is a good thing? “It’s definitely good to have non-alcohol days as part of your lifestyle,” says Catherine Collins, an NHS dietitian at St George’s Hospital. “It’ll probably give you a chance to reassess your drinking habits if you’re drinking too much. But the idea that your liver somehow needs to be ‘cleansed’ is ridiculous.”
The liver breaks down alcohol in a two-step process. Enzymes in the liver first convert alcohol to acetaldehyde, a very toxic substance that damages liver cells. It is then almost immediately converted into carbon dioxide and water which the body gets rid of. Drinking too much can overwhelm these enzymes and the acetaldehyde buildup will lead to liver damage. Moderate and occasional drinking, though, might have a protective effect. Population studies, says Collins, have shown that teetotallers and those who drink alcohol excessively have a shorter life expectancy than people who drink moderately and in small amounts.
“We know that a little bit of alcohol seems to be helpful,” she says. “Maybe because its sedative effect relaxes you slightly or because it keeps the liver primed with these detoxifying enzymes to help deal with other toxins you’ve consumed. That’s why the government guidelines don’t say, ‘Don’t drink’; they say, ‘OK drink, but only modestly.’ It’s like a little of what doesn’t kill you cures you.”
This adage also applies in an unexpected place – to broccoli, the luvvie of the high-street “superfood” detox salad. Broccoli does help the liver out but, unlike the broad-shouldered, cape-wearing image that its superfood moniker suggests, it is no hero. Broccoli, as with all brassicas – sprouts, mustard plants, cabbages – contains cyanide. Eating it provides a tiny bit of poison that, like alcohol, primes the enzymes in your liver to deal better with any other poisons.
Collins guffaws at the notion of superfoods. “Most people think that you should restrict or pay particular attention to certain food groups, but this is totally not the case,” she says. “The ultimate lifestyle ‘detox’ is not smoking, exercising and enjoying a healthy balanced diet like the Mediterranean diet.”
So why, then, with such a feast available on doctor’s orders, do we feel the need to punish ourselves to be healthy? Are we hard-wired to want to detox, given that many of the oldest religions practise fasting and purification? Has the scientific awakening shunted bad spirits to the periphery and replaced them with environmental toxins that we think we have to purge ourselves of?
Susan Marchant-Haycox, a London psychologist, doesn’t think so. “Trying to tie detoxing in with ancient religious practices is clutching at straws,” she says. “You need to look at our social makeup over the very recent past. In the 70s, you had all these gyms popping up, and from there we’ve had the proliferation of the beauty and diet industry with people becoming more aware of certain food groups and so on.
“The detox industry is just a follow-on from that. There’s a lot of money in it and there are lots of people out there in marketing making a lot of money.”
Peter Ayton, a professor of psychology at City University London, agrees. He says that we’re susceptible to such gimmicks because we live in a world with so much information we’re happy to defer responsibility to others who might understand things better. “To understand even shampoo you need to have PhD in biochemistry,” he says, “but a lot of people don’t have that. If it seems reasonable and plausible and invokes a familiar concept, like detoxing, then we’re happy to go with it.”
Many of our consumer decisions, he adds, are made in ignorance and supposition, which is rarely challenged or informed. “People assume that the world is carefully regulated and that there are benign institutions guarding them from making any kind of errors. A lot of marketing drip-feeds that idea, surreptitiously. So if people see somebody with apparently the right credentials, they think they’re listening to a respectable medic and trust their advice.”
Ernst is less forgiving: “Ask trading standards what they’re doing about it. Anyone who says, ‘I have a detox treatment’ is profiting from a false claim and is by definition a crook. And it shouldn’t be left to scientists and charities to go after crooks.” | -faster stripes on your car. You can buy detoxifying tablets, tinctures, tea bags, face masks, bath salts, hair brushes, shampoos, body gels and even hair straighteners. Yoga, luxury retreats, and massages will also all erroneously promise to detoxify. You can go on a seven-day detox diet and you’ll probably lose weight, but that’s nothing to do with toxins, it’s because you would have starved yourself for a week.
Then there’s colonic irrigation. Its proponents will tell you that mischievous plaques of impacted poo can lurk in your colon for months or years and pump disease-causing toxins back into your system. Pay them a small fee, though, and they’ll insert a hose up your bottom and wash them all away. Unfortunately for them – and possibly fortunately for you – no doctor has ever seen one of these mythical plaques, and many warn against having the procedure done, saying that it can perforate your bowel.
Other tactics are more insidious. Some colon-cleansing tablets contain a polymerising agent that turns your faeces into something like a plastic, so that when a massive rubbery poo snake slithers into your toilet you can stare back at it and feel vindicated in your purchase. Detoxing foot pads turn brown overnight with what manufacturers claim is toxic sludge drawn from your body. This sludge is nothing of the sort – a substance in the pads turns brown when it mixes with water from your sweat.
“It’s a scandal,” fumes Ernst. “It’s criminal exploitation of the gullible man on the street and it sort of keys into something that we all would love to have – a simple remedy that frees us of our sins, so to speak. It’s nice to think that it could exist but unfortunately it doesn’t.”
Spinach and broccoli smoothie.
That the concept of detoxification is so nebulous might be why it has evaded public suspicion. | no |
Yoga | Can yoga really detoxify your body? | no_statement | "yoga" cannot "detoxify" your "body".. detoxification of the "body" is not achieved through "yoga". | https://mindfulnessexercises.com/myths-facts-how-yoga-contributes-to-body-detox/ | Myths and Facts How Yoga Contributes to Body Detox | Myths and Facts How Yoga Contributes to Body Detox
Ah, the myths around yoga and its almost magic detox effects. If you google detox yoga, you’ll get over 41,000,000 search results. And beyond 7,000,000 results, if you change your phrase to “detox yoga classes”. Well, there must be something about it then, right?
But what if we told you that “detox yoga” is a myth? Is it, really?
Spoiler: no, it’s certainly not.
Yet, there are many misunderstandings concerning the question of body detoxification and what yogic techniques have to do with it. Let’s decipher between myths and reality about body purification and cleansing with yoga.
Top 3 Misconceptions about Body Detox with Yoga
There are some things that knock you for six when you hear them, and this is typically the case when you discover yoga and meditation-related myths. Some of them are so ingrained in the yoga culture that they have taken a life of their own, and many instructors and coaches swear that they are true.
If you have ever taken a detox yoga class, you’ve definitely heard practically all of the myth-based phrases like “Let’s rinse out your toxins!” or “You’re cleansing the liver completely at this moment”.
The myths below must have appeared due to the lack of knowledge or faulty phrasing. Shall we debunk the most widespread ones?
Myth #1. Yoga purifies your liver.
Your liver converts toxins into the waste material. It does its work efficiently even without yoga, if it’s in a good condition, of course. At the same time, physical activity, including yoga, can help your liver function normally and support its healthiness.
Founder & CEO of Uplifted Yoga, Brett Larkin, shares her insights about yoga and its benefits which she also discusses regularly during Uplifted Online Yoga Teacher Trainings, “Yoga itself does not detoxify your liver. Yoga only supports the detox process. But to a great extent. It also helps keep your liver healthy in the long run.”
Myth #2. You have to be bendy for yoga and practice every day.
Yoga is a highly beneficial practice to detoxify your organism no matter when you decide to do it or how flexible your body is. You can start with easy yoga for beginners and that would be enough for you to get a head start in boosting your metabolism and body detox.
“You don’t have to be super-bendy or super-active to promote faster detox of your body with yoga. No gimmicks here. Moderation is the key to a well-balanced life,” says Kyle Risley, Founder & CEO of Lift Vault. “You should maintain moderation in doing exercises and practice asana systematically to achieve greater results of cleansing your body,” he adds.
Can yoga literally help your body “push out” all toxins? With heavy sweat, for example? Let’s debunk this myth as well in the next paragraphs.
Myth #3. You sweat toxins out of your body with yoga.
Perspiration during hot yoga practice has its undeniable advantages. But sweating out toxins is a typical myth, even though it’s often called one of the best detox tools even by yoga teachers.
Because the sweating out myth became so popular, it has already provoked major issues in the sweat therapy and detoxification spa treatment that, in turn, resulted in death due to overheating.
In fact, sweat does not carry the toxins’ cells (like those of most drugs and alcohol) out of the body. What does go out with sweat is bisphenol A (BPA). It’s a chemical primarily used for the manufacture of polycarbonate plastics. More importantly, a small part of heavy metals is also “washed out” with sweat.
Peer into some more details on this and other true facts about yoga and its influence on your body detoxification.
Demystify Detox with these 3 Facts about Yoga
The truth is that your body has already got its inner natural detoxification system. And yoga substantially contributes to its functionality in certain ways. Read on to find out how exactly.
Fact #1. Yoga helps sweat out heavy metals.
As we have mentioned before, sweating during yoga is a good bet for heavy metal detox. Your body disposes of lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic with sweat. But besides those, the body loses too much water as well.
John Gardner, Co-Founder & CEO of Kickoff, suggests that to avoid the risks of dehydration during hot yoga, for example, you need to measure your sweat rate and create a personal fluid intake plan. That’s one of the first things the certified professional trainers do when working with people on their remote personal training platform.
The thing is that it’s the lymphatic system that collects wastes and toxins to get them eliminated from your body. It is like an aquarium. If you don’t clean it regularly, its environment will be prone to infections.
And since this system depends on the up and down movements of the diaphragm in combination with the outward and inward movements of the abdomen to promote lymph flow, yoga enhances its activity and positively influences lymphatic drainage.
Fact #3. Yoga twists stimulate detoxification.
Bending as well as squeezing-and-soaking actions trigger compression of the body’s waste elimination organs: kidneys, skin, lungs, liver, and intestines. With various twisting poses, morning yoga stretches, and twist variations, you get these organs stimulated to a higher degree.
But don’t overstimulate them – everything should be done in moderation.
How to Cope with Emotional “Toxins”
But how do you deal with those? When it comes to yoga, introspection and mindfulness come into play. One of the sure-fire ways is to try mindfulness meditation practice. As a part of yoga, it can battle negative emotions, heal trauma and improve your sleep quality.
“Working with seniors, our nurses and care managers have noticed that yoga exercises help them stay active and purify their body and mind,” says Stephan Baldwin, Founder of Assisted Living. “Chair yoga is one of the variations of traditional yoga that we practice at our centers. It helps achieve better mental clarity and enhances concentration, among other benefits.”
For yoga teachers, there are some guided meditation scripts that can help teach mindfulness in yoga classes. A wise combination of mindful yoga poses and moment-to-moment awareness can change everything.
How to Get Rid of Unwanted Toxins and Wastes
Take advantage of the specific types of yoga exercises that are beneficial for flushing out toxins. You may achieve purification of the body with Shatkarma – a set of six detox techniques. They are:
Neti kriya – for nasal cavities
Basti kriya – for the large intestine
Dhauti kriya – for the digestive tract
Kapalbhati kriya – for frontal lobes
Trataka kriya – for eyes
Nauli kriya – for abdominal organs
These yoga cleansing techniques help your body get detoxified thoroughly and safely. Make the most of the yogic cleanses and remove harmful substances that litter your body.
Conclusion
The yogic principle of purity and cleanliness is the basis for body detox. In this article, we’ve debunked the most prevalent myths about the role of yoga in whole-body detox and discussed the facts on how exactly yoga contributes to it.
As we have explained, yoga detoxes and restores the body indirectly. It supports and stimulates the processes that are already happening in our bodies. Despite the myths about yogic activities aimed at detoxification, the potential they have for the cleansing effect is huge, without exaggeration.
When we talk about body detoxification, we should also understand our capacity to overcome the toxic effects of our emotions. We can improve this capacity using the principles of mindfulness.
Do you have what it takes to try detox yoga right now? Don’t wait for tomorrow. Try some exercises today, but don’t go too far – do those in moderation and remember about the power of mindfulness.
About the author
Sean Fargo
Sean Fargo is the Founder of Mindfulness Exercises, a former Buddhist monk of 2 years, a trainer for the mindfulness program born at Google, an Integral Coach from New Ventures West, and an international mindfulness teacher trainer. He can be reached at Sean@MindfulnessExercises.com | If you have ever taken a detox yoga class, you’ve definitely heard practically all of the myth-based phrases like “Let’s rinse out your toxins!” or “You’re cleansing the liver completely at this moment”.
The myths below must have appeared due to the lack of knowledge or faulty phrasing. Shall we debunk the most widespread ones?
Myth #1. Yoga purifies your liver.
Your liver converts toxins into the waste material. It does its work efficiently even without yoga, if it’s in a good condition, of course. At the same time, physical activity, including yoga, can help your liver function normally and support its healthiness.
Founder & CEO of Uplifted Yoga, Brett Larkin, shares her insights about yoga and its benefits which she also discusses regularly during Uplifted Online Yoga Teacher Trainings, “Yoga itself does not detoxify your liver. Yoga only supports the detox process. But to a great extent. It also helps keep your liver healthy in the long run.”
Myth #2. You have to be bendy for yoga and practice every day.
Yoga is a highly beneficial practice to detoxify your organism no matter when you decide to do it or how flexible your body is. You can start with easy yoga for beginners and that would be enough for you to get a head start in boosting your metabolism and body detox.
“You don’t have to be super-bendy or super-active to promote faster detox of your body with yoga. No gimmicks here. Moderation is the key to a well-balanced life,” says Kyle Risley, Founder & CEO of Lift Vault. “You should maintain moderation in doing exercises and practice asana systematically to achieve greater results of cleansing your body,” he adds.
Can yoga literally help your body “push out” all toxins? With heavy sweat, for example? Let’s debunk this myth as well in the next paragraphs.
Myth #3. | no |
Yoga | Can yoga really detoxify your body? | no_statement | "yoga" cannot "detoxify" your "body".. detoxification of the "body" is not achieved through "yoga". | https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/does-yoga-really-detoxify-the-body | Does Yoga Really Detoxify the Body? | Discover Magazine | The health benefits of yoga are well-established, but claims that that certain moves can "detox" the body call for a reality check.
Newsletter
If you Google the words “detox” and “yoga," the hits about how certain yoga moves can help you rid your body of toxins go on for pages. (These range from books promising the best detox yoga moves to blogs that use clinical terms that are not based on science.) Or maybe you've heard your yoga instructor proclaim that certain twisting moves or postures "cleanse our bodies" or are "good for detoxification."
But there's no scientific evidence to support the idea that individual yoga maneuvers are detoxifying. Jonathan Cane, an exercise physiologist and coach based in New York City, says such claims are inaccurate and hyperbolic. "I think we're past hyperbole there," adds Cane. "There's a few layers of nonsense, to be perfectly honest."
The Detoxification Myth
Research suggests that this particular myth was born out of what's been dubbed the "squeeze and soak" theory, coined by internationally-known yogi B.K.S. Iyengar, who founded his eponymous yoga style in the 1960s. He also popularized the notion that twists can cleanse and that certain moves that squeeze the internal organs can help with detoxification. Essentially, Iyengar compared what happens inside your body during a twist to dirty water being squeezed out of sponge to make room for clean water.
But our bodies don’t need extra squeezing to do what they already do. To better understand why, we need a better understanding of the clinical definition of detox — and a short physiology lesson.
According to the National Cancer Institute, detoxification can refer to "the process of removing toxins, poisons or other harmful substances from the body." Luckily, we are born with organs assigned to do this job: the kidney and the liver. The kidney is a blood cleanser, removing excess fluid, chemicals and waste from our blood before it's carried out in our urine. The liver, too, plays a key role in filtering and removing toxic substances. When both of these organs are healthy, they work in tandem to detoxify materials not meant to be in the body.
Can't These Organs Use a Little Push?
There is no research that suggests these organs need outside help to get their jobs done. In other words, neither the kidneys nor the liver require twisting, squeezing, pushing or bending to be more effective at cleansing. "Maybe this twisting plays with your abdominal cavity in such a way that it compresses your liver. But, so what," says Cane. "The suggestion [is] that it’s now going to increase blood flow. [...] There's nothing that I'm aware of that says a liver with greater blood flow is a more effective, detoxifying organ; that it does its job any better.”
Cane calls use of the word detox in exercise circles “casual language.” In other words, it’s not being used in a clinical or medical way and therefore shouldn’t be heard or interpreted as such. "I do some yoga here and there and I just sort of roll my eyes every time I hear stuff like that,” says Cane.
That said, all that twisting and folding you are doing during your yoga practice is still good for you. Twisting can help promote the spine's range of motion, says Cane. And twisting helps you move your spine in ways that are often neglected. "An argument could be made that, ’active’ twisting helps strengthen your obliques, and they help your spinal mobility,” adds Cane.
So, until the science trickles down to every yogi and yoga instructor who incorrectly uses the word “detox," consider an eye roll and remember that it's the physical portion of your routine — not the verbal portion — that's the key part of your practice. | The health benefits of yoga are well-established, but claims that that certain moves can "detox" the body call for a reality check.
Newsletter
If you Google the words “detox” and “yoga," the hits about how certain yoga moves can help you rid your body of toxins go on for pages. (These range from books promising the best detox yoga moves to blogs that use clinical terms that are not based on science.) Or maybe you've heard your yoga instructor proclaim that certain twisting moves or postures "cleanse our bodies" or are "good for detoxification."
But there's no scientific evidence to support the idea that individual yoga maneuvers are detoxifying. Jonathan Cane, an exercise physiologist and coach based in New York City, says such claims are inaccurate and hyperbolic. "I think we're past hyperbole there," adds Cane. "There's a few layers of nonsense, to be perfectly honest. "
The Detoxification Myth
Research suggests that this particular myth was born out of what's been dubbed the "squeeze and soak" theory, coined by internationally-known yogi B.K.S. Iyengar, who founded his eponymous yoga style in the 1960s. He also popularized the notion that twists can cleanse and that certain moves that squeeze the internal organs can help with detoxification. Essentially, Iyengar compared what happens inside your body during a twist to dirty water being squeezed out of sponge to make room for clean water.
But our bodies don’t need extra squeezing to do what they already do. To better understand why, we need a better understanding of the clinical definition of detox — and a short physiology lesson.
According to the National Cancer Institute, detoxification can refer to "the process of removing toxins, poisons or other harmful substances from the body." Luckily, we are born with organs assigned to do this job: the kidney and the liver. | no |
Yoga | Can yoga really detoxify your body? | no_statement | "yoga" cannot "detoxify" your "body".. detoxification of the "body" is not achieved through "yoga". | https://www.healthxchange.sg/fitness-exercise/exercise-tips/hot-yoga-bikram-myths-facts | Hot Yoga (Bikram Yoga): Top Myths and Facts - HealthXchange.sg | What’s hot yoga, also known as Bikram yoga? It is the practice of yoga conducted in a heated room with sweltering temperatures of about 40°C (or approximately 104° Fahrenheit) and 40 per cent humidity. It’s guaranteed to make the body sweat… plenty! Hence, many believe this helps detoxify the body and burn major calories. But is it true? Are there any dangers, and how can you prepare for a session?
Myths about hot yoga
Myth 1: Heavy sweating during hot yoga will help detox your body
Hot yoga can really make you sweat buckets - up to two litres during a single session, according to reports. However, sweat is 99 per cent water combined with a small amount of minerals such as sodium, potassium and magnesium, as well as trace metals like zinc, copper and iron. Thus, sweating will mostly eliminate water and other constituents needed for bodily functions. Real toxins like mercury, alcohol and most drugs are eliminated by the liver, kidneys and intestines, not through sweat.
Raising the temperature of the room you’re exercising in does increase heart rate as your heart needs to work harder to cool your body down. But this does not mean that hot yoga puts greater physical demand on your muscles, hence offering a more intensive workout. Neither does it guarantee greater calorie burn or consumption. Heat by itself doesn’t burn calories.
Myth 3: The heated environment warms up muscles so injuries are less likely to occur
It is true that heat enhances vasodilation of the blood vessels so more blood is delivered to the muscles, making muscles more elastic and less susceptible to injury. However, certain people are just generally less flexible than others. So even within a heated environment, advanced yoga postures might prove too difficult for a participant (especially if he or she rarely exercises) and continuous insistence of achieving these postures can still result in injuries to the legs and back.
Possible dangers of hot yoga
Apart from possible injuries arising from over-stretching, intense sweating also brings about the risk of heat exhaustion and dehydration. Furthermore, those not used to exercising in a hot and humid environment may experience sluggishness, dizziness or nausea during their first initial lessons.
“Patients with conditions such as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and some cardiac complications can develop a unique sensitivity to heat. Plus, those taking medication for depression, nervousness and insomnia should also check with their doctor prior to participating in hot yoga to ensure the heat does not interplay with their medication.”
How to get your body ready for hot yoga
Most people need a minimum of two litres of fluid daily to stay hydrated. When doing hot yoga (or Bikram yoga), it is important to hydrate throughout the day rather than immediately before your class. This way, you won’t be bothered by a full bladder and will be able to concentrate fully on each yoga pose.
“You can bring a bottle of water with you and take sips during the class. After class, continue to rehydrate and supplement with electrolytes or an isotonic drink – replenishing minerals like sodium, potassium and magnesium, which were lost through sweat,” advises our experts.
What are the benefits of hot yoga?
As with any form of exercise, there is always the risk of injury. However, regular practice of yoga has been proven to:
Elevate metabolism
Reduce stress
Build strength, endurance and muscle tone
Improve posture and circulation
Increase balance, coordination, focus and discipline
Strengthen the immune system
“When it comes to hot yoga, the key is to know your limits”. If halfway through a session, you feel lightheaded, dizzy or experience any discomfort, take a break or step out of the room. You should always listen to your body.
Terms of Use / Disclaimer All information provided within this web and mobile application is intended for general information and is provided on the understanding that no surgical and medical advice or recommendation is being rendered. Please do not disregard the professional advice of your physician. | What’s hot yoga, also known as Bikram yoga? It is the practice of yoga conducted in a heated room with sweltering temperatures of about 40°C (or approximately 104° Fahrenheit) and 40 per cent humidity. It’s guaranteed to make the body sweat… plenty! Hence, many believe this helps detoxify the body and burn major calories. But is it true? Are there any dangers, and how can you prepare for a session?
Myths about hot yoga
Myth 1: Heavy sweating during hot yoga will help detox your body
Hot yoga can really make you sweat buckets - up to two litres during a single session, according to reports. However, sweat is 99 per cent water combined with a small amount of minerals such as sodium, potassium and magnesium, as well as trace metals like zinc, copper and iron. Thus, sweating will mostly eliminate water and other constituents needed for bodily functions. Real toxins like mercury, alcohol and most drugs are eliminated by the liver, kidneys and intestines, not through sweat.
Raising the temperature of the room you’re exercising in does increase heart rate as your heart needs to work harder to cool your body down. But this does not mean that hot yoga puts greater physical demand on your muscles, hence offering a more intensive workout. Neither does it guarantee greater calorie burn or consumption. Heat by itself doesn’t burn calories.
Myth 3: The heated environment warms up muscles so injuries are less likely to occur
It is true that heat enhances vasodilation of the blood vessels so more blood is delivered to the muscles, making muscles more elastic and less susceptible to injury. However, certain people are just generally less flexible than others. So even within a heated environment, advanced yoga postures might prove too difficult for a participant (especially if he or she rarely exercises) and continuous insistence of achieving these postures can still result in injuries to the legs and back.
| no |
Yoga | Can yoga really detoxify your body? | no_statement | "yoga" cannot "detoxify" your "body".. detoxification of the "body" is not achieved through "yoga". | https://movementsyoga.com/faq/ | Faqs Archive - Movements Yoga | Archives: Faqs
why is hot yoga one of the most popular yoga styles in the world?
hot yoga attracts people because of the unique heat element and because of the set sequence of postures. hot yoga is a yoga that’s practiced in a room heated to 40 degree celsius while most yoga styles are practiced in normal room temperature. heat helps by promoting sweat faster than other styles of yoga especially for beginners. a set sequence allows your body to gradually adjust and eventually get deeper into the postures. hot yoga poses are mostly static with rest in between suitable for all levels particularly for beginners.
what are the benefits of the heat in hot yoga?
heat in the room helps by promoting more sweat and thus flushing toxins from your body. heat also helps loosening up tendons and ligaments in your body allowing you to get deeper into postures and prevent injuries. the heated environment helps to raise your heart rate, which in turn means you burn more calories.
how will I feel after my first couple of hot yoga classes?
the first class, for most beginners, is generally challenging. this is because you are not used to the temperature in the room. it usually takes 2-3 classes for you to adjust your body to the room temperature and enjoy the heat. it is also not unusual to feel nauseous or dizzy during your first hot yoga class. usually the problem is that you did not drink enough water. in the heated yoga room, your body needs adequate water to allow perspiration to release heat from the body. it is estimated that one needs around 2 litres to allow for a comfortable 90-minute hot yoga class.
you might feel a bit disoriented or even sleepy; this is most likely because your body has begun to cleanse itself as a result of the hot yoga class. this sleepiness and feeling of disorientation will disappear after a few classes, after your body has become stronger and used to the exercise. try to rest more, especially the night before your hot yoga class. this will make you feel more energized throughout the yoga class and the rest of your day.
you might also feel sore or stiff the day after your first class. don’t worry about this too much or let it keep you from coming back. even if you feel stiff and sore, you can practice hot yoga. in fact, the feeling will generally go away once you warm up. this is because your body starts expelling lactic acids by profuse sweating.
will hot yoga help me lose weight and tone my body?
yes. yoga is also known as an aerobic exercise. the use of breath and heat (created by internal and external sources) combining with yoga poses increases heart rate, metabolism, stimulates elimination, and reduces food cravings. it is estimated that you will burn in between 400-700 kcal per 90-minute yoga class. many hot yoga poses work all muscles and burn fat resulting in a toner
and stronger body. if you are on a weight loss path, make sure you also focus on the dietary aspect, as proper diet is the biggest contributor to weight loss.
is yoga only for flexible people?
no, not at all; yoga lessons are even highly recommended when you are somewhat inflexible. yoga poses increase flexibility in all parts of your body which enables oxygen to reach deeper into joints, ligaments, and into overall blood circulation.
should I practice hot yoga while menstruating?
it is perfectly safe to do hot yoga when menstruating. inverted postures are normally the postures to be avoided during menstruation, but there are no inverted postures in hot yoga. hot yoga is very good for toning the reproductive system as it directly affects the reproductive organs and the endocrine glands, pituitary, pineal and thyroid gland in particular. women’s cycle becomes more regular with complaints of menstruating pain and pms decrease.
should I practice if I have high blood pressure?
first consult your physician. listen to your body and don’t push too hard in any of the hot yoga poses the first couple of classes. yoga poses that one should be more cautious with include back-bending, standing bow pulling, cobra, balancing stick, locust and camel.
should i practice hot yoga if i have asthma, emphysema or bronchitis?
yes, hot yoga can be good for you in several ways. it is done in a warm room which promotes the relaxation of your muscles and nerves. furthermore it is the type of exercise that you can do with as little or as much intensity as appropriate for your needs.
strength and flexibility
with regular asana practice (postures), weak muscles are strengthened; tight muscles become more flexible bringing balance to the body. by learning how to breathe properly during hot yoga, the mind is able to better focus, bringing strength and flexibility to both body and mind.
circulation
practiced dynamically, (hot) yoga raises the heart rate and increases the circulation of oxygen-rich blood to every cell in the body. it increases blood circulation to the joints, connective tissues, and internal organs. asanas (postures) create opening and spaciousness so blood can go to places that are generally closed and tight.
detoxification (mind and body)
by breathing deeply and deliberately, stale air is removed from the lungs. heat generated externally and internally helps to induce sweat, detoxify your skin, and increases circulation by raising your heart rate.
confidence
practicing (hot) yoga postures brings a great sense of well being. learning how to breathe through a stressful posture translates into dealing with stressful situations with calm and grace in your daily life.
breath control
by practicing breath/movement coordination, we learn to focus the mind. over time it becomes possible to maintain a deep, consistent breath throughout an asana practice, regardless of the level of difficulty or the discomfort. in this manner, (hot) yoga teaches us that breath is a tool to help control our state of mind, regardless of the daily stresses we encounter.
overall fitness
the practice of asana (postures) is a rare physical activity that promotes wellness in body and mind. when practiced with mindfulness, (hot) yoga is an exercise system that will reduce the imbalances that lead to injuries and complications later on in life.
reduces stress
stresses in our daily lives have a direct impact on our body affecting our digestion, circulation, immunity and emotions. prolonged stress has been proven to lead to serious diseases. a regular (hot) yoga practice calms the body and mind, rebalances the nervous system, boosts the immune system and detoxifies the body.
what is pilates?
a gentle, non-aerobic exercise method, which lengthens and strengthens the muscles, and improves posture, without stressing the joints or the heart.
whereas most forms of exercise build the body’s stronger muscles, pilates exercises work as much or more to strengthen the weaker ones too. the result is a properly balanced body, with better joint mobility, a firm musculature and good, natural posture.
Join Movements for Hot Yoga & Pilates. A close-knit team of talented teachers is ready to give you the most rewarding lessons in the finest studios. Movements is the studio where we know you by your name & where you immediately feel at home. At Movements, you experience so much more than a workout. | it is done in a warm room which promotes the relaxation of your muscles and nerves. furthermore it is the type of exercise that you can do with as little or as much intensity as appropriate for your needs.
strength and flexibility
with regular asana practice (postures), weak muscles are strengthened; tight muscles become more flexible bringing balance to the body. by learning how to breathe properly during hot yoga, the mind is able to better focus, bringing strength and flexibility to both body and mind.
circulation
practiced dynamically, (hot) yoga raises the heart rate and increases the circulation of oxygen-rich blood to every cell in the body. it increases blood circulation to the joints, connective tissues, and internal organs. asanas (postures) create opening and spaciousness so blood can go to places that are generally closed and tight.
detoxification (mind and body)
by breathing deeply and deliberately, stale air is removed from the lungs. heat generated externally and internally helps to induce sweat, detoxify your skin, and increases circulation by raising your heart rate.
confidence
practicing (hot) yoga postures brings a great sense of well being. learning how to breathe through a stressful posture translates into dealing with stressful situations with calm and grace in your daily life.
breath control
by practicing breath/movement coordination, we learn to focus the mind. over time it becomes possible to maintain a deep, consistent breath throughout an asana practice, regardless of the level of difficulty or the discomfort. in this manner, (hot) yoga teaches us that breath is a tool to help control our state of mind, regardless of the daily stresses we encounter.
overall fitness
the practice of asana (postures) is a rare physical activity that promotes wellness in body and mind. when practiced with mindfulness, (hot) yoga is an exercise system that will reduce the imbalances that lead to injuries and complications later on in life.
reduces stress
stresses in our daily lives have a direct impact on our body affecting our digestion, circulation, immunity and emotions. | yes |
Zymology | Can you brew beer without hops? | yes_statement | it is possible to "brew" "beer" without "hops".. "beer" can be made without the use of "hops". | http://www.homebrewing.com/articles/gruit/ | Gruit, or Brewing Without Hops | Gruit, or Brewing Without Hops
Gruit is a drink from olden times, a drink much like beer, but made without the use of hops. Instead of hops, bittering herbs of different varieties were used, and there is evidence to support the idea that beer without hops is a different and livelier experience on many levels. Gruit was swept under the rug when beer purity laws ravaged the brewers of Europe in the 1500s, but is now making a revival.
Today's Gruit Ale
Today, Gruit is making a comeback. More and more, brewers are realizing that although Hops are a delicious herbal addition to beer, they have their fair share of down sides. As with any brewed herb, Hops convey a number of qualities to the beer we drink.
Before the beer purity laws which swept Europe in the 1500s, beer was made with many different admixtures, and Gruit was one variety which was popular. Recipes for gruit were different depending on which herbs grew locally. According to GruitAle.com, gruit usually included the following herbs: Yarrow (Achillea millefolium), Bog Myrtle (Myrica Gale), and Marsh Rosemary (Ledum palustre). This claim is also supported by the book Sacred & Healing Herbal Beers, by Stephen Harrod Buhner. This book contains many ancient recipes for beer, including a section on gruit. Additional herbs which have been found in gruit recipes are Juniper berries, Mugwort, Wormwood, Labrador Tea, Heather, Licorice, and some others.
There are a few factors to consider when comparing the inebriatory qualities of gruit in comparison to more commonly made beer. It is held amongst those experienced in gruit inebriation that gruit rivals hopped beer on many accounts. One factor is that hops create a sedentary spirit in the imbiber. Amongst those knowledgeable about herbs, hops tea is well known as a catalyst for dreams, and creates drowsiness for the beer drinker. Hops is also an anaphradesiacal herb - meaning that it lessens sexual desire. While the alcohol in beer can lessen inhibitions - which may result in bawdier activities in many - the anaphradesiacal effect of the hops does counter act this to some degree. Gruit, on the other hand, does not counter this effect and also has a unique inebriatory effect due to the chemical composition of the herbs involved in its manufacture. One of noticeable aspect of this chemical composition is the Thujone content.
Thujones are chemicals known as alkaloids, which cause an additional form of inebriation when imbibed in beer. According to Jonathan Ott's book, Pharmaecotheon I, Thujones act upon some of the same receptors in the brain as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, as found in Marijuana), and are also present in the spirit known as Absinthe. Gruit and Absinthe sometimes share the same herbs in their manufacture, such as Wormwood, Anise seed, and Nutmeg, but it is the herb Yarrow (Achilles Millefolium) that contains the lion's share of thujones in the gruit concoction.
Yarrow is an herb with many uses and plays a profound part in history and myth. According to Buhner, its use can be traced back 60,000 years. Through many different cultures, from Dakota to ancient Romans, Yarrow has been used to staunch serious wounds - it is even rumored to have been used by Achilles (hence the name Achilles Millefolium, the thousand leaved plant of Achilles). According to Buhner, the plants aphrodisiacal qualities are also documented in the Navaho culture. As an inebriant, it has been used in the Scandinavian countries and in North America as well.
Bog Myrtle (Myrica gale) and Wild Rosemary (Ledum glandulosum) also have many uses in the realm of herbalism, but not nearly as many as Yarrow. Both tend to have inebriation enhancing effects in beer, but also tend to cause a headache and probably a wicked hangover, if too much is drunk. The use of Bog Myrtle in ale was continued through the 1940s in Europe and the 1950s in outlying areas of England and the Scandinavian countries - Wild Rosemary probably through the 18th century.
Although some traditionally made non-hopped ales have survived the pervasiveness of hops in the world of beer, the craft of making gruit has largely been out of practice. But, in the golden age of craft ales in which we live, we can see a re-newed interest in this ancient ale and others like it. Namely, beer made without hops: Williams Brothers brewery's Fraoch, a revival of an ancient Scottish recipe, uses heather, sweet gale, and ginger. Belgium brewery Proefbrouwerji's Gageleer uses sweet gale. England's Lancelot brewery has mixed styles with their Cervoise, containing heather as well as hops. I think we will see more herbal beers in the coming days that will open the world of beer to more and more unique forms of inebriation. | Gruit, or Brewing Without Hops
Gruit is a drink from olden times, a drink much like beer, but made without the use of hops. Instead of hops, bittering herbs of different varieties were used, and there is evidence to support the idea that beer without hops is a different and livelier experience on many levels. Gruit was swept under the rug when beer purity laws ravaged the brewers of Europe in the 1500s, but is now making a revival.
Today's Gruit Ale
Today, Gruit is making a comeback. More and more, brewers are realizing that although Hops are a delicious herbal addition to beer, they have their fair share of down sides. As with any brewed herb, Hops convey a number of qualities to the beer we drink.
Before the beer purity laws which swept Europe in the 1500s, beer was made with many different admixtures, and Gruit was one variety which was popular. Recipes for gruit were different depending on which herbs grew locally. According to GruitAle.com, gruit usually included the following herbs: Yarrow (Achillea millefolium), Bog Myrtle (Myrica Gale), and Marsh Rosemary (Ledum palustre). This claim is also supported by the book Sacred & Healing Herbal Beers, by Stephen Harrod Buhner. This book contains many ancient recipes for beer, including a section on gruit. Additional herbs which have been found in gruit recipes are Juniper berries, Mugwort, Wormwood, Labrador Tea, Heather, Licorice, and some others.
There are a few factors to consider when comparing the inebriatory qualities of gruit in comparison to more commonly made beer. It is held amongst those experienced in gruit inebriation that gruit rivals hopped beer on many accounts. One factor is that hops create a sedentary spirit in the imbiber. Amongst those knowledgeable about herbs, hops tea is well known as a catalyst for dreams, and creates drowsiness for the beer drinker. | yes |
Zymology | Can you brew beer without hops? | yes_statement | it is possible to "brew" "beer" without "hops".. "beer" can be made without the use of "hops". | https://beercreation.com/brew-beer-without-hops/ | Can You Brew Beer Without Hops? The Answer Really Shocked Me ... | Planning to start brewing your own beer soon? Check out my shop and recommended gear page with all the brewing equipment, recipes and kits I've used in the past as well as some items on my own wish list. Check out the Menu to find out more!
Can You Brew Beer Without Hops? The Answer Really Shocked Me
If you’ve been brewing your own beer for any length of time, you’ve probably already committed its four staple ingredients to memory: water, grains, yeast, hops.
The first three of this Fab Four seem to make total sense. Water makes up about 95% of beer, so no water = no beer.
With no grains, there would be no sugars for the yeast to eat and produce alcohol with.
But have you ever asked yourself whether it’s possible to brew beer without hops?
Being a bit of a history geek, I knew about the reinheitsgebot laws in Germany, but I wanted to find out more about beer before hops.
The truth was completely at odds with what I’ve always taken as a given.
Brewing beer without hops is possible. One ‘beer’ made without hops is called gruit. It is made with a range of botanicals as bittering agents, preservatives, & flavorants. Other hopless beers are spruce beer, using spruce tips instead of hops, and Finnish sahti, spiced with twigs & juniper berries.
While you may be utterly devoted to hopped beer (I know I am!), it’s totally normal to be curious about the hopless versions:
What do they taste like? How do you even make them, and why would you want to?
Plan your next Beer Creation?
What does hopless beer taste like?
As with any beer you brew, the balance between the sweetness of the malt character and the bitterness of the hops (or other bittering agents in this case) character is key to the overall finished product. In this mix, you also have your yeast at play of course.
So, if anything, as brewers we are rather limited in the flavors we can get because we generally only rely on one plant.
Our fore-brewers weren’t that restricted and the drinks they made are a testament to that!
If you want to get a flavor for what people were drinking before hops even came onto the scene, I can really recommend the collaborative book by Patrick E. McGovern and Sam Calagione (of Dogfish Head brewing fame) called “Ancient Brews” (available on Amazon).
One note about spruce beer, though: soft drinks called “spruce beers” exist in some regions where spruce was historically used as a beverage flavorant, notably Newfoundland and Quebec.
“Spruce beer” in these regions could mean the non-alcoholic drink or traditional alcoholic spruce beer.
So if you ever find yourself up north and you want to try a spruce beer, be careful to ask for the right thing!
Do any modern breweries sell hopless beer?
Hopless beers have seen a resurgence in popularity in the last twenty years, and microbreweries have been churning out some interesting hopless brews—on a much less regular schedule than hopped beers, though.
They’re much harder to find than regular hopped beers because mostbeer drinkers aren’t looking for them, which means a lot of vendors aren’t noticing, purchasing, and selling them.
To illustrate, the Beer Advocate database includes 32,576 IPAs and only 273 gruits.
That doesn’t mean low/no hops beers aren’t out there, though! You’ll find a lot of microbreweries have them in their collection but that they’re “not currently available.”
It’s one of those things where you just have to keep your eyes open and your Google search fresh.
To be honest though, most commercially sold beers in the USA will always have some hops in them due to the State and Federal laws brewers have to abide by. So, for the true hopless experience, you’d better brew your own.
Here are a few of the most consistently available no/low hops beer on the market:
For their Historic Ales series, Williams Brothers Brewing Company of Scotland produces a heather ale dating back to 2000 BC called Fraoch.
There’s still hops in it (and in their other Historic Ale offerings) but much less than in a contemporary brew. And most importantly, these ales are all made with botanicals gathered by the brewery itself.
Garrison Brewing Company of Nova Scotia produces a spruce beer on a rotating/seasonal basis that’s a real crowd pleaser.
Traditional hopless sahti is best (and most easily) experienced in Finland itself, but you’ll find plenty of breweries putting their own spins on the drink, including Dogfish Head’s Sah’Tea.
I good beginner book which also has a spruce beer recipe (though it does have hops in it) is Greg Hughes’ “Home Brew Beer“.
Making sahti
When it comes to making your own sahti, you’ll have to get your head in a different “brew space” than you’re used to.
Sahti is the oldest beer style on earth, and brewing an authentic version of it is very process dependent. That means some of the processes involved in making this unique beer are going to feel totally wrong to you if you’ve ever made modern beer, but you need to stick with them.
On the other hand, most modern brewing equipment will work for making a sahti (Thankfully! It’d be hard to get a wooden vat and a kuurna).
The ingredients list also doesn’t need to match precisely with that of a Finnish sahti-maker, either. Again, it’s the process that’s key to getting sahti.
Brewing Nordic has an excellent comprehensive sahti recipe. While it’s not something a total beginner might want to attempt, it doesn’t seem too daunting to brew for someone with a few more kegs under their belt.
Why would you choose to make beer without hops?
You and I may love the taste of hoppy beer, but not everyone does. For those people, sometimes the only thing holding them back from beer enjoyment is the presence of hops.
Some people are also allergic to hops, so beer is normally off the menu for them for health reasons. Present them with a hopless brew, though, and they can get in on the fun.
Speaking of fun, maybe the only thing more fun than homebrewing your own beer is homebrewing something totally new. Going no/low hops can make it feel like your first time brewing again!
Is it technically “beer” if it doesn’t have hops?
Why wouldn’t it be? If hops were integral to beer, wouldn’t that make an IPA more “beery” than a lager?
When it comes to the modern beer market though, some laws require the presence of hops in a beverage in order to market it as “beer.”
This is reminiscent of the 1516 Bavarian law Reinheitsgebot (“purity order”) that restricted the ingredients of beer to no more or less than water, barley, and hops.
Yeast was present too, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that scientist first understood what it was, then told us brewers I suppose.
A great book about this and how to brew beer which adhere to this 500 year law, check out Dave Carpenter’s book ‘Lager‘ which is a great read. (link to Amazon).
Anyway, in general ‘down the pub’ terms, I think we can still call it beer even even if no hops are added.
When did people first add hops to beer, anyway?
The first recorded use of hops dates back to the 9th century. Prior to that, gruit was king (or queen, considering it was usually made by women).
Only in the 1200s did hops really start to compete with gruit when—in some parts of Europe—if the nobility taxed hops, brewers switched to gruit. If gruit was taxed, they hopped back over to hops.
Like most things, when hop farming began to make profit for land owners, laws came into effect, like the Reinheitsgebot in Germany and other laws in other countries, which shifted the entire industry onto a distinct hops footing.
It’s up to use homebrewers to experiment and keep the old pre-9th century beer styles alive and well.
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About Phil
Hey! My name is Phil and I'm the creator of Beercreation.com. I have a passion for everything beer related. I've had the great fortune of tasting and now trying to brew some of the best beer recipes from around the world. On this blog, I'm dedicated to answering your questions (and many of my own) on how to brew beer to enjoy with friends and family. Cheers!
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Can You Brew Beer Without Hops? The Answer Really Shocked Me
If you’ve been brewing your own beer for any length of time, you’ve probably already committed its four staple ingredients to memory: water, grains, yeast, hops.
The first three of this Fab Four seem to make total sense. Water makes up about 95% of beer, so no water = no beer.
With no grains, there would be no sugars for the yeast to eat and produce alcohol with.
But have you ever asked yourself whether it’s possible to brew beer without hops?
Being a bit of a history geek, I knew about the reinheitsgebot laws in Germany, but I wanted to find out more about beer before hops.
The truth was completely at odds with what I’ve always taken as a given.
Brewing beer without hops is possible. One ‘beer’ made without hops is called gruit. It is made with a range of botanicals as bittering agents, preservatives, & flavorants. Other hopless beers are spruce beer, using spruce tips instead of hops, and Finnish sahti, spiced with twigs & juniper berries.
While you may be utterly devoted to hopped beer (I know I am!), it’s totally normal to be curious about the hopless versions:
What do they taste like? How do you even make them, and why would you want to ?
Plan your next Beer Creation?
What does hopless beer taste like?
As with any beer you brew, the balance between the sweetness of the malt character and the bitterness of the hops (or other bittering agents in this case) character is key to the overall finished product. In this mix, you also have your yeast at play of course.
| yes |
Zymology | Can you brew beer without hops? | yes_statement | it is possible to "brew" "beer" without "hops".. "beer" can be made without the use of "hops". | https://www.hobbyfarms.com/beer-ale-home-brewing-without-hops/ | Brew Your Own Beer — No Hops Required - Hobby Farms | You don't need hops to brew your own beer. This easy home-brewing method includes water, sugar and yeast as well as herbs and other edible botanicals you can grow yourself.
What’s the first word that comes to mind if someone were to ask you what beer is made of? Many would say hops, and others might think of grains. While those are the two primary components of the vast majority of modern commercial beers, neither is absolutely necessary for brewing your own beer.
Beer’s two core components are the ingredients most people take for granted: water and yeast. You can’t make beer without them. For yeast to create alcohol, it needs sugar to feed on. This is why malted grain is a core component of most beers.
To malt grain, the kernels of harvested and dried grain are moistened at a warm temperature until the embryos sprout. This process helps make simple sugars and starches available to the brewer. The grains are then dried so that the germination process stops and the sugars and starches are locked in. Then, the grains are coarsely ground and heated with water to create a mash. The hot water is drained from the mash, and the resulting liquid is a sugary wort that can then be boiled, have flavoring and preservative ingredients—such as hops—added to it, cooled and fermented with yeast.
The reason hops and grain are what most people think of as the core components of beer stems from a long, convoluted series of cultural, societal, economic and religious shifts that go back to the beginning of humanity. The culmination of this thorny series of historical circumstances was the Reinheitsgebot, an edict issued in the Bavarian region of Germany in 1516 primarily for economic and trade purposes that required beer be made only from malted grains, hops and water. (Yeast was added later.) This law was subsequently extended to all German brewers and eventually took over the brewing world.
Practice Witchcraft: Make Beer
A well-balanced, grain-based, hopped beer can be difficult to put down, but what about those of us who avoid gluten or just don’t like the flavor of hops?
Throughout much of history, alcoholic beverages were made with all manner of botanicals and sugar sources. While a strict, modern definition of beer wouldn’t include drinks made from sugar sources other than grain, perusing cookbooks and brewing recipes published as recently as the early 20th century shows that the definition wasn’t always this strict.
For hops, there are many alternatives. The use of hops took precedence over herbal ales and beers partly because hops have strong preservative and antibacterial properties. Other herbs can accomplish this as well, but hops are the workhorse.
When hops began to be used heavily in commercial brewing, brewers could use less grain and thus produce lower–alcohol beers for much cheaper than most herbal ales. Until around the 15th century, most beer and ale was produced at home and the excess was sold.
The brewers were often female and were known as brewsters, or alewives. They combined their knowledge of herbalism and brewing to keep their communities happy and healthy.
Sadly, the authorities didn’t like the idea of women holding a respected role in the community and perpetuated myths about brewsters—with their cauldrons, long stir-sticks and tall hats, which made them more visible in the marketplace—as practitioners of witchcraft.
Medicinal Herbal Brews
While the options of herbs to brew with are many, there are some core plants to use for their healing qualities, all of which can be grown easily at home or even harvested wild. Research any herb—checking several sources—before imbibing large amounts or using medicinally, and check with your physician for contraindications with pharmaceuticals or other herbs.
Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris):Mugwort has bittering qualities but is tamer than its cousin wormwood (artemesia absinthum). It’s a great substitute for hops’ bittering and preservative powers. Among its many medicinal uses, it has traditionally been used as an antidepressant, an expectorant, a diaphoretic (perspiration inducer) and for digestion (due to its carminative properties). Pregnant women should consult with a physician before imbibing it or any other herb.
Alehoof (Glechoma hederacea): Alehoof has many other names, including creeping Charlie and ground ivy. Its name is directly related to its traditional use in brewing. Considered by many to be a weed, it pops up in most yards throughout North America in early spring. Although it has bittering qualities, the effect is milder than mugwort. Its medicinal qualities include anti-inflammatory, digestive, menstrual induction (avoid if pregnant), antidiarrhetic and antirheumatic.
Meadowsweet (Spiraea ulmaria): A very common herb in traditional brewing, the flower and leaves of meadowsweet were both used. The flowers are much more aromatic, but the leaves take on some of these aromatic qualities as well. It can be used as a fever reducer, an antidiarrhetic and a diuretic and for indigestion. Its aromatic qualities make it a great candidate for adding at the end of the boil when brewing beer.
St. John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum): This herb’s name comes from its traditional use in brewing, as “wort” is the term for unfermented beer. St. John’s Wort has been extensively used in brewing and medicine, including use as an antidepressant, a digestive, a diuretic and a sedative—and to keep away evil spirits. It was also used as an abortive and contraceptive, so it should be avoided by pregnant women.
Yarrow (Achillea millefolium): Another mild bittering herb, yarrow is common in many early brewing recipes. It can be used to induce perspiration (diaphoretic) and has antidiarrhoeal, anti-inflammatory and carminative qualities. It was also used in divination and was associated with “The Evil One,” going by names such as Devil’s Nettle and Devil’s Plaything.
Brewing Beyond the Reinheitsgebot
If you want to resurrect the practice of brewing at home for economic, enjoyment and health purposes, you can do so with variations of these simple ingredients:
water (quality spring water preferably)
sugar (cane sugar, brown sugar, molasses, even honey)
yeast (wild, baker’s or brewer’s)
herbs, spices and other edible botanicals
Filtered tap water can be used as a substitute for spring water provided any chlorine is boiled off. (Some municipalities use chloramine, which doesn’t break down by boiling or filtering.) You can also use well water, though high mineral levels can cause problems.
Various types of cane sugar and molasses (boiled down cane sugar) can be blended for flavor variations. You can also substitute dry malt extract, or DME, from a homebrew-supply store for a more “beerlike” beer; this is simply malted grain that has been made into beer wort and dehydrated. A simple rule to follow is that 1 pound of sugar or DME in about 1 gallon of water produces beer with an alcohol level of 5 to 51⁄2 percent.
Wild yeast can be procured by adding fresh or dried organic fruits or herbs after the boil. The herbs and spices you can use for flavoring, presentation and wild yeast are many. Common ones include ginger and other roots, alehoof/ground ivy, meadowsweet, yarrow, dandelion,
St. John’s wort and mugwort. Hops can also be used but, again, aren’t necessary.
Equipment Check
For equipment, you won’t need much more than what you already have in your kitchen:
(1) 2- to 3-gallon cooking pot
(1) 2- to 3-gallon open-mouthed container (either glass, ceramic or food-grade plastic) with a towel or cheesecloth that fits over it
(1) 1-gallon glass or plastic jug with airlock or balloon
a vessel with a spigot for bottling (or substitute with a funnel and careful pouring)
stirring spoon
bottles (swing-top are ideal)
Some other pieces of equipment are nice to have but not necessary, including food-grade vinyl tubing for siphoning, a bottle capper and caps, and a hydrometer, which is a specialized tool for measuring alcohol level. I recommend starting simple and building from there.
Brewing can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. When brewing with simple sugars, you needn’t do much more than make a quick trip to your pantry or the grocery store. The flavor of non-grain-based beers is more akin to hard sodas, but I like to call them simple ales. Some have ciderlike qualities, and others can taste similar to a grain-based beer.
The Recipe
Following is a recipe that provides the guidelines and a basic blueprint for brewing your own herbal concoctions:
Bring 1 gallon of water to a rolling boil in a stockpot.
Stir in one pound of cane sugar, dark or light brown sugar, molasses, DME or any combination of these.
Squeeze in juice of half a lemon.
Add 2 teaspoons dried or four to five sprigs fresh mugwort, yarrow or alehoof (or experiment with other herbs and spices).
Boil for half an hour, and cool the wort quickly (to avert bacterial spoilage) by placing the hot pot in an ice-water bath.
When the wort reaches 60 to 80 degrees F or feels warm to the touch, pour it into a 2- to 3-gallon container.
Add 1 teaspoon of bread yeast or brewer’s yeast and wait 12 to 24 hours for it to begin fermenting.
Alternative wild-fermentation method: Add one-half cup of fresh or dried organic fruit, cover and stir several times daily until the solution fizzes in three to five days.
Strain solution through a sieve or cheesecloth into a 1-gallon jug, topping off with fresh water to about 1 inch below the opening.
Insert an airlock (pictured left), which can be purchased from a homebrew store, half-filled with water or stretch a balloon over the opening; either of these act as a barrier against outside air that will turn your solution to vinegar and allow for carbon dioxide gases to escape.
Allow to ferment for two weeks or until carbon dioxide activity stops.
Prime (for carbonation) by adding 1 ounce/28 grams of cane sugar or brown sugar to the beer. Then bottle and place in a cool, dark corner.
Wait two to three weeks and open carefully. Results can range from slight fizz to gushing bottles.
This might seem like several steps at first, but it’s a very simple process once you’ve done it a couple of times. Results can vary wildly depending on sugar sources used and ingredients added. Keep in mind that most herbs and spices can easily become overpowering if too much is added, so start small or follow a recipe and experiment from there.
Bittering herbs such as mugwort and yarrow should be added early in the boil for maximum effect, while herbs and spices with aromatic flavors such as cinnamon and cloves should be added at the last five minutes or just when cutting off the boil to keep from losing their volatile oils and aroma to evaporation.
Jereme Zimmerman is a writer and traditional brewing revivalist who lives in Berea, Kentucky, with his wife, Jenna; daughters Sadie and Maisie; and herds of wild yeast that he corrals into his various fermentation creations. He writes for a number of homesteading, green-living and sustainability magazines. He is also a popular speaker, giving presentations and leading workshops across the country on topics including fermentation, natural and holistic homebrewing, modern homesteading and sustainable living. He is the author of Make Mead Like a Viking (2015) and Brew Beer Like a Yeti (2018). | You don't need hops to brew your own beer. This easy home-brewing method includes water, sugar and yeast as well as herbs and other edible botanicals you can grow yourself.
What’s the first word that comes to mind if someone were to ask you what beer is made of? Many would say hops, and others might think of grains. While those are the two primary components of the vast majority of modern commercial beers, neither is absolutely necessary for brewing your own beer.
Beer’s two core components are the ingredients most people take for granted: water and yeast. You can’t make beer without them. For yeast to create alcohol, it needs sugar to feed on. This is why malted grain is a core component of most beers.
To malt grain, the kernels of harvested and dried grain are moistened at a warm temperature until the embryos sprout. This process helps make simple sugars and starches available to the brewer. The grains are then dried so that the germination process stops and the sugars and starches are locked in. Then, the grains are coarsely ground and heated with water to create a mash. The hot water is drained from the mash, and the resulting liquid is a sugary wort that can then be boiled, have flavoring and preservative ingredients—such as hops—added to it, cooled and fermented with yeast.
The reason hops and grain are what most people think of as the core components of beer stems from a long, convoluted series of cultural, societal, economic and religious shifts that go back to the beginning of humanity. The culmination of this thorny series of historical circumstances was the Reinheitsgebot, an edict issued in the Bavarian region of Germany in 1516 primarily for economic and trade purposes that required beer be made only from malted grains, hops and water. (Yeast was added later.) This law was subsequently extended to all German brewers and eventually took over the brewing world.
Practice Witchcraft: | yes |
Zymology | Can you brew beer without hops? | yes_statement | it is possible to "brew" "beer" without "hops".. "beer" can be made without the use of "hops". | https://news.berkeley.edu/2018/03/20/brewing-hoppy-beer-without-the-hops | Brewing hoppy beer without the hops | Berkeley | Brewing hoppy beer without the hops
Hoppy beer is all the rage among craft brewers and beer lovers, and now UC Berkeley biologists have come up with a way to create these unique flavors and aromas without using hops.
UC Berkeley scientists have found a way to avoid expensive, variable and water-intensive hops by endowing yeast with the ability to create a hoppy flavor. Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally, UC Berkeley.
The researchers created strains of brewer’s yeast that not only ferment the beer but also provide two of the prominent flavor notes provided by hops. In double-blind taste tests, employees of Lagunitas Brewing Company in Petaluma, California, characterized beer made from the engineered strains as more hoppy than a control beer made with regular yeast and Cascade hops.
Bryan Donaldson, innovations manager at Lagunitas, detected notes of “Fruit Loops” and “orange blossom” with no off flavors.
Why would brewers want to use yeast instead of hops to impart flavor and aroma? According to Charles Denby, one of two first authors of a paper appearing this week in the journal
Nature Communications
, growing hops uses lots of water, not to mention fertilizer and energy to transport the crop, all of which could be avoided by using yeast to make a hop-forward brew. A pint of craft beer can require 50 pints of water merely to grow the hops, which are the dried flowers of a climbing plant.
“My hope is that if we can use the technology to make great beer that is produced with a more sustainable process, people will embrace that,” Denby said.
Hops’ flavorful components, or essential oils, are also highly variable from year to year and plot to plot, so using a standardized yeast would allow uniformity of flavor. And hops are expensive.
A former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow, Denby has launched a startup called Berkeley Brewing Science with Rachel Li, the second first author and a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate. They hope to market hoppy yeasts to brewers, including strains that contain more of the natural hop flavor components, and create other strains that incorporate novel plant flavors not typical of beer brewed from the canonical ingredients: water, barley, hops and yeast.
Using DNA scissors
The engineered yeast strains were altered using CRISPR-Cas9, a simple and inexpensive gene-editing tool invented at UC Berkeley. Denby and Li inserted four new genes plus the promoters that regulate the genes into industrial brewer’s yeast. Two of the genes – linalool synthase and geraniol synthase – code for enzymes that produce flavor components common to many plants. In this instance, the genes came from mint and basil, respectively. Genes from other plants that were reported to have linalool synthase activity, such as olive and strawberry, were not as easy to work with.
The classic ingredients of beer, hops and barley, are combined with water and yeast to produce a refreshing brew (iStock photo)
The two other genes were from yeast and boosted the production of precursor molecules needed to make linalool and geraniol, the hoppy flavor components. All of the genetic components – the Cas9 gene, four yeast, mint and basil genes and promoters – were inserted into yeast on a tiny circular DNA plasmid. The yeast cells then translated the Cas9 gene into the Cas9 proteins, which cut the yeast DNA at specific points. Yeast repair enzymes then spliced in the four genes plus promoters.
The researchers used a specially designed software program to get just the right mix of promoters to produce linalool and geraniol in proportions similar to the proportions in commercial beers produced by Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, which operates a tap room not far from the startup.
They then asked Charles Bamforth, a malting and brewing authority at UC Davis, to brew a beer from three of the most promising strains, using hops only in the initial stage of brewing – the wort – to get the bitterness without the hoppy flavor. Hop flavor was supplied only by the new yeast strains. Bamforth also brewed a beer with standard yeast and hops, and asked a former student, Lagunitas’s Donaldson, to conduct a blind comparison taste test with 27 brewery employees.
“This was one of our very first sensory tests, so being rated as hoppier than the two beers that were actually dry-hopped at conventional hopping rates was very encouraging,” Li said.
From sustainable fuels to sustainable beer
Denby came to UC Berkeley to work on sustainable transportation fuels with Jay Keasling, a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. The strategy developed by Keasling is to make microbes, primarily bacteria and yeast, ramp up their production of complex molecules called terpenes, and then insert genes that turn these terpenes into commercial products. These microbes can make such chemicals as the antimalarial drug, artemisinin, fuels such as butanol, and aromas and flavors used in the cosmetic industry.
Charles Denby and Rachel Li, UC Berkeley researchers who created strains of yeast that produce a hoppy flavor without the use of hops.
But the brewing project “found me,” Denby said
“I started home brewing out of curiosity with a group of friends while I was starting out in Jay’s lab, in part because I enjoy beer and in part because I was interested in fermentation processes,” he said. “I found out that the molecules that give hops their hoppy flavor are terpene molecules, and it wouldn’t be too big of a stretch to think we could develop strains that make terpenes at the same concentrations that you get when you make beer and add hops to them.”
The final hook was that a hoppy strain of yeast would make the brewing process more sustainable than using agriculturally produced hops, which is a very natural resource-intensive product, he said.
“We started our work on engineering microbes to produce isoprenoids – like flavors, fragrances and artemisinin – about 20 years ago,” said Keasling. “At the same time, we were building tools to accurately control metabolism. With this project, we are able to use some of the tools others and we developed to accurately control metabolism to produce just the right amount of hops flavors for beer.”
Denby and Li first had to overcome some hurdles, such as learning how to genetically engineer commercial brewer’s yeast. Unlike the yeast used in research labs, which have one set of chromosomes, brewer’s yeast has four sets of chromosomes. They found out that they needed to add the same four genes plus promoters to each set of chromosomes to obtain a stable strain of yeast; if not, as the yeast propagated they lost the added genes.
They also had to find out, through computational analytics performed by Zak Costello, which promoters would produce the amounts of linalool and geraniol at the right times to approximate the concentrations in a hoppy beer, and then scale up fermentation by a factor of about 100 from test tube quantities to 40-liter kettles.
In the end, they were able to drink their research project, and continue to do so at their startup as they ferment batches of beer to test new strains of yeast.
“Charles and Rachel have shown that using the appropriate tools to control production of these flavors can result in a beer with a more consistent hoppy flavor, even better than what nature can do itself,” Keasling said.
The work was funded from grants awarded by the National Science Foundation. These include an initial grant awarded to UC Berkeley to use synthetic biology in yeast to produce industrially important products, and subsequent funding from a Small Business Innovation Research grant to Berkeley Brewing Science.
In addition to Denby, Li, Costello, Keasling, Donaldson and Bamforth, other coauthors are Van Vu of UC Berkeley, Weiyin Lin, Leanne Jade Chan, Christopher Petzold, Henrik Scheller and Hector Garcia Martin of the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, which is part of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Joseph Williams of UC Davis. | Brewing hoppy beer without the hops
Hoppy beer is all the rage among craft brewers and beer lovers, and now UC Berkeley biologists have come up with a way to create these unique flavors and aromas without using hops.
UC Berkeley scientists have found a way to avoid expensive, variable and water-intensive hops by endowing yeast with the ability to create a hoppy flavor. Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally, UC Berkeley.
The researchers created strains of brewer’s yeast that not only ferment the beer but also provide two of the prominent flavor notes provided by hops. In double-blind taste tests, employees of Lagunitas Brewing Company in Petaluma, California, characterized beer made from the engineered strains as more hoppy than a control beer made with regular yeast and Cascade hops.
Bryan Donaldson, innovations manager at Lagunitas, detected notes of “Fruit Loops” and “orange blossom” with no off flavors.
Why would brewers want to use yeast instead of hops to impart flavor and aroma? According to Charles Denby, one of two first authors of a paper appearing this week in the journal
Nature Communications
, growing hops uses lots of water, not to mention fertilizer and energy to transport the crop, all of which could be avoided by using yeast to make a hop-forward brew. A pint of craft beer can require 50 pints of water merely to grow the hops, which are the dried flowers of a climbing plant.
“My hope is that if we can use the technology to make great beer that is produced with a more sustainable process, people will embrace that,” Denby said.
Hops’ flavorful components, or essential oils, are also highly variable from year to year and plot to plot, so using a standardized yeast would allow uniformity of flavor. And hops are expensive.
A former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow, Denby has launched a startup called Berkeley Brewing Science with Rachel Li, the second first author and a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate. | yes |
Zymology | Can you brew beer without hops? | yes_statement | it is possible to "brew" "beer" without "hops".. "beer" can be made without the use of "hops". | https://homebrewadvice.com/what-beer-tastes-like-without-hops | This Is What Beer Tastes Like Without Hops | This Is What Beer Tastes Like Without Hops
When it comes to brewing beer, many ingredients and factors make it taste great. Most people focus on the yeast and think that’s the main part, which it is. However, hops also play a huge role, so what does beer taste like without hops?
Beer tastes sweet without hops. Using hops in the brewing process adds to the bitterness of the beer. Without them, the beer would be entirely too sweet to drink for the majority of beer drinkers.
In this article, I will discuss why hops are so crucial to the taste of beer, how they are used in the brewing process, and the various types of hops and which beers they’re used in.
Hops Add Additional Flavors to Beer
In addition to providing a bitter element to beer, hops can add different flavors such as floral, piney, spicy, earthy, citrusy, woody, or fruity. This can vary depending on where the hops are grown. Different geographic regions produce different types of hops.
Various types of hops can be used in the brewing process according to Renegade Brewing.
Noble hops: have a zesty, botanic taste
English hops: have a earthen, zesty, sweet taste
American hops: have a very bitter, citrusy, and bold flavor
New World hops: have a tangy, fruity flavor
Additionally, IPAs are seen as a hoppier beer flavor. This is the type of beer that most people think of when they think of the word “hoppy.”
Types of Hopping
There are two types of hopping: wet and dry. These two types affect the overall taste of the beer. So, you can choose which one will help you achieve your desired outcome.
Wet hopping: This type of hopping adds pickled hops at any point in the brewing process. This makes for a less strong hop flavor in the beer.
Dry hopping: This type of hopping is the general form of hopping that is used. Hops are harvested and added to the fermentation process. This gives a more bitter beer flavor.
Typically, the later you add hops to the brewing process, the less bitter they are. So, beers with hops added later in the brewing process might be a favorite among those who don’t typically enjoy the bitter taste of beer.
Using Hops to Make Different Types of Beer
How hops are used will vary on the type of beer being brewed. For cream beers, aged hops are used to achieve this silky flavor. The beer itself doesn’t have cream in it, but the title comes from the smoothness of the beer once the hops are added.
When brewing a blonde beer, the hops are usually roasted beforehand to give it a slightly sweet flavor. Blonde beers have a balanced hop-to-grain ratio to limit bitterness.
Wheat beer, for example, is less bitter because of the small number of hops used during the brewing process. Wheat beers can have a slightly citrus flavor.
Using Salts With Hops in Beer
Different types of salt also affect the taste of your hops. For example, using Epsom salt will increase the bitterness of the hop.
However, using some salts can also help balance out the bitterness if you’ve used too many hops.
Gypsum and table salt can enhance the beer’s flavor, but they don’t really change the bitterness of hops.
Hold the Hops, Please
Even though to the average beer drinker, having no hops in a beer might be off-putting, there are beers out there that are made without hops on purpose.
These beers can be made without hops for a different flavor or used as a substitute due to allergies related to hops.
A beer without hops is called Gruit. A German beer called Aventinus is a very smooth wheat beer with no hops in it. The flavor has been described as tasting like bananas and raisins. This beer contains 8.2 % alcohol, so it’s not for the weak.
According to Draft Mag, The Boston Beer Company has a hopless Samuel Adams on the market that uses black leaves, green malted corn, citrus, and coriander in place of the hops. This beer has a chocolatey, spicy, and caramel flavor to it.
Beers without hops can have a sweeter taste. For more information on sweet beer, check out my YouTube video below.
Hops can typically be replaced with another substance. So, if you don’t want to use hops in your beer, you can swap them with other ingredients such as:
Juniper Berries
Rosemary
Wormwood
Orange Peel
Chamomile
Most breweries you’ll go to won’t sell hopless beer just because it is not that common, especially in the United States. You’ll most likely have to buy hopless beer from a vendor if you want it.
How and Why You Should Use Hops in Beer
In addition to being an essential part of the flavor, hops can help the preservation of the beer.
Hops are added during the boiling process, which is crucial to the flavor. They add balance to beer and prevent it from getting overly sweet. Without hops, the beer would have a completely different taste. They have to be boiled, though, to achieve the desired flavor.
The longer they are boiled, the better because this gives them time to create that perfect balance between bitter and sweet.
Most beers, such as IPA and Lager, won’t boil for longer than 90 minutes. However, Ale is boiled for only 60 minutes.
To give your beer multiple dimensions, it is best to add hops gradually throughout the boiling process. You can add some in the beginning, middle, and end, enhancing your beer’s flavor.
Conclusion
Without hops, your beer will taste overly sweet. Hops play a crucial role in brewing by giving beer that bitter balance that people enjoy.
There are beers made without hops because some people prefer this for a sweeter taste. However, you can always substitute hops with other ingredients if you prefer.
Wet and dry hopping are the two types of hopping used when brewing beer. There are various types of hops, each providing different flavors and aromas to the beer.
Additionally, the type of salt used in the brewing process can also affect the hops’ overall flavor.
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also participates in other affiliate programs and is compensated for referring traffic and
business to these companies. | This beer has a chocolatey, spicy, and caramel flavor to it.
Beers without hops can have a sweeter taste. For more information on sweet beer, check out my YouTube video below.
Hops can typically be replaced with another substance. So, if you don’t want to use hops in your beer, you can swap them with other ingredients such as:
Juniper Berries
Rosemary
Wormwood
Orange Peel
Chamomile
Most breweries you’ll go to won’t sell hopless beer just because it is not that common, especially in the United States. You’ll most likely have to buy hopless beer from a vendor if you want it.
How and Why You Should Use Hops in Beer
In addition to being an essential part of the flavor, hops can help the preservation of the beer.
Hops are added during the boiling process, which is crucial to the flavor. They add balance to beer and prevent it from getting overly sweet. Without hops, the beer would have a completely different taste. They have to be boiled, though, to achieve the desired flavor.
The longer they are boiled, the better because this gives them time to create that perfect balance between bitter and sweet.
Most beers, such as IPA and Lager, won’t boil for longer than 90 minutes. However, Ale is boiled for only 60 minutes.
To give your beer multiple dimensions, it is best to add hops gradually throughout the boiling process. You can add some in the beginning, middle, and end, enhancing your beer’s flavor.
Conclusion
Without hops, your beer will taste overly sweet. Hops play a crucial role in brewing by giving beer that bitter balance that people enjoy.
There are beers made without hops because some people prefer this for a sweeter taste. However, you can always substitute hops with other ingredients if you prefer.
Wet and dry hopping are the two types of hopping used when brewing beer. There are various types of hops, | yes |
Zymology | Can you brew beer without hops? | yes_statement | it is possible to "brew" "beer" without "hops".. "beer" can be made without the use of "hops". | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/science/craft-beer-hops.html | Something's Brewing in the Lab: Beer Without Hops - The New York ... | Something’s Brewing in the Lab: Beer Without Hops
Charles Denby, a biochemist, pouring a mix of brewer’s yeast with molecules from plants that can produce hoppy flavors into a fermentor to make a hop-free beer.Credit...Sarah Craig/KQED
By Douglas Quenqua
March 20, 2018
If Americans will eat a burger with no meat, will they drink a beer without hops?
Charles Denby, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, might have made it an option. Dr. Denby works in a lab that focuses on creating sustainable fuel out of plant molecules called terpenes. But he is also “a very enthusiastic home brewer,” he said. When he learned that some terpenes could, in small doses, impart the taste of hops — the small, green flowers that give beer its bitter, citrusy flavor — he decided to perform a side experiment.
Dr. Denby and his colleagues infused brewer’s yeast with DNA from basil and mint, two plants that naturally produce the hop-flavored terpenes. The scientists were aiming to recreate the flavor of Cascade hops, which are most popular among craft brewers. They used the engineered yeast to brew a hops-free ale.
There were some misfires.
“The real challenge of the study was to produce strains that produce flavor molecules at the right concentrations without sacrificing other aspects of the brewing yeast performance,” said Dr. Denby.
Once they perfected the formula, the tasting began.
“To me, it tasted distinctively hoppy, and not unlike a beer hopped with Cascade,” said Dr. Denby.
Wanting a more objective analysis, the researchers asked Lagunitas Brewing Company in California to help them convene a double-blind taste test involving 40 participants. When asked to compare the brew’s hoppiness relative to traditionally brewed beers, the participants placed it above most of the competition. “We were really excited to see that some of our strains produced flavors that were hoppier than conventionally dry-hopped beers,” said Dr. Denby.
Bryan Donaldson, brewing innovation manager at Lagunitas, described it as having “flavor characteristics of Froot Loops and orange blossom without having undesirable off-flavors.”
Hops, one of beer’s four essential ingredients (the others are water, yeast and barley), come in dozens of varieties. Each bestows its own unique flavor. But they are a resource-intensive crop, requiring large amounts of water and sunlight to grow. The irrigation of hops in the United States alone requires more than 260 million gallons of water a year.
This is a growing problem for breweries. Over the past two decades, as craft beer has boomed, Americans have developed a strong preference for hoppy brews like India pale ales, driving up demand for the crop. But farmers can’t keep up, and brewers are facing a hops shortage that some say is slowing the growth of the craft beer industry.
Dr. Denby’s process, which he is hoping to commercialize, is a long way from putting hops farmers out of business. Still, he said, the technique could also help brewers produce a more consistent product. “Brewers we’ve spoken with say that ensuring consistency of hop flavor is a constant challenge” because potency can vary among farms and seasons, he said. “On the other hand, the conditions inside a fermentor can be easily controlled.”
Either way, he said, “we’re really excited to make the brewing process more sustainable.”
A version of this article appears in print on , Section D, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Frothy Research: Brewing in the Lab: Beer Without Hops. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe | Something’s Brewing in the Lab: Beer Without Hops
Charles Denby, a biochemist, pouring a mix of brewer’s yeast with molecules from plants that can produce hoppy flavors into a fermentor to make a hop-free beer. Credit...Sarah Craig/KQED
By Douglas Quenqua
March 20, 2018
If Americans will eat a burger with no meat, will they drink a beer without hops?
Charles Denby, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, might have made it an option. Dr. Denby works in a lab that focuses on creating sustainable fuel out of plant molecules called terpenes. But he is also “a very enthusiastic home brewer,” he said. When he learned that some terpenes could, in small doses, impart the taste of hops — the small, green flowers that give beer its bitter, citrusy flavor — he decided to perform a side experiment.
Dr. Denby and his colleagues infused brewer’s yeast with DNA from basil and mint, two plants that naturally produce the hop-flavored terpenes. The scientists were aiming to recreate the flavor of Cascade hops, which are most popular among craft brewers. They used the engineered yeast to brew a hops-free ale.
There were some misfires.
“The real challenge of the study was to produce strains that produce flavor molecules at the right concentrations without sacrificing other aspects of the brewing yeast performance,” said Dr. Denby.
Once they perfected the formula, the tasting began.
“To me, it tasted distinctively hoppy, and not unlike a beer hopped with Cascade,” said Dr. Denby.
Wanting a more objective analysis, the researchers asked Lagunitas Brewing Company in California to help them convene a double-blind taste test involving 40 participants. When asked to compare the brew’s hoppiness relative to traditionally brewed beers, the participants placed it above most of the competition. | yes |
Zymology | Can you brew beer without hops? | yes_statement | it is possible to "brew" "beer" without "hops".. "beer" can be made without the use of "hops". | https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/brewing-without-hops.562641/ | Brewing without hops? | Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead ... | Brewing without hops?
Member
I know this question has probably been asked a few times but hopefully this is a different take on it.
I know you can brew without hops and use herbs ala gruit but my question is can you brew without any type of bittering agent? I would assume that using just grains and some sort of LME/DME along with yeast would be sufficient in creating an alcoholic beverage or am I missing something that yeast adds to the process in respect to alcohol?
I know it's probably a weird question but I like to experiment and was curious if I was thinking correctly?
Well-Known Member
You'd get an alcoholic fluid, I'm not sure I'd call something that sickly-sweet, with all the residual sugars from the malt and absolutely nothing bitter (or sour) to counter them, a beverage per se. If you mashed really low and really long, shot for relatively low gravity, and fermented with a very high-attenuating yeast, maybe you could achieve something approaching a macro lager in terms of flavor profile, but I'm not sure why you'd bother.
5 Gallon Partial-Something Brewer
I have not tried a hopless malt with alcohol, but I have had many hopless malts without alcohol. Sometimes called malt tea or malt soft drinks. Those have been about as sweet as colas. I suspect fermentation would make them less sweet, though perceptually sweeter than a bittered malt. Seems like a worthwhile experiment. If so, then I'd like to taste a series of a single malt with different yeasts.
Member
Thanks guys, the tea and soft drink references are along the lines of what I was thinking. Specifically a root beer type soft drink or iced tea style alcoholic beverage I figured the sweetness would go well with both of these...may have to do some small batch experiments! | Brewing without hops?
Member
I know this question has probably been asked a few times but hopefully this is a different take on it.
I know you can brew without hops and use herbs ala gruit but my question is can you brew without any type of bittering agent? I would assume that using just grains and some sort of LME/DME along with yeast would be sufficient in creating an alcoholic beverage or am I missing something that yeast adds to the process in respect to alcohol?
I know it's probably a weird question but I like to experiment and was curious if I was thinking correctly?
Well-Known Member
You'd get an alcoholic fluid, I'm not sure I'd call something that sickly-sweet, with all the residual sugars from the malt and absolutely nothing bitter (or sour) to counter them, a beverage per se. If you mashed really low and really long, shot for relatively low gravity, and fermented with a very high-attenuating yeast, maybe you could achieve something approaching a macro lager in terms of flavor profile, but I'm not sure why you'd bother.
5 Gallon Partial-Something Brewer
I have not tried a hopless malt with alcohol, but I have had many hopless malts without alcohol. Sometimes called malt tea or malt soft drinks. Those have been about as sweet as colas. I suspect fermentation would make them less sweet, though perceptually sweeter than a bittered malt. Seems like a worthwhile experiment. If so, then I'd like to taste a series of a single malt with different yeasts.
Member
Thanks guys, the tea and soft drink references are along the lines of what I was thinking. Specifically a root beer type soft drink or iced tea style alcoholic beverage I figured the sweetness would go well with both of these...may have to do some small batch experiments! | yes |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://www.cnn.com/2014/04/01/health/upwave-cellulite-exercises/index.html | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | CNN | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise?
Exercise alone won't get rid of cellulite, experts say. But it can help, along with diet and boosting circulation.
Martin-dm/E+/Getty Images
Story highlights
There's no way to spot-treat cellulite
Nutrition and boosting circulation can help
Women are more prone to cellulite than men
upwave.com
—
A lot of workouts are marketed as fat-blasting and cellulite-shrinking. Instructors claim that if you only knew the right moves, your trouble zones would disappear and your body would be dimple-free. But can certain exercises really get rid of cellulite?
The verdict: Exercise can reduce fat, but there’s no way to spot-treat cellulite
According to Hundt, the keys to a good anti-cellulite training program are: losing body fat, firming the muscle underneath the skin, following a low-carb diet, and boosting circulation and blood flow.
Here are her tips for doing all of that:
Circulation
Enhance your circulation by getting massages and doing regular exercise that involves strength training and cardio. Taking showers that switch from hot to cold can also boost circulation.
Diet
Eating a low-fat diet consisting of lean proteins and veggies is one way to lose body fat. Avoid sugar, starches, alcohol, processed foods and sugary fruit. Lowering your carb intake will also help: Foods with a low glycemic index have been shown to aid in weight loss, according to the Harvard School of Public Health.
Cardio
Interval training – which involves varying the intensity of your activity – is a great way to burn body fat.
Strength training
Firming the muscle underneath the cellulite will help smooth the skin’s appearance. Focus on strength-training moves that build up the hamstrings, quads, buttocks and hips. Aim for training the lower body at least two times a week, increasing the weight over time to challenge your muscles. Among the most effective lower-body exercises are:
– Step-Ups: Step up on a bench or fitness step, then step down with the same leg. Aim for 20 reps on each leg.
– Lunges: Walking or stationary lunges effectively target all lower-body muscles. Take one large step forward and lower your body so both of your knees form 90-degree angles, keeping your front knee over the ankle. Return to starting position. Aim for 30 to 50 reps on each leg.
– Squats: Aim for 50 reps, keeping your weight in the heels and your back straight as you extend your hips down and back (like you’re sitting in a chair). Try to lower until your thighs are at least paralell to the floor. Don’t let your knees extend past your toes. | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise?
Exercise alone won't get rid of cellulite, experts say. But it can help, along with diet and boosting circulation.
Martin-dm/E+/Getty Images
Story highlights
There's no way to spot-treat cellulite
Nutrition and boosting circulation can help
Women are more prone to cellulite than men
upwave.com
—
A lot of workouts are marketed as fat-blasting and cellulite-shrinking. Instructors claim that if you only knew the right moves, your trouble zones would disappear and your body would be dimple-free. But can certain exercises really get rid of cellulite?
The verdict: Exercise can reduce fat, but there’s no way to spot-treat cellulite
According to Hundt, the keys to a good anti-cellulite training program are: losing body fat, firming the muscle underneath the skin, following a low-carb diet, and boosting circulation and blood flow.
Here are her tips for doing all of that:
Circulation
Enhance your circulation by getting massages and doing regular exercise that involves strength training and cardio. Taking showers that switch from hot to cold can also boost circulation.
Diet
Eating a low-fat diet consisting of lean proteins and veggies is one way to lose body fat. Avoid sugar, starches, alcohol, processed foods and sugary fruit. Lowering your carb intake will also help: Foods with a low glycemic index have been shown to aid in weight loss, according to the Harvard School of Public Health.
Cardio
Interval training – which involves varying the intensity of your activity – is a great way to burn body fat.
Strength training
Firming the muscle underneath the cellulite will help smooth the skin’s appearance. Focus on strength-training moves that build up the hamstrings, quads, buttocks and hips. Aim for training the lower body at least two times a week, increasing the weight over time to challenge your muscles. | no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-get-rid-of-cellulite-on-thighs | How to Get Rid of Cellulite on Thighs: Home Remedies and More | Massage
One promising remedy is massage. This can be done at home or with the help of a professional massage therapist.
Massage may reduce cellulite by improving lymphatic drainage. It can also help stretch your skin tissue. This may help stretch out cellulite dimples too.
Massage creams offer the same benefits, but the key component is the massaging process. You can’t apply a cream and expect the cellulite to go away by itself.
Also, know that just one massage won’t help when it comes to cellulite. You need to repeat the process consistently to achieve and maintain your desired results.
Bioactive collagen peptides
You may already be wary of the promises that supplement manufacturers make about changing your body via quick fixes.
However, a 2015 study found an improvement in cellulite in women who took bioactive collagen peptides.
Participants took the daily oral supplement for 6 months. Overall, there was a noted decrease in cellulite on their thighs. Improvement was seen in both women with a moderate and higher weight, but those with a moderate weight saw the most improvement.
While the results are interesting, more studies are needed to back up any supplement’s role in cellulite improvement.
Drink more water
Drinking water is another low cost option that may help with cellulite. Not only does it keep you hydrated, but water also helps encourage circulation and lymphatic flow.
Weight loss
Weight loss might also help some people with overweight and obesity reduce cellulite. Losing excess body fat may naturally reduce the appearance of cellulite.
But keep in mind anyone at any weight can have cellulite. It’s not restricted to just those who have overweight or obesity.
If you do want to lose weight or tone your muscles, you may find that eating a balanced diet and getting regular exercise can help reduce cellulite on your thighs. Consider some of the exercises below.
Squats
Lower your glutes as if you were sitting in a chair, ensuring your knees don’t go over your toes.
Squeeze your glutes as you rise to the starting position, and then repeat.
Jump squats
This is a step beyond the regular squat with the added challenge of a jump at the end:
Perform a regular squat.
As you stand back up to the starting position, speed up slightly and jump.
Try to land as softly as you can on your feet. Repeat.
Step-ups
Stand in front of a bench or sturdy exercise box.
Step up on the box, one foot at a time.
Step back down in the same pattern.
Repeat.
Glute/leg kickbacks
Get in an all-fours position in the floor.
Kick one leg back behind you, engaging your glutes and upper thighs.
Repeat 12 to 15 times.
Lower your leg and repeat on the other leg.
Side lunges
Stand tall with your feet hip-width apart.
Take a wide step out to one side. Bend your right knee as you push your hips back while keeping the left leg straight.
Keep both feet flat on the floor throughout the lunge.
Push off with the same leg to return to the starting position.
Repeat with the other side, bending the left knee and straightening the right.
Add progressions
Each of the exercises above allows you to use your body weight to your advantage. You can also incorporate handheld weights and barbells as you see fit.
Do 12 to 15 repetitions at a time. You can increase the weights or repetitions as you get stronger.
Be sure to warm up before exercise to prevent muscle strains.
Aim for 2 to 3 sessions per week, 30 minutes at a time.
Rather than focus on one single exercise, aim for a regular workout routine that combines aerobic exercises and strength training. Aerobic activities help you burn fat, while strength exercises build muscle and help with overall skin elasticity.
Combined, all these factors may help improve thigh cellulite.
Some aerobic exercises that can help burn fat include:
cycling
dancing
hiking
running
swimming
walking
The key here is to find an activity you enjoy and stick with it.
If you’re new to exercising, be sure to double-check with your doctor first before getting started.
The American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) says some creams may effectively aid in cellulite treatment. The AAD notes daily use of a product with caffeine may reduce the appearance of cellulite by dehydrating cells.
There’s no way to prevent cellulite. It’s a very common condition. The chances of cellulite developing increase with age and certain lifestyle factors.
Although you can’t control your age, you can make some changes to your lifestyle that may help reduce the amount of cellulite on your thighs. These changes can include things like regular exercise and a balanced diet.
Talk with a dermatologist if you’re interested in professional procedures to reduce the appearance of cellulite. Some treatments, such as laser therapy, may help but won’t fully erase cellulite on your thighs.
Also important: Know that results from any remedy or procedure aren’t permanent. You’ll likely have to repeat the process to continually reduce the appearance of thigh cellulite.
Last medically reviewed on December 22, 2021
How we reviewed this article:
Healthline has strict sourcing guidelines and relies on peer-reviewed studies, academic research institutions, and medical associations. We avoid using tertiary references. You can learn more about how we ensure our content is accurate and current by reading our editorial policy. | Repeat with the other side, bending the left knee and straightening the right.
Add progressions
Each of the exercises above allows you to use your body weight to your advantage. You can also incorporate handheld weights and barbells as you see fit.
Do 12 to 15 repetitions at a time. You can increase the weights or repetitions as you get stronger.
Be sure to warm up before exercise to prevent muscle strains.
Aim for 2 to 3 sessions per week, 30 minutes at a time.
Rather than focus on one single exercise, aim for a regular workout routine that combines aerobic exercises and strength training. Aerobic activities help you burn fat, while strength exercises build muscle and help with overall skin elasticity.
Combined, all these factors may help improve thigh cellulite.
Some aerobic exercises that can help burn fat include:
cycling
dancing
hiking
running
swimming
walking
The key here is to find an activity you enjoy and stick with it.
If you’re new to exercising, be sure to double-check with your doctor first before getting started.
The American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) says some creams may effectively aid in cellulite treatment. The AAD notes daily use of a product with caffeine may reduce the appearance of cellulite by dehydrating cells.
There’s no way to prevent cellulite. It’s a very common condition. The chances of cellulite developing increase with age and certain lifestyle factors.
Although you can’t control your age, you can make some changes to your lifestyle that may help reduce the amount of cellulite on your thighs. These changes can include things like regular exercise and a balanced diet.
Talk with a dermatologist if you’re interested in professional procedures to reduce the appearance of cellulite. Some treatments, such as laser therapy, may help but won’t fully erase cellulite on your thighs.
Also important: Know that results from any remedy or procedure aren’t permanent. | no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness-exercise/cellulite-exercises | Are There Exercises to Get Rid of Cellulite? | Is It Possible To Get Rid of Cellulite With Exercises?
Cellulite is a natural part of the human body and affects up to 80–90% of people, especially women (1).
However, it’s been labeled a “problem” that we’re conditioned to think we need to get rid of, mostly thanks to endless photo editing that showcases smooth, flawless skin.
Unfortunately this has led to many people wishing to get rid of their cellulite. To be perfectly candid, it’s not possible to get rid of cellulite with exercise alone. Even the most lean people can have visible cellulite.
That said, there are things you can do to reduce the appearance of cellulite, which may help you feel more confident in your skin.
This article dives deep into cellulite, provides useful tips to reduce its appearance, and offers lower body exercises that will help you grow your strength and confidence, regardless.
While exercise can be a useful tool in reducing the appearance of cellulite, it can’t completely get rid of it.
What exercise will do is make the muscles under your cellulite stronger. The stronger your muscles are, the better you’ll feel. And the better you feel, the more confidence you’ll have — which will hopefully help you look beyond cellulite and focus on your power, instead.
Cellulite is visible subcutaneous fat that creates a “dimpled” or “orange-peel” appearance. It’s mostly found on the buttocks and thighs.
The third layer, known as the hypodermis, consists of a fatty tissue (known as subcutaneous fat) which stores energy (i.e., fat), provides protection and insulation, and attaches the upper layers of skin to muscle and fascia (2, 3).
Just above the hypodermis sits a layer of connective tissue, mostly made of collagen. In some cases, fat may protrude through these collagen fibers and cause a dimpled appearance.
Sometimes losing body fat and increasing muscle mass may help to reduce the appearance of cellulite. However, even very lean individuals can still have visible cellulite (4).
Summary
You cannot get rid of cellulite from exercise alone. Though, losing body fat and gaining muscle mass may help to reduce its appearance.
The root cause of cellulite is thought to be multifactorial, meaning there are many factors at play.
Anatomical and hormonal differences
Cellulite affects women significantly more than men due to higher levels of estrogen and anatomical differences.
The collagen fibers in men typically run at a 45-degree angle, resulting in a criss-crossed appearance. This can make it more difficult for underlying fat to protrude. In contrast, collagen fibers in women run perpendicular to the skin, increasing the visibility of fat (5, 6).
Furthermore, women with cellulite are most likely to have higher amounts of fibrous septae, which are thick bands of connective tissue that pull the skin down. As a result, this can increase the appearance of cellulite (5, 6).
Finally, higher levels of estrogen may also play a role in cellulite severity. In particular, higher levels of estrogen are linked with storage of fat in the thighs and hips. Androgen deficiency and estrogen therapy are also linked with greater incidence of cellulite (4, 5, 6).
Age
Though age is not considered a primary cause of cellulite, it may play a role.
Connective tissue weakens and becomes thinner with age. This may make it easier for fat to protrude through weakened connective tissue, thereby worsening the appearance of cellulite (5, 6).
That said, cellulite usually occurs any time post-puberty, meaning it can appear in people of all ages.
Genetics
Most research suggests there is a large genetic component to cellulite, meaning you’re more susceptible to cellulite if a parent or other close relative has or had it.
For many, this is why cellulite is difficult to get rid of or prevent. Hence, we should learn to accept cellulite as a natural part of the body (5, 6, 7).
Body composition
Some research suggests that higher body fat percentage may increase the appearance of cellulite. This may be the result of excess body fat being pushed through fibrous septate (connective tissue) to make the appearance even more pronounced (7).
Further, building more lean muscle through strength training may decrease the appearance of cellulite. While this is promising, there is surprisingly little research on this topic.
That said, having cellulite does not automatically mean you have excess body fat. Since cellulite is mostly related to the distribution of connective tissue and people of all sizes have body fat, this means anyone can have cellulite.
Lifestyle
Certain lifestyle habits may improve or worsen the appearance of cellulite.
Despite what many fitness influencers may tell you, you can’t get rid of cellulite from exercise alone. Furthermore, spot-toning — or trying to slim a specific part of the body with extra exercises targeting that area — is also impossible.
Technically, there is no such thing as “toning” muscle. To help make muscles more visible, the process requires losing body fat (which impacts the entire body, not just one area) and increasing muscle mass.
If you’re looking to reduce the appearance of cellulite, you may see small changes by increasing muscle and decreasing body fat. This requires a lifestyle commitment rather than just doing a few extra leg exercises every day.
Though you may see some results from exercise, remember that cellulite isn’t something you need to get rid of. Instead, it’s best to use exercise as a tool for good health, rather than a way to meet ever-changing beauty standards.
Summary
There are no exercises that can help you “spot reduce” your cellulite.
Though exercise won’t get rid of cellulite, it may help reduce its appearance.
When designing an exercise program, you want to make sure that you’re doing a combination of cardio and strength training exercises 4–7 days a week, as this helps to achieve weight loss and prevent muscle loss (9).
Cardio (e.g., walking, running, biking, swimming, etc.) is important for strengthening the heart and lungs while also helping to burn calories during the workout.
You’ll want to have a mixture of moderate and high intensity cardio. For example, one day you could go for an hour walk and another day you could do a 20 minute high-intensity workout.
Strength training (e.g., lifting weights, using resistance bands, Pilates, etc.) is important for building muscle mass and strength, which can help to burn more calories at rest.
Though your exercise plan may vary depending on your needs, goals, and intensity, it’s a good idea to get in at least 2–3 days of strength training per week (10).
If your goal is to build muscle in a specific area, such as your glutes, you may want to dedicate two training days a week to this area (10).
Since weight loss is dependent on a calorie deficit and muscle building is dependent on a high protein intake, you’ll also want to make sure that you’re eating a nutritious diet with plenty of protein (e.g., fish, poultry, beef, eggs, dairy, lentils, beans, tofu).
Summary
Ideally, try to incorporate both cardio and strength training into your fitness routine at least four or more days per week.
2. Curtsy lunge
The key to a round booty is to work all sides of the glute muscle. The curtsy lunge hits the gluteus medius — which is important for hip and knee stabilization — in addition to engaging your quads and hamstrings.
Start by standing with your feet shoulder-width apart and arms bent comfortably in front of you for balance.
Bracing your core and keeping your chest up, step backwards with your right leg, crossing over the midline so your right foot lands at a diagonal behind you — as you would if you were curtsying. Bend both legs so your back knee comes down toward the floor
After a brief pause, push through your left heel and squeeze your glutes to return to the starting position. This is one rep.
Complete 8–12 reps, then switch sides. Take a rest and then complete two more sets.
3. Lateral lunge
The lateral lunge targets many lower body muscles and is a great functional movement.
Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart.
Starting with your left leg, take a big step to the side — bending your left knee and pretending like you’re sitting back into a chair — and raise your arms out in front of you simultaneously for balance. Your right leg should remain straight.
Do a form-check here: Your chest should be up and your butt should be back and down, really targeting those glutes and hamstrings. This exercise takes quite a bit of flexibility and mobility in your hips, so don’t force anything that doesn’t feel right.
Return to the starting position by pushing up from your right foot. Complete 8–12 reps on this side, then switch legs and repeat 8–12 reps on the other.
4. Bulgarian split squat
Muscles worked: Quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes
This single-leg exercise helps to build a strong butt and improve your balance.
Stand two feet away from a step or bench facing away from it.
Bend your left leg and place the top of your foot on the bench/step. This will be your starting position.
Next, bend your right knee and lower your body as low as you can go. Be sure to keep your chest, hips, and shoulders facing forward.
Press down into your right heel to return to the starting position. This is one rep.
Complete 8–12 reps or 2–3 sets.
For an added challenge, hold a dumbbell in each hand.
5. Reverse lunge
Muscles worked: Glutes, hamstrings, core
If you don’t like performing Bulgarian split squats, reverse lunges are another excellent option.
Stand hip-width apart with your hands on your hips.
Shift your weight to your left foot and take a large step back with your right foot.
With the ball of your right foot touching the ground and heel up, lower your right leg until your thigh is perpendicular to the ground and your right knee is at a 90-degree angle. Your left knee should also be bent 90-degrees.
Push into your heel and squeeze your glutes to lift your body back to starting position. This is one rep.
8. Squat jump
This explosive move is a great way to build strength and agility. However, it’s considered high-impact and may not be suitable for those with knee issues. In that case, stick with traditional squats where your feet are always planted on the ground.
Cellulite is a normal part of the body and not something we need to fix or get rid of.
Though society has an unhealthy obsession with clear, flawless skin, the reality is upwards of 90% of people have visible cellulite. Usually, it’s most prevalent in women and those with a genetic predisposition to it.
If you are looking to reduce the appearance of cellulite, losing body fat and building muscle mass may have a modest effect. But, remember it’s not something you can completely get rid of with exercise alone.
Instead of focusing on getting rid of a natural part of your body, you’re much better off focusing on sustainable lifestyle habits that will improve your health and wellbeing.
Last medically reviewed on April 25, 2022
How we reviewed this article:
Healthline has strict sourcing guidelines and relies on peer-reviewed studies, academic research institutions, and medical associations. We avoid using tertiary references. You can learn more about how we ensure our content is accurate and current by reading our editorial policy. | Is It Possible To Get Rid of Cellulite With Exercises?
Cellulite is a natural part of the human body and affects up to 80–90% of people, especially women (1).
However, it’s been labeled a “problem” that we’re conditioned to think we need to get rid of, mostly thanks to endless photo editing that showcases smooth, flawless skin.
Unfortunately this has led to many people wishing to get rid of their cellulite. To be perfectly candid, it’s not possible to get rid of cellulite with exercise alone. Even the most lean people can have visible cellulite.
That said, there are things you can do to reduce the appearance of cellulite, which may help you feel more confident in your skin.
This article dives deep into cellulite, provides useful tips to reduce its appearance, and offers lower body exercises that will help you grow your strength and confidence, regardless.
While exercise can be a useful tool in reducing the appearance of cellulite, it can’t completely get rid of it.
What exercise will do is make the muscles under your cellulite stronger. The stronger your muscles are, the better you’ll feel. And the better you feel, the more confidence you’ll have — which will hopefully help you look beyond cellulite and focus on your power, instead.
Cellulite is visible subcutaneous fat that creates a “dimpled” or “orange-peel” appearance. It’s mostly found on the buttocks and thighs.
The third layer, known as the hypodermis, consists of a fatty tissue (known as subcutaneous fat) which stores energy (i.e., fat), provides protection and insulation, and attaches the upper layers of skin to muscle and fascia (2, 3).
Just above the hypodermis sits a layer of connective tissue, mostly made of collagen. In some cases, fat may protrude through these collagen fibers and cause a dimpled appearance.
Sometimes losing body fat and increasing muscle mass may help to reduce the appearance of cellulite. However, even very lean individuals can still have visible cellulite (4).
| no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://www.nivea.co.uk/advice/skin/how-to-get-rid-of-cellulite | How to get rid of cellulite | Advice | NIVEA | How to get rid of cellulite
Do you want to find out how to get rid of cellulite? Read here for all tips and tricks, including causes and treatments.
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How to get rid of cellulite
Cellulite is a perfectly natural and normal occurrence. Nonetheless, many people still wish to know how to reduce cellulite as it can make them feel uncomfortable. As a result, it is common to want to know how to get rid of cellulite and how to reduce cellulite. Below we explore how you get cellulite and how to get rid of cellulite on thighs. Read on to learn more about cellulite and how possible it is to lose it.
Why Does Cellulite Appear?
Cellulite is the result of fat cells underneath the skin pushing upwards on its surface layer. As these fat cells accumulate and push skin upwards, the connective fibres that attach the skin to the underlying muscles pull down, causing the skin to buckle and dimple.
The fat cells and connective tissue in the dermatological layer of women sit vertically, whereas in men they sit in a criss-cross structure, which is perhaps one of the reasons why women are more likely to show signs of cellulite than men. Women’s fat is also typically distributed in the thighs, hips and bottom, common areas for cellulite.
Knowing how do you get cellulite and what causes it can be helpful when understanding how to get rid of it.
What Is Cellulite? And is getting rid of cellulite actually possible?
No one should ever feel ashamed that they have cellulite or like it is something that they simply must get rid of. Cellulite is perfectly normal and is something that over 90% of all women (who are more predisposed to cellulite than men) have to some extent. Cellulite appears when fat cells under the skin push against connective tissue, causing the skin to dimple. Due to how cellulite is formed, it is near impossible to completely remove it at home, however, there are a few things you can do at home to help reduce the prevalence of cellulite.
There is a cellulite grade scale - mild, moderate, severe. Naturally, the milder the condition, the easier it is to reduce cellulite.
What causes cellulite?
How do you get cellulite? What actually causes cellulite and how it appears is not wholly known, but is speculated to include:
Hormones
Hormones are thought to be one of the largest contributors to the causes of cellulite, particularly in women. As women age, their natural level of estrogen begins to fall and with the onset of menopause, blood flow to the connective tissue can also decrease. Less blood flow means less oxygen is being delivered to cells to produce collagen, slowing regeneration and repair. As the connective cells are weakened, fat becomes more visible through them.
Genes
Genetics contribute to things such as a person's metabolism, fat distribution and blood circulation - all of which can contribute to the formation of cellulite. This makes some people more genetically predisposed to having cellulite than others.
Leading an Unhealthy Lifestyle
Poor nutrition and a lack of physical exercise can increase the likelihood of cellulite appearing. This is because an unhealthy lifestyle means you are more likely to accumulate fat cells which will push on skin, causing it to dimple. Not only this but being sedentary for long periods of time will affect your circulation, and a lack of blood flow will restrict your body’s regeneration and repair. Overeating certain foods such as those that are processed, high in sugar or salt can also increase your chances of cellulite forming.
Poor Blood Circulation
Having a healthy circulation means we are delivering the energy and nutrients our cells need to regenerate and repair. Without good circulation our skin can become weaker, meaning it is more likely to let cellulite appear.
Age
As we age, the skin becomes thinner and less elastic, which also increases the chance of cellulite developing. Many people start seeing cellulite from between 25 and 35. Oestrogen has an impact on the blood vessels, so when it starts to decrease, you lose receptors in your blood vessels and thighs, which causes a decreased circulation which can lead to cellulite on thighs.
Stress
Experts believe stress hormones like cortisol could also be a factor. Stress has a profound effect on the body, including on digestion and the liver, and can aggravate cellulite. Stress can also cause contributory factors that can cause cellulite, such as a poor diet, drinking too much alcohol or smoking. Exercise and eating well can help to reduce stress levels as well being a great defence against cellulite.
How To Get Rid Of Cellulite
Cellulite Treatment
So you would like to know how to get rid of cellulite on legs and other areas? Unfortunately, without going under the knife it is a near impossibility to completely eradicate. How to reduce cellulite is a slightly different story and there are a few things you can try to make it less prevalent. Read our tips on how to lose cellulite:
1) EAT HEALTHILY TO REDUCE CELLULITE
Eating an unhealthy diet that is loaded with toxins and fat will encourage the buildup of fatty tissue under your skin and contribute to cellulite. Eating plenty of whole-grain foods and fibre will help to remove toxins from your body. Avoiding excess salt is also recommended as this can cause dehydration and swelling - both contributors to cellulite. Eating in a calorie deficit will also help you to burn fat which can contribute to the appearance of cellulite.
2) STAY HYDRATED TO REDUCE CELLULITE
Our body is made up of almost 60% water and without it, our skin can become weaker, thinner and shrivelled. When skin is dehydrated cellulite is more likely to show, so drinking plenty of water can improve skin elasticity which will help to reduce cellulite.
3) DRY BRUSH OR MASSAGE TO REDUCE CELLULITE
Dry brushing or massaging is a good way to aid lymphatic drainage - a process that rids the fat layer of accumulated toxins. Dry brushing increases circulation and exfoliates the skin; it is also believed to help break down fatty deposits under the skin that can result in cellulite.
A step in how to get rid of cellulite on thighs and legs can be to massage or brush the affected areas twice a day, in the morning and evening. Use a dry brush before a shower or bath - using a firm brush on dry skin, roll in small circular motions on the skin. Follow with a body lotion or moisturiser after your shower or bath to maximise results.
You can massage the area yourself before or after a bath or shower to stimulate the lymphatic system and can improve the general appearance and tone of the skin. Use oils or your favourite body lotion to nourish the skin. Massage from the bottom up and aim for circular movements.
4) GET PLENTY OF EXERCISE TO REDUCE CELLULITE
For how to get rid of cellulite on thighs and how to get rid of cellulite on legs, make sure you are working out your lower body as much as possible - even if it's just for 20 minutes a few times a week. Exercising regularly will help to increase your blood flow and burn fat - both things that will help to get rid of cellulite.
5) WEAR TIGHT CLOTHING LESS OFTEN TO REDUCE CELLULITE
Wearing compression clothing for too long and too often can restrict our blood circulation, meaning cellulite is more likely to appear.
6) USE A SKIN-STRENGTHENING CREAM TO REDUCE CELLULITE
Whilst the root cause of cellulite is deeper than just the skin, having weak, sagging and undernourished skin can make it appear much worse. A lack of collagen in the skin can mean it is weaker and more likely to let the fat push through, try using our NIVEA Q10 Multipower 5In1 Firming Cellulite Gel to firm the skin and reduce the appearance of cellulite in 3 weeks.
7) AVOID STRESS
Hormones play a key role in cellulite and oestrogen is not the only culprit. Learning to manage stress is a vital tool. Stress causes cortisol levels to rise, which encourage the appearance of cellulite. Managing your stress and lowering cortisol levels can help with learning how to get rid of cellulite on legs and other areas..
Carve out time for yourself - this might be a yoga class, an hour with a book or a nice soak in the bath - to relax for your body and mind. Breathing exercises can also help if you’re feeling particularly anxious.
8) EXFOLIATE
Using a body scrub on the cellulite on thighs or legs can remove dead skin cells and stimulate blood flow which can help reduce the appearance of cellulite.
9) AVOID SALTY FOODS
Salty, fatty, sugary food can contribute to cellulite on the legs by building up fat cells in our body that can cause inflammation. Highly salted food can promote tissue swelling which can make cellulite appear worse after a salty meal.
How To Get Rid Of Cellulite On Thighs & How To Get Rid Of Cellulite On Legs
The thighs and rest of the legs are particularly susceptible to cellulite. Many women will have it post-puberty - and it has nothing to do with weight.
Stimulate the lymphatic system
A sluggish lymphatic system can cause cellulite, or exaggerate it, which is where a body brush or scrub comes in. Massaging an exfoliator or gently brushing the area can help to stimulate blood and lymphatic drainage. To see change, this needs to be done on a regular basis.
Eat plenty of vegetables
Eating green, leafy vegetables and avoiding processed foods and alcohol will also help to get rid of cellulite on thighs and legs
SKIN FIRMING WITH NIVEA TO REDUCE CELLULITE
Even though our creams can work miracles for your skin, cellulite is not strictly a skin problem so they cannot eradicate it. That being said, our NIVEA Q10 products help to strengthen and firm the skin to reduce the appearance of cellulite. Try our NIVEA Q10 Body Multi-Power Firming Bundle Set for a complete skincare routine that tones the skin and targets cellulite.
Exercise And Care For Cellulite - Cellulite Natural Treatment
Wearing shorts or a pretty skirt in the summer is only half as much fun if the dreaded indentations on your legs are likely to be on show. So, get to grips with cellulite in good time: get your legs and bum back in shape with a specially tailored exercise programme and these care tips that can help with how to reduce cellulite.
CELLULITE: HERE’S HOW TO LOSE CELLULITE & MAKE YOUR SKIN SMOOTHER
Fighting cellulite is a real concern for many women.
The troublesome indentations do not disappear overnight. Start your anti-cellulite programme in the winter so that your skin is beautiful again in time for the bikini season.
Cycling, jogging and the step machine are your allies on the route to better-looking skin. Because exercise not only tightens the muscles, it also smooths your skin.
By taking special measures against cellulite you will support the strengthening of the tissue: Our NIVEA Q10 range has a tightening and strengthening effect and can reduce the appearance of cellulite.
Caffeine increases the resilience of the outer layer of skin. Scrub with coffee grounds also purifies and stimulates the circulation in the cells.
Shower alternately with cold and warm water. When you use cold water the vessels contract and then they expand in warm water. This promotes the circulation of blood and the tissue becomes firmer.
Target the affected area - so that might be cellulite on thighs or cellulite on legs, for example - with the showerhead for an extra blast of stimulation.
TRICKS FOR TIGHTER SKIN – YOUR ACTION PLAN AGAINST CELLULITE
- Massages improve circulation and stimulate lymph flow. Massage the skin of your bum and legs with an exfoliating glove or a cellulite brush.
- Beware of varicose veins: before treating them you should speak with your GP.
- Taking an alkaline bath approximately once a week purifies and detoxifies the whole body. Add about four tablespoons of alkaline salt to your bath water and take the time to enjoy the healing effect of the bath.
- Our skin is a reflection of our bodies. If we are healthy, it radiates from within. If you eat plenty of vitamins and a balanced diet – it is noticeable! Combat cellulite from within by eating foods that are low in salt. Salt absorbs water in the body, which results in bloated tissue. So, season your food with aromatic herbs instead.
- Vegetables rich in potassium such as broccoli, legumes and spinach also ensure that excess tissue fluid is flushed out.
FIRM UP YOUR SKIN EVEN WHEN SHOWERING
Your skin tightening programme begins in the morning when you’re in the shower. Use a shower gel or in-shower moisturiser that is designed to tighten and tone
REGULAR EXERCISE – THE BEST WAY TO COMBAT CELLULITE
Exercise strengthens the muscles and burns fat – reduce cellulite by ensuring you move around a lot.
Getting rid of cellulite on thighs and legs
The appearance of cellulite can be alleviated with a few simple exercises – if you stick at them consistently. While cellulite can appear on anyone, even those who exercise regularly, exercise can help tone a specific area where you have cellulite, usually your legs, bum and tum. Try these routines to help tone those areas:
All you need is an exercise mat. Lie on your back and put your legs up. Bend both knees into a right angle leaving a hand’s width of space between them. Now lift your hips and stretch one leg out forwards. Count to ten slowly and then change legs. Just ten regular repetitions of this exercise every day will alter your figure and the appearance of your skin measurably.
Tighter upper thighs
Lie sideways on an exercise mat and bend the lower leg slightly. Now straighten the upper leg and lift it up whilst exhaling. Hold it briefly in the air and then lower it again whilst inhaling. Change sides after 20 repetitions.
These forms of exercise can also help get rid of cellulite
- Yoga
- Aerobic exercises such as running or cycling
- HIIT - high-intensity interval training - increases your heart rate and helps you burn more fat
- Strength training - including squats and lunges and weights
2 MINUTES TO BUILD YOUR CUSTOM SKINCARE ROUTINE
Whether you have any perfect imperfections or skin concerns that really bother you, try our routine builder for a genuinely bespoke, helpful skincare routine. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions about your skin concerns and lifestyle. Our tool then analyses your unique skin features and constructs a personalised routine adapted to your needs. | Exercising regularly will help to increase your blood flow and burn fat - both things that will help to get rid of cellulite.
5) WEAR TIGHT CLOTHING LESS OFTEN TO REDUCE CELLULITE
Wearing compression clothing for too long and too often can restrict our blood circulation, meaning cellulite is more likely to appear.
6) USE A SKIN-STRENGTHENING CREAM TO REDUCE CELLULITE
Whilst the root cause of cellulite is deeper than just the skin, having weak, sagging and undernourished skin can make it appear much worse. A lack of collagen in the skin can mean it is weaker and more likely to let the fat push through, try using our NIVEA Q10 Multipower 5In1 Firming Cellulite Gel to firm the skin and reduce the appearance of cellulite in 3 weeks.
7) AVOID STRESS
Hormones play a key role in cellulite and oestrogen is not the only culprit. Learning to manage stress is a vital tool. Stress causes cortisol levels to rise, which encourage the appearance of cellulite. Managing your stress and lowering cortisol levels can help with learning how to get rid of cellulite on legs and other areas..
Carve out time for yourself - this might be a yoga class, an hour with a book or a nice soak in the bath - to relax for your body and mind. Breathing exercises can also help if you’re feeling particularly anxious.
8) EXFOLIATE
Using a body scrub on the cellulite on thighs or legs can remove dead skin cells and stimulate blood flow which can help reduce the appearance of cellulite.
9) AVOID SALTY FOODS
Salty, fatty, sugary food can contribute to cellulite on the legs by building up fat cells in our body that can cause inflammation. Highly salted food can promote tissue swelling which can make cellulite appear worse after a salty meal.
| yes |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://advancedaestheticsocala.com/blog/can-i-get-rid-of-cellulite-with-diet-and-exercise/ | Can I Get Rid Of Cellulite With Diet And Exercise Alone? | Can I Get Rid Of Cellulite With Diet And Exercise Alone?
Men and women (mainly women) all over Ocala suffer from cellulite in one area or another on their body. And we understand how embarrassing it can be. After all, we live so close to amazing Florida beaches, and we know you want to look your best in your swimming suit and short shorts.
At Advanced Aesthetics Med Spa of Ocala, many of our patients are curious about whether or not they can get rid of cellulite by just dieting and exercising. One would assume so, but is it really that simple? Keep reading to learn a little more about this frequently asked question.
Can Diet and Exercise be the Answer to All of My Cellulite Problems?
The truth is that while diet and exercise do play a part in the amount and type of visible cellulite you have, these two things are not effective cellulite treatments in and of themselves.
In fact, if you go on a crash diet and drastically reduce the number of calories you eat in a day, you will most likely regain your lost weight within the first 6 months after you give up the diet.
The reason behind yo-yo weight fluctuations that occur when you participate in extremely low- calorie diets is that when you drastically decrease calories you not only reduce the fat in your body, but you also experience muscle loss. Not only that, but when you suddenly make a huge change in your calorie intake, your body responds by entering survival mode and conserving fat, and that’s definitely not what you want.
When it comes to exercise, many people assume that they need to run their fat off. While cardio is incredibly beneficial to your health, if your goal is to burn fat, you should concentrate on strength training in order to build muscle mass. Weight training is proven to be much more effective at burning fat than cardio exercises are.
We, at Advanced Aesthetics Med Spa, recommend eating a balanced diet full of protein and healthy carbs and fats, along with participating in a regular exercise program combining cardio and weight training. This healthy lifestyle works wonders at reducing visible cellulite when combined with one of our advanced cellulite treatments.
Cellulite Treatments With Advanced Aesthetics Med Spa of Ocala Should be Part of Your Beauty Regimen
Since diet and exercise alone won’t effectively treat cellulite, we offer several different cellulite treatments for the residents of Ocala to combine with their healthy lifestyle. A popular at-home treatment is the ZO Skin Health Oraser Cellulite Control. In fact, this topical cellulite treatment is one of the most effective creams on the market today. And better still, you can purchase ZO Skin Health Line products directly from Advanced Aesthetics Med Spa in Ocala.
When you’re ready to get serious about smoothing and rejuvenating your skin, call our office today at (352) 620-2566 to book your cellulite treatment consultation with one of our licensed professionals.
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Men and women (mainly women) all over Ocala suffer from cellulite in one area or another on their body. And we understand how embarrassing it can be. After all, we live so close to amazing Florida beaches, and we know you want to look your best in your swimming suit and short shorts.
At Advanced Aesthetics Med Spa of Ocala, many of our patients are curious about whether or not they can get rid of cellulite by just dieting and exercising. One would assume so, but is it really that simple? Keep reading to learn a little more about this frequently asked question.
Can Diet and Exercise be the Answer to All of My Cellulite Problems?
The truth is that while diet and exercise do play a part in the amount and type of visible cellulite you have, these two things are not effective cellulite treatments in and of themselves.
In fact, if you go on a crash diet and drastically reduce the number of calories you eat in a day, you will most likely regain your lost weight within the first 6 months after you give up the diet.
The reason behind yo-yo weight fluctuations that occur when you participate in extremely low- calorie diets is that when you drastically decrease calories you not only reduce the fat in your body, but you also experience muscle loss. Not only that, but when you suddenly make a huge change in your calorie intake, your body responds by entering survival mode and conserving fat, and that’s definitely not what you want.
When it comes to exercise, many people assume that they need to run their fat off. While cardio is incredibly beneficial to your health, if your goal is to burn fat, you should concentrate on strength training in order to build muscle mass. Weight training is proven to be much more effective at burning fat than cardio exercises are.
We, at Advanced Aesthetics Med Spa, recommend eating a balanced diet full of protein and healthy carbs and fats, along with participating in a regular exercise program combining cardio and weight training. | no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://www.cosmopolitan.com/style-beauty/beauty/g3704/how-to-get-rid-of-cellulite/ | How To Get Rid of Cellulite in 2023: 14 Tips from Dermatologists | How to Get Rid of Cellulite: 14 Tips and Product Recs From Dermatologists and Plastic Surgeons
Hi, living, breathing human with cellulite—welcome to the club! Because the majority of adult humans have cellulite, according to dermatologist Joyce Imahiyerobo-Ip, MD, this is a pretty popular club—and membership is nothing to be ashamed of or feel uncomfortable about.
That said, it's also totally okay to wish you didn't have cellulite and be looking into how to get rid of cellulite. Tech has come a long way (hi, 2023!), and cellulite reduction treatments are offered both in-office and at home with varying results, procedure lengths, and price points. Take a peek below at the options five dermatologists and two plastic surgeons actually recommend to get rid of cellulite, along with info on what cellulite actually is and what actually works to smooth it. Keep reading, and get ready to take notes. But first, a few favorites you can try at home:
Try a coffee-based scrub
Frank Body Original Coffee Scrub
Dry brush to promote lymphatic drainage
Joanna Vargas Ritual Brush
What is cellulite?
Cellulite is the name for the dimpled or lumpy skin that’s commonly found the thighs, butts, stomachs, hips, and arms. Cellulite forms when fat cells beneath your skin push up against your skin’s connective tissues—known as fibrous bands, or septa—causing the skin to dimple or pucker, explains board-certified dermatologist Hadley King, MD. It’s important to note that everyone has these fat cells, regardless of what you eat or how frequently you exercise, and that cellulite is completely harmless and extremely common, says Dr. Ip.
Though everyone and anyone can get cellulite, it’s especially common in women because their fat cells are contained in “chamber-like structures that favor the expansion of fat tissue into the dermis,” says Dr. King. Meanwhile, men have criss-crossing connective tissue structures, making it more difficult for fat to push through and create dimpling.
Still, your body’s structure only plays a role in whether or not you develop cellulite. The other determining factors include hormones, genetics, age, weight, eating habits, pregnancy, activity, and how much collagen and estrogen you naturally have in your skin. Which, again, is why cellulite is so common in humans.
How to get rid of cellulite:
Here’s a rundown from the dermatologists and plastic surgeons on the best ways to get rid of cellulite, from temporary at-home options to semi-permanent in-office treatments.
Pros
Cons
There's no quick way to get rid of cellulite, but applying some self-tanner can help disguise your dimples a little bit and make your skin look more smooth and glowy. I'm a huge fan of Loving Tan's Bronzing Mousse because it comes in a variety of shades that work for a handful of skin tones (see: medium for fair to light skin, dark for light to medium skin, ultra dark for medium to tan skin, and platinum for tan to deep skin). It gives me an opaque color that isn't streaky or sticky—I just massage it in with a mit, let it sit overnight, and then rinse in the morning. My cellulite looks a bit less noticeable, and my glow is un-freakin'-matched.
THE REVIEWS: "I am so impressed that this tanning mousse, because it doesn’t leave a sticky feeling or a strong odor like the rest of them," one reviewer writes. "The color lasts for about a week, and I’ve noticed that it looks much more natural than some of the others I’ve tried. I love that I can sleep in it without feeling like I’m sticking to the sheets! Very happy with this product, and I will continue to purchase."
U Beauty The Sculpt Arm Compound
Pros
Cons
Even though creams and lotions won’t make your cellulite disappear, they can help temporarily smooth and tighten your skin—especially if you pick a formula that’s spiked with caffeine, which slightly “dehydrates fat cells, making them less visible,” says Dr. King.
So if you can’t swing a professional treatment, try massaging this cream wherever you have cellulite. Just note: “It needs to be applied daily,” says Dr. King, “and the effect will be modest at best.” Basically, don’t expect miracles, but you may see a temporary, more-even look on your skin. FWIW, I massage this cream all over my thighs and arms every morning, and I've noticed my skin is so much firmer, which has helped my dimpling look less prominent.
MY REVIEW: I use this cream all over my legs just before special events. It makes my skin look smoother and firmer as soon as I massage it on, but it doesn’t feel sticky when I’m ready to get dressed. This was so great before beach and pool days when I wanted a little boost to feel more confident.
Paula's Choice Retinol Skin-Smoothing Body Treatment
Pros
Cons
Board-certified dermatologist Mona Gohara, MD, also suggests incorporating a retinol body lotion or cream into your cellulite-minimizing routine, like this non-greasy, antioxidant-rich formula from Paula’s Choice. As Dr. Ip explains, “Retinol helps increase collagen and thicken your skin,” working to plump and smooth your skin every time you use it. Massage this cream on your cellulite at night, and make sure to layer on sunscreen in the morning (retinoids increase your sensitivity to the sun).
THE REVIEWS: “I have purchased three bottles of this over the past year, and I have seen a difference in the appearance in cellulite on the back of my legs,” writes one reviewer. “Obviously, for anyone buying, be aware I had better results because I was also dieting and working to not add to the problem. But I think my skin is firmer, and I am happy with this lotion.”
Try QWO to minimize cellulite
Try QWO to minimize cellulite
One of the most popular cellulite treatments to date is Qwo, an injectable enzyme that “breaks down the septa bands that contribute to cellulite,” says board-certified plastic surgeon Alexis Parcells, MD. You’ll feel a slight pinch (similar to a Botox injection or a shot in general) and might experience some bruising, swelling, and soreness in the area for up to a week.
You’ll likely need about three sessions to see full results, and you can expect to pay anywhere from $700 to $1,000 per treatment. Doctors can’t say with 100 percent certainty that your cellulite will never come back (thanks to genetics and weight fluctuations), but you can expect it to last significantly longer—think: years—than, say, Botox or face fillers.
Frank Body Original Coffee Scrub
Frank Body Original Coffee Scrub
Pros
Cons
If you don’t have time to massage a cream on every night, add a caffeine-filled body scrub to your shower. When used topically, a ground-coffee exfoliant can temporarily minimize the appearance of cellulite, thanks to the fact that coffee contains caffeine, which temporarily tightens and plumps your skin. “Caffeine can also dehydrate fat cells so they deflate, which then makes your cellulite look a little less obvious,” says Dr. Gohara.
Just remember: Anything that touches your skin for a few seconds (see: cleansers and body washes) don’t have a ton of efficacy, so don’t rely on this scrub alone for your cellulite-smoothing goals. Instead, incorporate this scrub into your routine for a little extra oomph.
THE REVIEWS: “This did a great job of smoothing my skin without drying it, and caffeine has firming properties that help reduce puffiness and the look of cellulite,” one tester writes. “A little goes a long way with this product. The coffee coconut fragrance is divine.”
6
Look into Avéli for cellulite
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The newest procedure to get rid of cellulite is Avéli, a professional treatment in which a long probe is inserted into your skin to cut the connective bands that are causing the cellulite dimple. “It’s the only cellulite device that allows us to identify which of the septa under the skin are the culprits causing the dimple,” says board-certified plastic surgeon Camille Cash, MD, using a light on the end of the probe that allows your provider to see each band that's causing the dimpling.
You only need one hour-long treatment for your skin to look immediately smoother (and don’t worry, you’ll be numbed with local anesthetic), but it’s not cheap: You can expect to pay anywhere from $4,000 to $6,000, depending on your location and the provider you see. You might also experience some bruising and swelling afterward—and potentially some pain in the first 24 hours—but you should be able to resume normal activities within a week, says Dr. Cash.
Just note that the treatment is so new that it isn’t widely available yet, so use the Avéli website to find a provider in your area.
Joanna Vargas Ritual Brush
Pros
Cons
You know those wooden dry brushes you’ve always considered buying? Some pros say they help the appearance of your cellulite. “Daily body brushing and massaging can jumpstart your lymphatic drainage,” says board-certified dermatologist Dendy Engelman, MD, which can potentially lead to smoother, less puffy skin. But, Dr. King says, it’s important to remember that dry-brushing “won’t change the anatomy that is creating cellulite.”
THE REVIEWS: “I love this sturdy brush,” one review reads. “And the head is detachable from the stick if you want to detach it to scrub! I would recommend it!”
8
Consider Cellfina
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The cellulite technology that dermatologist Arash Akhavan, MD, recommends? Cellfina, a minimally invasive treatment that microscopically severs the septa that weave throughout the fat in your thighs and buttocks. “First, the dimple is numbed with a tiny needle,” says Dr. Akhavan, “then a microscopic device goes in and cuts or shatters the connective cord, so the fibrous bands can’t find each other again.”
“The good thing about this procedure is you’ll only need to do it once—it’s considered semi-permanent because the results show in as little as three days and are still visible in three years,” says Dr. Arkahavan. Know that this procedure definitely isn’t cheap though—Dr. Akhavan suggests talking to your dermatologist or going to a plastic surgeon for a consultation, since the treatment can cost upwards of $5,000, depending on where you live.
9
Tighten your skin with Emtone
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Emtone is a professional device that combines radiofrequency (which internally heats your skin to encourage collagen production) with acoustic waves (which boosts circulation and aids in lymphatic drainage) to help thicken and tone your skin, making cellulite less noticeable.
Treatments are quick—roughly 20 minutes for the procedure itself—and you’ll only need four treatments (which cost about $1,000 to $1,500 each) spaced a week apart. And, unlike most of the other cellulite treatments, Emtone also has the ability to slightly tighten and firm your skin if you’re dealing with laxity too, such as from weight fluctuations or age.
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10
Try laser treatments
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If you want to get rid of cellulite and help firm your skin at the same time, opt for a laser treatment like Cellulaze. It uses a laser fiber (that’s inserted directly beneath your skin) to heat up and break the bands surrounding fat cells, while also triggering collagen production for tighter, more elastic skin. You only need one treatment to start seeing results (!), but it’ll cost anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000, depending on your location and the provider.
11
Freeze fat cells with CoolSculpting
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While CoolSculpting, aka cryolipolysis, isn’t the first pick from dermatologists for getting rid of cellulite, it can still be beneficial, because it helps reduce the number of fat cells in an area, making cellulite less noticeable over time. The procedure utilizes “very cold temperatures to break down fat cells just beneath the skin,” says board-certified dermatologist Will Kirby, MD. “When these fat cells freeze, they die and are then eliminated through your body’s natural processes over the course of weeks to months following your treatment.”
You’ll need one to three treatments that can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $1,7000, but your provider may also choose to combine treatments for better results, like utilizing CoolSculpting to spot-reduce fat on the thighs, while targeting the individual cellulite dimples with Cellfina or Avéli.
12
Check your salt intake
Anna Blazhuk//Getty Images
Remember: Your eating habits aren't solely responsible for whether or not you develop cellulite—though loading up on nutrition-rich foods definitely won't hurt if you're trying to smooth your cellulite, says Dr. Engelman. She suggests watching your sodium intake, which can lead to puffiness and water retention, and eating plenty of fiber and whole grain foods (think: bran and oat cereals) that improves circulation. Don’t forget to load up on fruits and veggies too.
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13
Drink plenty of water
Stefania Pelfini, La Waziya Photography//Getty Images
“You want to stay adequately hydrated, since cellulite can appear worse in a dehydrated state,” says Dr. Engelman. “Dehydration can cause the skin to become thinner and weaken, and when the skin is thin, it tends to show more cellulite.” So consider investing in a water bottle you’ll actually want to use (like one with a built-in straw, or one with a time table on the side to keep you on track).
14
Develop an exercise routine
Morsa Images//Getty Images
Exercise alone won’t completely get rid of cellulite or even prevent it, but it can decrease overall body fat percentage and lead to smoother skin, says Dr. King. So whether you hit the gym a few times a week, take a yoga class when you can, or switch up your commute by jogging or walking, it’s a smart idea to incorporate exercise into your lifestyle, not only for your skin, but for your health in general.
Is it possible to get rid of cellulite?
Yes, it’s possible to get rid of cellulite with in-office treatments, according to dermatologists and plastic surgeons. “Think of your cellulite like a button creating a pucker on a couch cushion,” says Dr. Gohara. “To get rid of the pucker, you have to go deeper and cut the cords.” Which, obviously, you can’t do at home.
That said, there are a handful of tips and tricks you can use to help temporarily lessen the appearance of cellulite (ahem, see: everything above), and as long as you go into the process with realistic expectations, they’re not a bad place to start. But, of course, remember: Cellulite is super common and natural, and there’s no shame in wanting to keep yours or get rid of yours. Bodies are bodies, and you decide what you want to do with your own.
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15
Can you really get rid of cellulite with exercise?
No, you can't get rid of cellulite with exercise, because you can't "tone" or target a specific muscle. For your thighs to look tighter, you'll need to lose body fat, which happens all over your body. Sure, losing fat and gaining some muscle might make your dimpling look less prominent or noticeable, but it'll take major consistency and an overall lifestyle change rather than a few simple exercises, and even then, this still won't entirely "get rid of" cellulite.
How do I get rid of cellulite naturally?
There are no ways to naturally get rid of cellulite at home, and it’s not possible to get rid of cellulite using only natural, topical ingredients, either. Body creams and body scrubs that contain caffeine can make your skin look temporarily smoother, while retinol body lotions can help exfoliate your skin over time—but neither is going to truly get rid of your cellulite, and neither will be clean and natural, either. If you really want to get rid of cellulite, skip the creams and talk to your dermatologist about an in-office procedure.
Will cellulite go away if I lose weight?
Cellulite could go away if you lose weight, but it often has nothing to do with weight gain or loss. “Anyone can have cellulite regardless of the number on the scale,” says Dr. Ip. Honestly, nothing can truly get rid of cellulite for good, especially at home. “Even if you make the decision to try one of the medical cellulite treatments, it is possible that cellulite may return,” says Dr. Ip, because cellulite is often related to uncontrollable variables, like your genetics, hormones, and inevitable weight fluctuations.
Will Kirby, MD, is a board-certified dermatologist based in Los Angeles, CA. He is also the chief medical officer of LaserAway, which offers CoolSculpting, laser hair removal, and laser skin treatments all over the United States.
Why trust ‘Cosmopolitan’?
Beth Gillette is the beauty editor at Cosmopolitan with five years of experience researching, writing, and editing skincare stories that range from skin barrier and whiteheads. She’s an authority in all skincare categories, but is an expert when it comes to cellulite, thanks to asking experts how to get rid of her own for years. She regularly tests and analyzes cellulite treatments for efficacy, while working with the industry’s top dermatologists and plastic surgeons to assess new formulas and brands.
Katherine J. Igoe is a contributing editor at Cosmopolitan, and has eleven years of experience as a freelancer—with nearly five of those years writing about beauty, fashion, and lifestyle, including wrinkle serums and pregnancy-safe sunscreen. Her cellulite treatment picks were based on personal testing and product reviews, along with information from experts.
Beth Gillette is the beauty editor at Cosmopolitan, where she covers skincare, makeup, hair, nails, and more across digital and print. She can generally be found in bright eyeshadow furiously typing her latest feature or hemming and hawing about a new product you "have to try." Prior to Cosmopolitan, she wrote and edited beauty content as an Editor at The Everygirl for four years. Follow her on Instagram for makeup selfies and a new hair 'do every few months.
Katherine J Igoe (she/her) was a contributing editor for Cosmopolitan and is a freelancer covering style, lifestyle, culture, and beauty (she's obsessed with gift guides, best-of movie lists, and beauty products). She's been a freelance writer and editor for over a decade, previously working for Marie Claire (2018 to 2021) and Bustle (2021), with bylines in the The New York Times, Parents magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Boston with her family, and you can follow her on Instagram or Twitte. It's "I go to dinner," not "Her huge ego," but she responds to both. | Is it possible to get rid of cellulite?
Yes, it’s possible to get rid of cellulite with in-office treatments, according to dermatologists and plastic surgeons. “Think of your cellulite like a button creating a pucker on a couch cushion,” says Dr. Gohara. “To get rid of the pucker, you have to go deeper and cut the cords.” Which, obviously, you can’t do at home.
That said, there are a handful of tips and tricks you can use to help temporarily lessen the appearance of cellulite (ahem, see: everything above), and as long as you go into the process with realistic expectations, they’re not a bad place to start. But, of course, remember: Cellulite is super common and natural, and there’s no shame in wanting to keep yours or get rid of yours. Bodies are bodies, and you decide what you want to do with your own.
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15
Can you really get rid of cellulite with exercise?
No, you can't get rid of cellulite with exercise, because you can't "tone" or target a specific muscle. For your thighs to look tighter, you'll need to lose body fat, which happens all over your body. Sure, losing fat and gaining some muscle might make your dimpling look less prominent or noticeable, but it'll take major consistency and an overall lifestyle change rather than a few simple exercises, and even then, this still won't entirely "get rid of" cellulite.
How do I get rid of cellulite naturally?
There are no ways to naturally get rid of cellulite at home, and it’s not possible to get rid of cellulite using only natural, topical ingredients, either. | no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna3076617 | Conquering cellulite with exercise | Conquering cellulite with exercise
Exercise can help minimize the dreaded dimpled appearance of cellulite, experts say.
Forty-five minutes of exercise three times a week can smooth out cellulite in formerly sedentary women, experts say.
Nov. 4, 2003, 5:42 PM UTC / Source: msnbc.com
By Jacqueline Stenson
What’s the best way to fight cellulite? Is it O.K. to eat before a workout? Smart Fitness answers your queries. Have an exercise question? Send to smartfitness@msnbc.com. We’ll post selected answers in future columns.
Question:Seems like all of my female friends complain of cellulite. How can exercise help us get rid of it?
Answer: You and your friends may take small comfort in knowing you’re among the vast majority of women who experience the dreaded dimpling of cellulite. While it’s known to affect some men, cellulite is infamous for plaguing women with the “cottage-cheese” or “orange-peel” effect on the thighs, hips and buttocks. It’s most obvious in these areas because that’s where fat tends to accumulate in women.
And while doctors say cellulite is just that — ordinary fat — the term is widely used to describe the lumpy skin appearance that can result from a combination of factors: too much fat, too little muscle, thinning skin and connective tissue beneath the skin that separates fat cells into pockets.
Exercise can reduce cellulite Exercise can help minimize cellulite by burning off fat and building muscle, says Wayne Westcott, fitness research director at the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Mass. Because fat is very soft tissue, it doesn’t keep the legs looking firm, smooth and shapely like muscle does.
Physical fitness is particularly important in fighting cellulite as women age, he says, because each decade they lose about 5 pounds of muscle and gain 15 pounds of fat.
“You have this shrinking foundation under this growing fat layer, and eventually the fat clumps,” Westcott explains. “It’s not just a matter of having too much fat. It’s a combination of too much fat and too little muscle.”
Strength training key While many women diet and engage in fat-burning aerobic exercise to combat cellulite, they may not realize the importance of strength training, notes Westcott, author of the new book “No More Cellulite” (Perigee, 2003), co-authored with colleague Rita La Rosa Loud.
Dieting in the absence of strength training can actually promote the appearance of cellulite by causing muscle loss, he says, so lifting weights to build and maintain muscle is key.
In his own research, Westcott found that sedentary women who modified their diet and engaged in 45-minute sessions of aerobic exercise, weight training and stretching (see sidebar) three times a week saw results within two months.
“About 70 percent of the women had major changes and were very pleased,” he says. These women said they had “a lot less cellulite” after completing the program, while the remaining participants said they had “less cellulite.”
“Overall, they gained about 1.5 pounds of muscle, lost about 9 pounds of fat and increased strength by 46 percent,” says Westcott. “They also lost just under 2 inches off their hip measurements.”
Len Kravitz, coordinator of exercise science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, agrees that exercise can have a big impact on cellulite. “Minimizing bodily fat while enhancing muscle firmness, especially in the legs, is the best approach,” he says, and a variety of workout regimens can help.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a permanent quick-fix for cellulite, according to Kravitz: “There are no magic cures, pills, creams or ‘silver bullets’ out there for cellulite reduction.”
Question:Should I eat before or after exercise? And what are the best foods to consume?
Answer: It’s OK to eat certain foods before and after exercise, experts say, but don’t overdo it, especially just prior to a workout.
Exercising after consuming a heavy meal is not advisable because it can interfere with proper digestion, says Richard Cotton, a San Diego-based spokesperson for the American Council on Exercise, a nonprofit fitness watchdog group.
“When you’re exercising and digesting there’s a battle in your body for oxygen, and usually the working muscles win out,” says Cotton, who is also the chief exercise physiologist for MyExercisePlan.com, a virtual personal training site. “That can lead to an upset stomach, cramp or a stitch.”
Don't go hungry during workouts At the same time, though, don’t embark on a workout if your stomach is growling. Your body needs fuel for the activity. Some quick carbohydrates from a piece of fruit or an energy bar can do the trick, Cotton says. The same goes for early-morning workouts — make sure to eat something light like a piece of whole-grain toast and some fruit juice.
After exercise, allow your body time to cool down before eating. Then be sure to include some carbs in your next snack or meal. “The carbohydrates are necessary to replace glucose used during the exercise session and especially glycogen (carbohydrate) stores in the muscle,” says Kara Mitchell, an exercise physiologist and dietitian with the Duke Health and Fitness Center in Durham, N.C.
Of course, getting plenty of water is paramount, so drink up — 8 ounces — before and after exercise. And while you’re working up a sweat, be sure to get at least 4 ounces every 15 minutes. | Conquering cellulite with exercise
Exercise can help minimize the dreaded dimpled appearance of cellulite, experts say.
Forty-five minutes of exercise three times a week can smooth out cellulite in formerly sedentary women, experts say.
Nov. 4, 2003, 5:42 PM UTC / Source: msnbc.com
By Jacqueline Stenson
What’s the best way to fight cellulite? Is it O.K. to eat before a workout? Smart Fitness answers your queries. Have an exercise question? Send to smartfitness@msnbc.com. We’ll post selected answers in future columns.
Question:Seems like all of my female friends complain of cellulite. How can exercise help us get rid of it?
Answer: You and your friends may take small comfort in knowing you’re among the vast majority of women who experience the dreaded dimpling of cellulite. While it’s known to affect some men, cellulite is infamous for plaguing women with the “cottage-cheese” or “orange-peel” effect on the thighs, hips and buttocks. It’s most obvious in these areas because that’s where fat tends to accumulate in women.
And while doctors say cellulite is just that — ordinary fat — the term is widely used to describe the lumpy skin appearance that can result from a combination of factors: too much fat, too little muscle, thinning skin and connective tissue beneath the skin that separates fat cells into pockets.
Exercise can reduce cellulite Exercise can help minimize cellulite by burning off fat and building muscle, says Wayne Westcott, fitness research director at the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Mass. Because fat is very soft tissue, it doesn’t keep the legs looking firm, smooth and shapely like muscle does.
Physical fitness is particularly important in fighting cellulite as women age, he says, because each decade they lose about 5 pounds of muscle and gain 15 pounds of fat.
| yes |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/body/fitness-workouts/a34976777/cellulite-exercise/ | Can exercise get ever get rid of cellulite? | An expert verdict | Ever wondered if exercise can get rid of cellulite?
Ever wondered if working out consistently can help you with the dimples on your legs you can't seem to budge?
Yep, we're talking about cellulite. But before we get into it, a top-line: cellulite isn't 'too much fat', rather, a physical trait most women have. It's caused by weaker connective tissue and larger fat cells around women's thighs and hips which we carry, why? You guessed it: for childbearing reasons.
93% of women are affected by cellulite, and a shocking 60% of women surveyed believe it's down to their lifestyle. But news flash: cellulite is normal, and definitely not caused by anything you can control.
According to personal trainer Leigh Clayton, nearly all women will have cellulite, but how it shows will differ from person-to-person. That is, your best mate could have it under her skin, it just may not show on the surface. Every physical body is different, so cellulite looks different on every individual.
"It's completely normal and nothing to worry about," he shares. However, how it appears, plus how much you have, is largely down to:
It's high time we embraced cellulite as one of the many perfectly normal bodily features most women experience. But before we do: there's an old wives tale that swears cardio will get rid of cellulite. To put that one to bed once and for all, we quizzed Leigh on his expert knowledge on the matter.
So... can exercise reduce cellulite?
In a word: no. Sure, logic might suggest that reducing your body fat percentage will reduce the amount of cellulite that you have, but realistically, the human body is far more complex than that, the PT explains.
"Removing it completely is unrealistic and unlikely. As far as I'm aware, there is no scientific research or evidence to suggest that exercise can totally get rid of cellulite," Leigh continues.
Where do you think the myth comes from?
Simply put, people are terrible at comparing themselves to others. "They see people who have less cellulite than them doing certain exercises and think they need to do that to reduce their cellulite, too," Leigh explains.
He urges you not to confuse correlation with causation. "We know that reducing body fat and growing muscle in the right areas can - sometimes, not always - reduce the appearance of cellulite - but only reduce, not get rid of. If you're interested, I'd recommend hiring a qualified personal trainer who can inform your decision with expert advice," he explains.
It's important here to remember that you're individual, unique, and special, and really don't need to be worrying about your cellulite. Embrace your body, practice self-love and treat your body with compassion: you only get one life, and wasting it worrying about what moves are best for cellulite seems futile.
Conscious about your cellulite? 3 tips
Practice self-love
As above, a huge 93% of women have cellulite or will have it at some point in their lives - "it’s a fact of life," Leigh explains. Remember this next time you feel self-conscious: everybody is too busy with themselves to notice your cellulite anyway.
"Even if they did notice and judge you, then they're probably not the type of person you'd want in your life, right?" shares Leigh. "If you can learn to accept it, then you're left with the headspace to focus on training goals that actually matter," he continues.
Treat yourself
Now that's something we won't say no to. Leigh suggests investing in gym kit that makes you feel less self-conscious and more confident. "What will seem like one small confidence boost will massively help with other areas, too," he shares.
Like?
You'll feel more confident
You'll be more motivated to go to the gym in the first place
You may enjoy your gym session more
You may work harder during your session as a result
"I'm a big fan of this tip," Leigh adds. "I do this personally. People do this for their 'going out' clothes, so why not your gym clothes, if you spend lots of time in them?" You don't need to tell us twice... Shop our guides to the best activewear brands, gym leggings and plus size gym kit, now.
Focus on a training goal
...that isn't related to cellulite.
Sure, this sounds obvious, but you'll likely be surprised by how much maintaining a healthy diet within your energy balance requirements, drinking more water, sleeping well, and following a well-rounded training programme will boost your confidence. And isn't that the whole point? Getting you to focus on your many plus points, not your flaws?
"Any workout or training plan that helps you build consistent confidence is a yes in my opinion," Leigh explains. | Ever wondered if exercise can get rid of cellulite?
Ever wondered if working out consistently can help you with the dimples on your legs you can't seem to budge?
Yep, we're talking about cellulite. But before we get into it, a top-line: cellulite isn't 'too much fat', rather, a physical trait most women have. It's caused by weaker connective tissue and larger fat cells around women's thighs and hips which we carry, why? You guessed it: for childbearing reasons.
93% of women are affected by cellulite, and a shocking 60% of women surveyed believe it's down to their lifestyle. But news flash: cellulite is normal, and definitely not caused by anything you can control.
According to personal trainer Leigh Clayton, nearly all women will have cellulite, but how it shows will differ from person-to-person. That is, your best mate could have it under her skin, it just may not show on the surface. Every physical body is different, so cellulite looks different on every individual.
"It's completely normal and nothing to worry about," he shares. However, how it appears, plus how much you have, is largely down to:
It's high time we embraced cellulite as one of the many perfectly normal bodily features most women experience. But before we do: there's an old wives tale that swears cardio will get rid of cellulite. To put that one to bed once and for all, we quizzed Leigh on his expert knowledge on the matter.
So... can exercise reduce cellulite?
In a word: no. Sure, logic might suggest that reducing your body fat percentage will reduce the amount of cellulite that you have, but realistically, the human body is far more complex than that, the PT explains.
"Removing it completely is unrealistic and unlikely. As far as I'm aware, there is no scientific research or evidence to suggest that exercise can totally get rid of cellulite," Leigh continues.
Where do you think the myth comes from?
Simply put, people are terrible at comparing themselves to others. | no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://www.lipotherapeia.com/the-peach-factor-blog/cellulite-exercise | How to get rid of cellulite | Cellulite exercise - LipoTherapeia ... | What is the best type of exercise for cellulite: get the facts, not the hype
At the time of updating this article (October 2022) Google returned 3 million pages for the query “cellulite exercises”, volunteering “helpful suggestions” such as curtsy lunges, lateral lunges, glute bridges and squat jumps.
But do these so-called “cellulite exercises” work? Can you get rid of - or at least reduce - cellulite with specific exercises?
Here we present the ultimate “exercise for cellulite” guide. Honest, science-based and straight to the point, without clichés or even dangerous misinformation that you find all over the internet. Just science-based, actionable information.
Do cellulite exercises work? Can exercise get rid of cellulite on legs?
First things first: in most cases you cannot get rid of cellulite completely with any method of any kind, including exercise.
Of course, the answer to the, more correct, question "does exercise reduce cellulite?", is yes. exercise is one of the most important ways to reduce cellulite, not just because it makes you burn calories, but also because it boosts your circulation and promotes skin firming.
However, too many people, instead of looking for an effective workout for cellulite, they look for specific leg cellulite exercises, which, as we will see below, is completely the wrong way to go about it.
Images of so-called “cellulite exercises”, according to the “wisdom” of the internet
First off, if you are looking for specific leg cellulite removal exercises, i.e. exercises to remove cellulite from a specific area of your legs, for example your inner thighs, back of thighs etc, let me warn you that you are looking for something that does not exist: spot fat reduction (including cellulite fat) with exercise is biologically impossible, so all these exercises you see on the internet are utter BS (and that’s the best word I can use about them). Simple as that.
So if you are looking for that amazing squat or other leg exercise that will get rid of your cellulite, you can leave this website and visit one of the thousands of websites that peddle this "advice".
There are literally hundreds of thousands of photos, videos and articles, describing enough "cellulite-busting" thigh and butt exercises to waste your time and energy for decades, without seeing any results whatsoever.
These are indeed great choreography and nice posing and show-off but they will do nothing for your cellulite.
On the other hand, if you are looking for effective, science-based advice on how to use different types of whole body workout for cellulite - as opposed to waste-of-time specific leg exercises for cellulite - then read on.
But before we go on our serious discussion on proper cellulite workouts, let’s examine the issue of spot cellulite reduction in more detail.
Like spot fat reduction, spot cellulite reduction - with ANY exercise - does not exist. Period.
Very simply, it is physiologically impossible to reduce fat (including cellulite fat) from a specific part of the body with exercise. This is because fat tissue from where fat is released during exercise is completely separated from muscle tissue where fat “burning” occurs during exercise.
To put it another way, fat from the cellulite fat cells in your bum cannot magically travel through several layers of tissue and reach the adjacent buttock muscles - this is not how the body works. That would be the equivalent to you crossing through walls like a ghost.
Any personal trainer worth their salt will tell you that spot fat reduction (i.e. removing fat from a specific body area by exercising the muscles above that area) does not exist. As explained above, this does not make any physiological sense whatsoever and it has also been proven beyond doubt with different studies, the two most important of which can be found on this link.
And exactly the same applies to cellulite, which is basically superficial fat inside the skin: spot cellulite removal with exercise does not exist.
So all these You Tube channels are wrong?
Yep.
Then how on earth all these exercise and cellulite "experts" on YouTube and the internet recommend outer leg exercises to get rid of cellulite on the outer thighs or inner thigh exercises for inner thigh cellulite etc?
Why? Because it sells, to the naive and the ignorant.
Unfortunately, it's the same marketing hype thing that makes people recommend ground coffee scrubbing and dry brushing: it sells.
Even the brightest lawyer, for example, could know all about law but she could not be expected to know about cellulite physiology. So naturally, she would trust an “expert” to enlighten her. Unfortunately those experts take advantage of the (understandable) ignorance of even the most intelligent people in order to sell their “advice”.
And then you have the millions of naive people who believe every miracle they are sold.
That’s why wrong information sells.
Serious discussion about whole body exercise and cellulite
There are two factors that determine if a type of exercise is effective against cellulite:
Factor I: The ability of exercise to reduce cellulite fat, either by direct calorie burning during exercise or by stimulating long-term metabolic changes that result in calorie burning throughout the day, after exercise
Factor II: The ability of exercise to provide mechanical stimulation to fibroblasts (collagen and elastin-producing cells), adipocytes (fat cells), blood vessels and lymph vessels, which in turn results in collagen production and contraction; elastin production; and fat cell reduction
Factor I: Burning calories during and after exercise
Burning loads of calories during exercise is a good thing, but a better thing is to stimulate your endocrine system into burning more fuel throughout the day, thereby reducing more cellulite fat deposits.
It has been known for several years now that intensive exercise (e.g. fast running) has a more pronounced effect on the endocrine system, whilst light exercise (e.g. slow walking) has a minimal effect on the metabolism.
And it is very easy to assess how fast you burn calories and how much the exercise impacts your metabolism: the more your heart rate and breathing rate increase, the more calories you burn.
This is a very basic biological principle: the only reason your lungs and heart pump air and blood faster is because you are burning fuel (calories) fast, therefore you need to supply your muscles with more fresh oxygen and fuel to burn.
Factor II: Boosting skin firmness and circulation
A type of exercise that provides intense mechanical stimulation to your fat cells, collagen cells and blood/lymph vessel cells will lead to reduced fat cell number, more firmness and improved circulation and lymphatic drainage, thereby further improving the appearance of cellulite.
Mechanical stimulation is usually more intense during high intensity training, but not always, as we will see below.
The best types of exercise for cellulite
Firstly, let’s reiterate again that in most cases, i.e. moderate and advanced cellulite, you cannot get rid of cellulite, with any method, but you can reduce it. Light/recent exercise can be completely eliminated, for some time at least.
Having made that clear again, let’s classify cellulite exercises, from totally ineffective to very effective, according to the two factors mentioned above:
1. "Thigh/butt cellulite exercises": zero effect on cellulite
These are the “specific leg exercises” that we mentioned at the beginning of this article: plié squats, curtsy lunges, hip thrusts, Romanian dead lifts, you name it. Fancy names, all nonsense.
You can do as many plié squats as you want, but these will not have a direct effect on cellulite on your bum and thighs.
Similarly you can perform hundreds of inner thigh exercises, but these will not affect your inner thigh fat or cellulite in the least. You will indeed have tighter muscle under your cellulite, but cellulite and local fat will still be there.
Simple as that.
2. Pilates & Yoga: little or no effect on cellulite
Pilates, Yoga, slow elliptical training, slow cycling and slow swimming burn very few calories and provide very little mechanical stimulation, so they will have minimal effect on cellulite.
Medium pace walking provides some mechanical stimulation and increased calorie burning, so it is a bit better than pilates and yoga.
Intensive yoga or pilates still provide little mechanical stimulation (being largely static) but they help you burn more calories, so they are at the same level as medium pace walking, regarding cellulite reduction.
Medium speed cycling burns a moderate amount of calories and provide little mechanical stimulation, so do not expect much from it.
3. Fast walking or slow running: moderate cellulite reduction
Fast walking, uphill walking and fast uphill walking (hiking) provide more intense mechanical stimulation and more calorie burning so they are more efficient at reducing cellulite.
Slow running provides even more mechanical stimulation and burns even more fuel than fast walking, so it tops the list of moderate cellulite-reducing types of exercise.
Fast "elliptical" training and fast cycling can also burn a lot of calories but provide little mechanical stimulation, so they can be categorised as moderate cellulite reducers.
Fast swimming burns a lot of calories and provides moderate mechanical stimulation (via the micro-massage effect that agitated water exerts on the skin), so it is also categorised as a moderate cellulite reduction and prevention exercise.
Doing squats and lunges on the vibration platform (power plate) provides very intense mechanical stimulation and can help you burn quite a few calories, if you do not rest much between sets. If this condition is met, vibration platform training can be very efficient in cellulite reduction.
Interval swimming (intermittent swimming sprints) provides good mechanical stimulation and enhanced calorie burning, so it is also a great anti-cellulite exercise.
Fast running provides intense mechanical stimulation and intense calorie burning . metabolism boost, so it is also one of the best cellulite reduction methods.
Intensive sports such as basketball, football, handball, netball, water polo etc. are in effect interval training sports and are also ideal for cellulite reduction and prevention.
6. Uphill interval running: the ultimate exercise for cellulite
If I had to choose one type of cellulite exercise then I would not hesitate to recommend uphill interval running (UIR). UIR provides your fibroblasts with intense mechanical stimulation, intense metabolism boost and intense calorie burning and it can safely be said to be the ultimate type of anti-cellulite exercise.
Learn all you need to know about uphill interval running with our dedicated article on interval training here.
We mentioned above that specific exercises cannot be used to reduce fat or cellulite from a specific part of the body (spot fat reduction / spot cellulite reduction).
However, if intensive exercise (such as category 4 or category 5 above) is combined with an good cellulite treatment or a highly concentrated cream, then the effects of exercise can indeed be focused on one area. If the exercise takes place and/or the anti-cellulite cream applied immediately before or after exercise, then the results are more pronounced.
How does it work?
This is because during exercise fat cells release fat due to the effect of increased adrenaline and noradrenaline production
Good cellulite treatments or creams tend to favour the release of fat from fat cells too, but only locally, where the treatment / cream is applied
So by combining the two, an increased amount of fat will be released from the cellulite affected area, in relation to other body areas or in relation to just applying the treatment/cream without exercise
Indeed this is the best way to reduce cellulite and localised fat deposits and the best advice I can give to anyone who wants to use exercise to reduce her cellulite: receive a strong cellulite treatment and apply a concentrated cellulite creamjust before or just after a high intensity exercise session (such as interval running / swimming / cycling etc).
This "hack" only works with high intensity exercise
Please note that this combination of exercise with treatments and creams works only with the more intensive types of exercise, such as fast running, interval running, spinning, circuit training, intense sports and high impact aerobics.
This is because low intensity training such as Pilates, Yoga, walking and slow running do not stimulate much adrenaline / noradrenaline release.
This is not to say that without exercise a good cream or a treatment will not "work". They will still work, but the treatment sessions and/or cream applications that are combined with high intensity training will be much more effective than the same treatment sessions / cream applications while being sedentary.
And of course, do not forget that to achieve maximum results you must combine exercise + treatment + cream with healthy eating (think veg, salads, fish, chicken, lean meat and berry fruits while avoiding sugary snacks, fatty/oily/fried food and carbs).
(Safety note: always check with your doctor if you are unsure about your ability to safely perform vigorous exercise.)
Frequently asked questions
I hope it is all clear regarding the difference between cellulite local exercises vs cellulite whole body workouts. The former doesn’t work, while the latter does. The more intensive the whole body workouts, the better. And if you can combine an intensive workout with a strong cellulite treatment or cream, even better. That’s the summary of the whole article.
Below are some straight, quick answers to the most common questions related to "cellulite exercises", to clarify finer points and add more detail.
Do squats get rid of cellulite?
It is evident from all the above that squats do not directly reduce cellulite on thighs/butt. Only indirectly, i.e. via calorie burning, can squats reduce cellulite. But that can also be achieved with equal calorie burning by exercising any other body area, like the arms, abs or whole body.
So, no, squats do not get rid of cellulite, they only tone up the muscles of your butt. This muscle toning will end up in butt lifting, which is nice to have. But no cellulite reduction on the butt will directly occur due to squats.
Exercises to get rid of cellulite on thighs & buttocks?
As discussed above: those exercises don't exist because an exercising muscle does not burn fat from the fat tissue that sits on top of it. The muscle derives fat and glycogen ("carbs") it burns from the general circulation, which could have originated from anywhere in the body and very little of it would have originated from the fat that sits above the muscle.
Basic biology.
Best yoga pose to reduce cellulite on legs
As per above, such a yoga pose does not exist, not matter how complicated, “spiritual” or advanced. Exercising a specific muscle, on legs or elsewhere, does not eliminate the cellulite underneath it. Any such exercises are pure, unadulterated, well, BS.
How to reduce cellulite in a week with exercise
A week is a very short period of time to effectively reduce something that took months, years and even decades to build up.
But high intensity exercise, such as HIIT or, even better, uphill interval running, can offer you the best chance to start reducing cellulite in a week - in combination with vegetable juicing, strictly healthy nutrition and contrast showers, among other interventions.
Does running get rid of cellulite?
Yap. Running is one of the best ways to reduce cellulite, and perhaps completely get rid of cellulite too, if cellulite is very little or very recent.
Inner thigh cellulite exercises
Again, you can do 500 inner thigh muscle exercises and cellulite on your inner thighs will be reduced at exactly the same rate as when you do 500 outer thigh muscle exercises.
Try it! Two scientist teams have tried this before and the result was the same: spot fat reduction / spot cellulite reduction does not exist.
Cellulite before and after squats
As per above: spot cellulite reduction with leg exercises simply doesn’t exist, so the before and after pictures you are looking do not exist either (except from the fake ones, of course).
If you do not believe the science and the experience of millions of people and want to prove to yourself that that personal trainer on YouTube is right, why don't you do daily squats on one leg, for one, two, three… twelve months and then check the cellulite on both legs? Cellulite will be reduced at exactly the same degree on both legs (if any).
Legs cellulite workout
Yes, there are three amazing leg exercise workouts and they are called "fast uphill walking", "fast running" and "interval running".
On the other hand, lunges and squats will not get you very far, as discussed above.
How to get rid of cellulite on butt / thighs / legs
As discussed above, exercise cannot be used to reduce exercise on a specific spot, but it can reduce cellulite overall in the body, in combination with healthy nutrition and lifestyle in general.
For faster results, the best choices are:
Deep-acting, high-power radiofrequency
Deep acting, high-power ultrasound cavitation
And a real cellulite cream, i.e. a cream with multiple, high-purity, high-concentration actives, well researched for the their action against multiple aspects of cellulite
"Best leg exercises for cellulite". Seriously?
Fitness magazine, No 6 on Google for the above keyphrase at the time of updating this article (its position may be different now), suggests "Romanian Deadlifts". That’s great to break your back and get some nice herniated disks, just around the L4-L5 or L5-S1 joints. That will create plenty of new cellulite whilst you recover in bed from your injury.
If the Romanian dead lift is performed with 1-2kg dumbbells on each arm it is a sheer waste of time. If it is performed with proper, heavy weights to make a difference on your butt muscles, it is simply dangerous for most non-fit people. If you don't break your back, yes, you will (hopefully, not guaranteed) develop a more toned butt muscle.
But it will still do nothing for the cellulite on your bum.
Prevention magazine, No 1 on Google for the same keyphrase at the time of writing (again, its position may be different now), offers "Clockwork Lunges", ideal to damage your knees (especially the medial meniscus, medial collateral ligament and medial patellofemoral joint cartilage, specifically).
And it will make not a shred of difference to your cellulite.
These are two examples of either utter ignorance or wilful misleading of the public, for the sake of advertising clicks.
What the heck? Do people have no shame? How ignorant can you be and write for specialist magazines such as Fitness or Prevention? How can you offer such dangerous misinformation to the public?
Romanian deadlifts for people with cellulite? Many of whom are simply unfit and with very poor proprioception and neuromuscular coordination? Some of whom with already partially herniated lumbar intervertebral disks?
Clockwork lunges for people with cellulite, many of whom are in their 40s or older, with already partially worn out menisci and patellofemoral cartilage?
Are you serious? This is how you reduce people’s cellulite? By sending them to the orthopaedic surgeon as a side-effect of something (spot fat reduction) that provenly does not exist? It really beggars belief...
Guys (exercise “experts”, beauty “experts”, Instagram influencers, YouTubers, bloggers, vloggers), you can do so much better than that.
Romanian deadlifts…
Crazy...
How to reduce cellulite and tighten up your skin
For the fastest possible results, have an intensive course of 6-12 treatments combining…
For the best value for money and to maximise the results of your exercise, diet and treatment…
…apply a real cellulite cream, i.e. one with multiple, high-purity anti-cellulite actives in high concentrations (caffeine, forskolin, centella asiatica triterpenes are indispensable as anti-cellulite active ingredients - plus more, if possible), for 6-12 weeks. Concentrated cellulite creams act less fast but they offer far better value for money than treatments. Concentrated cellulite creams act on aspects of cellulite that treatments can’t: free radical damage, fibrosis, glycation and inflammation. They also do work for circulation enhancement, lipolysis and collagen/elastin synthesis, but to a lesser extent than treatments.
For maintenance, prevention and to reduce cellulite at home at no cost, albeit more slowly…
…than with treatments and creams, check out our epic guide with 100+ expert tips. Healthy nutrition and exercise are absolutely essential for both cellulite prevention and reduction and to make the most of your treatments and creams.
AI-free content
This website is human-written 100%. We do not use Chat-GPT or any other AI tool for our pages and articles to bombard you with spam articles and inaccurate information.
Chat-GPT and similar tools copy the web to write meaningless ‘lowest common denominator’ platitudes, i.e. generally accepted myths that often have nothing to do with reality. Plus plenty of inaccuracies, misinformation and a healthy added dose of literally made up stuff - what AI experts call “AI hallucinations”.
No AI tool has the depth of experience accumulated over tens of thousands of sessions with real human beings (in fact, AI tools have zero experience, obviously), neither can it discriminate what is reality and what is made up BS on the web.
Of course, the aesthetics industry is already full of myths, inaccuracies, platitudes and hallucinations, so the advent of AI does not make much of a difference. The beauty industry has always been full of BS, even without AI.
So 20+ years on, we still keep it real, regardless of AI.
About LipoTherapeia
The LipoTherapeia® treatment, a combination of deep-acting, high-power radiofrequency and deep acting, high-power ultrasound cavitation, is currently the strongest SAFE skin tightening, non-surgical bum lifting and cellulite treatment in London
The treatment is provided with advanced protocols based on the Physics of radiofrequency and ultrasound and on the anatomy and physiology of cellulite and skin laxity
Trademarks: Meso-CRF®, LipoTherapeia® and Celluence® are registered trademarks in the UK & EU and belong to LipoTherapeia Ltd. All rights to the usage of those trademarks and copyrights are strictly reserved and are only allowed with prior written approval. The terms Meso-CRF® and LipoTherapeia® are interchangeably used by us to refer to our skin tightening/non-surgical bum lifting/cellulite treatments based on ultrasound and radiofrequency.
Disclaimers
Efficacy: As with any medical / aesthetic treatment or skin product, results vary from person to person depending on lifestyle, genetics, state of health (how each individual body responds to treatment), so specific results cannot be guaranteed. BTW, there is NO cellulite removal or long-term skin tightening/lifting with one, two or even three sessions and there is neither 100% (nor permanent) cellulite removal/skin tightening/lifting, with ANY technique, including ours, so we never make such misleading claims.
Safety: Our treatments have proven 99%+ safe over the last 12+ years (with minor/temporary irritation occurring in the other 1%- of treatments). However, as with any medical/aesthetic treatment or skin product, sensitivity varies from person to person, and from time to time even on the same person, depending on lifestyle, genetics and state of health (how each individual body responds to a treatment at a specific time), so we cannot guarantee 100% safety.
Accuracy: The information presented on this website is based on our interpretation of peer-reviewed research and/or our extensive 22-year experience and study in our field of specialisation, but it cannot be guaranteed 100% accurate or impartial.
Prices and special offers: Subject to change without prior notice. Special offers can not be combined.
Non-medical: No information, treatment or product on this website aims to treat or diagnose any medical condition or to provide/replace medical advice. Always consult your doctor.
Not professional advice: No information on this website is intended as direct or indirect professional (or personal) advice
For information purposes only: All content on this website is strictly for information purposes only. | What is the best type of exercise for cellulite: get the facts, not the hype
At the time of updating this article (October 2022) Google returned 3 million pages for the query “cellulite exercises”, volunteering “helpful suggestions” such as curtsy lunges, lateral lunges, glute bridges and squat jumps.
But do these so-called “cellulite exercises” work? Can you get rid of - or at least reduce - cellulite with specific exercises?
Here we present the ultimate “exercise for cellulite” guide. Honest, science-based and straight to the point, without clichés or even dangerous misinformation that you find all over the internet. Just science-based, actionable information.
Do cellulite exercises work? Can exercise get rid of cellulite on legs?
First things first: in most cases you cannot get rid of cellulite completely with any method of any kind, including exercise.
Of course, the answer to the, more correct, question "does exercise reduce cellulite?", is yes. exercise is one of the most important ways to reduce cellulite, not just because it makes you burn calories, but also because it boosts your circulation and promotes skin firming.
However, too many people, instead of looking for an effective workout for cellulite, they look for specific leg cellulite exercises, which, as we will see below, is completely the wrong way to go about it.
Images of so-called “cellulite exercises”, according to the “wisdom” of the internet
First off, if you are looking for specific leg cellulite removal exercises, i.e. exercises to remove cellulite from a specific area of your legs, for example your inner thighs, back of thighs etc, let me warn you that you are looking for something that does not exist: spot fat reduction (including cellulite fat) with exercise is biologically impossible, so all these exercises you see on the internet are utter BS (and that’s the best word I can use about them). Simple as that.
| no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://stridestrong.com/does-rebounding-get-rid-of-cellulite/ | Does Rebounding Get Rid Of Cellulite? Bounce Your Way to ... | Does Rebounding Get Rid Of Cellulite? Bounce Your Way to Smooth Skin
In this article, we will explore how rebounding impacts the skin and cellulite and why it should be considered for enhancing skin health.
Cellulite is a benign yet widespread skin issue that affects both men and women, characterized by bumpy and uneven skin texture. It is commonly found on the thighs, abdomen, and buttocks and is a result of poor circulation. When collagen deteriorates and gets replaced by fat cells, cellulite tends to form.
For those who have cellulite, you might have tried various methods to minimize its appearance. So, does rebounding help eliminate cellulite? Rebounding can reduce or eliminate cellulite by firming and toning the skin. Additionally, it boosts blood circulation throughout the body, delivering fresh blood to the skin’s surface.
In this article, we will explore how rebounding impacts the skin and why it should be considered for enhancing skin health. To discover the top rebounders available, refer to our comparison article.
Is Rebounding Beneficial for Cellulite?
Rebounders, also known as mini trampolines, are an excellent choice for those seeking to enhance their skin health without resorting to medications or surgeries. One of the advantages of rebounding is its accessibility and ease of use.
Individuals of any age or fitness level can participate, and noticeable benefits can be achieved without dedicating an excessive amount of time. If you’re unsure about using a rebounder, read our article on who should avoid using one.
Incorporating a daily rebounding workout into your regular skincare regimen can yield remarkable results. Exercise is one of the best ways to tighten loose skin.
Physical activity contracts the muscles, leading to toning and firming of the skin from within. Bouncing on a rebounder is a simple yet highly effective method for skin tightening.
This movement promotes blood circulation throughout the body, ensuring a continuous supply of oxygen-rich blood to the skin’s surface.
As blood circulates, it transports toxins from within the body to the skin’s surface, where they are eliminated through the pores. Rebounding is a low-impact exercise that supplies the entire body with more oxygen than many conventional exercises, as it engages a broader range of muscles.
Rebounding and Cellulite: Before and After
If you’re skeptical about the impact of rebounding on cellulite and skin health, take a look at the before and after images below to see how rebounding can work wonders for your skin!
Lymphatic System and Rebounding
The lymphatic system is a crucial factor to consider if you want to achieve healthier skin. Its primary function is to remove toxins from the body.
Cellulite often develops due to poor lymph circulation, which causes toxins and waste to accumulate beneath the skin’s surface. As mentioned earlier, rebounding not only improves circulation (thus eliminating toxins) but also enhances the gravitational force created during the exercise.
As you bounce on the rebounder, you’ll feel heavier at the bottom of each bounce compared to the top, where you experience a sense of weightlessness. This effect stimulates the lymphatic system, enabling it to work more efficiently by removing toxins, dead cells, bacteria, and lactic acid from the body.
The bouncing motion aids in the movement of fluids through various connective tissues and the lymphatic system.
The toxin levels in your body are closely related to skin health. An unhealthy or sedentary lifestyle can cause the lymphatic system to function less efficiently, leading to toxin buildup.
However, using a rebounder regularly is one of the most effective ways to stimulate your lymphatic system, reducing toxins that contribute to cellulite or poor skin.
Collagen Production and Rebounding
Collagen is a naturally occurring substance in the body that contributes to healthy-looking skin. It helps the body combat skin-related issues, and low collagen levels can lead to sagging skin.
If you’re lacking collagen, you can consider using high-quality collagen supplements like this one:
Incorporating a daily rebounding session can stimulate collagen production, not only preventing skin-related problems but also providing a healthy glow.
A common issue that affects collagen production is cortisol, a hormone produced by the body in response to stress. When the body is under stress, collagen production slows down, and cortisol levels increase.
Jumping on a rebounder flushes cortisol from the bloodstream and soothes the nervous system. While this may not necessarily boost collagen production, it minimizes collagen loss and preserves the skin.
Stress Management and Rebounding
As mentioned earlier, the body produces cortisol in response to stress. Cortisol can be helpful in certain situations, such as heightening the senses and preparing the muscles for fight-or-flight responses.
However, excessive cortisol levels in the body are detrimental to long-term health. Over time, elevated cortisol levels can impair various bodily processes, including muscle growth and circulation. Since circulation is crucial for healthy skin, rebounding helps reduce cortisol levels while relieving stress.
Lower cortisol levels not only promote skin cell regeneration but also enhance the overall appearance and health of the skin.
Muscle Growth and Rebounding
While it may seem unrelated to cellulite and skincare, muscle growth is indeed connected to skin tightening. As you strengthen your muscles through rebounding, the tightening of the skin creates a smoother appearance, helping to even out sagging skin and wrinkles.
The up and down motion of rebounding is a weight-bearing exercise. This means that weight is placed on the protein fibers in the muscles, making them more resistant. As gravity pulls us down during the second part of the movement, it builds resistance, which in turn strengthens the skin cells. As you lose weight from consistent rebounding, your skin contracts with your weight loss, aiding in toning and tightening the skin.
Moreover, regular rebounding helps burn fat deposits stored beneath the skin. These fat deposits are responsible for causing the skin to wrinkle and sag. By rebounding regularly, you can help eliminate this layer of fat and improve the skin’s texture.
Does Rebounding Remove Cellulite?
Rebounding is the ideal workout if you want to have the best possibility of reducing cellulite through exercise. The explanations I’ve provided in this post for how rebounding can improve skin health are smart technique to lessen the look of cellulite in the common regions.
Remember that cellulite is a sort of fat, and regular rebounding will eventually aid in the reduction of this fat. The look of cellulite will vanish as you lose more fat. For any form of significant cellulite reduction objective, we advise at least 20 minutes every day.
Here is an illustration of a rebounder workout to utilize to maximize your lymphatic system.
Sprint: In addition to enhancing your knee joints, sprinting on the rebounder also helps reduce cellulite in the thighs and legs.
Squat: This straightforward workout separates the lower body and concentrates on the buttocks and hamstrings.
Side Kicks: Side kicks are a form of squats that target different muscles in the legs, usually the inner thighs, where cellulite frequently develops on the legs.
Twist: this movement targets the hips and thighs day to meet any type of serious cellulite reduction goal.
Cellulite Trampoline
Rebounding or using a trampoline is a fun method to work out, get rid of cellulite, or just improve the condition of your skin. This article’s information does not constitute medical advice and is not intended to address any particular medical condition.
FAQ
Can rebounding be harmful to the joints?
Rebounding is a low-impact exercise and is generally considered safe for the joints. However, individuals with joint issues or injuries should consult their doctor before starting any new exercise regimen.
How often should I rebound to see results?
For best results in reducing cellulite, we recommend rebounding for at least 20 minutes daily. However, any amount of rebounding is beneficial to your overall health.
Can I rebound if I have other health conditions?
Individuals with certain health conditions such as heart disease or high blood pressure should consult their doctor before starting any new exercise regimen, including rebounding.
Can rebounding be done by people of all ages?
Yes, rebounding is an exercise that can be done by individuals of all ages and fitness levels. However, as with any exercise, it’s important to start slowly and gradually increase intensity as you become more comfortable with the movement.
How long should I rebound to see results for cellulite reduction?
Consistency is key when it comes to seeing results from rebounding for cellulite reduction. Aim for at least 20 minutes of rebounding per day, and be patient as it may take several weeks or even months to see noticeable improvements.
Can rebounding worsen cellulite?
There is no evidence to suggest that rebounding can worsen cellulite. In fact, rebounding can improve circulation and promote fat loss, which can help reduce the appearance of cellulite.
Can rebounding replace a healthy diet and lifestyle for cellulite reduction?
While rebounding can be a great addition to a healthy diet and lifestyle, it is not a substitute for it. To effectively reduce cellulite and improve skin health, it is important to also maintain a balanced diet, stay hydrated, and avoid smoking and excessive alcohol consumption.
Are there any safety concerns with rebounding?
Rebounding is generally considered safe for most people. However, those with certain medical conditions such as heart problems or joint issues should consult with a doctor before starting a rebounding routine. It is also important to use a quality rebounder and to follow proper form and safety guidelines while rebounding.
Conclusion
In conclusion, rebounding is an excellent form of exercise that can benefit your skin health in multiple ways. It can help reduce the appearance of cellulite by firming and toning the skin and promoting fat loss. Additionally, rebounding can improve blood circulation, stimulate the lymphatic system, boost collagen production, and reduce stress levels.
However, it’s important to note that rebounding alone may not completely eliminate cellulite. A healthy diet, staying hydrated, and practicing other healthy habits such as avoiding smoking and excessive alcohol consumption are also essential in reducing cellulite. | Cellulite Trampoline
Rebounding or using a trampoline is a fun method to work out, get rid of cellulite, or just improve the condition of your skin. This article’s information does not constitute medical advice and is not intended to address any particular medical condition.
FAQ
Can rebounding be harmful to the joints?
Rebounding is a low-impact exercise and is generally considered safe for the joints. However, individuals with joint issues or injuries should consult their doctor before starting any new exercise regimen.
How often should I rebound to see results?
For best results in reducing cellulite, we recommend rebounding for at least 20 minutes daily. However, any amount of rebounding is beneficial to your overall health.
Can I rebound if I have other health conditions?
Individuals with certain health conditions such as heart disease or high blood pressure should consult their doctor before starting any new exercise regimen, including rebounding.
Can rebounding be done by people of all ages?
Yes, rebounding is an exercise that can be done by individuals of all ages and fitness levels. However, as with any exercise, it’s important to start slowly and gradually increase intensity as you become more comfortable with the movement.
How long should I rebound to see results for cellulite reduction?
Consistency is key when it comes to seeing results from rebounding for cellulite reduction. Aim for at least 20 minutes of rebounding per day, and be patient as it may take several weeks or even months to see noticeable improvements.
Can rebounding worsen cellulite?
There is no evidence to suggest that rebounding can worsen cellulite. In fact, rebounding can improve circulation and promote fat loss, which can help reduce the appearance of cellulite.
Can rebounding replace a healthy diet and lifestyle for cellulite reduction?
While rebounding can be a great addition to a healthy diet and lifestyle, it is not a substitute for it. To effectively reduce cellulite and improve skin health, it is important to also maintain a balanced diet, | yes |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://perfectskincenter.com/say-goodbye-to-cellulite-effective-strategies-for-smooth-and-firm-skin/ | Say Goodbye to Cellulite | Perfect Skin Center | Cellulite can be a significant source of insecurity and frustration for many people. It’s estimated that up to 90% of women experience cellulite in some form on their bodies, making it an incredibly common problem. Thankfully, there are proven strategies that you can employ to help reduce the appearance of those pesky lumps and bumps. Let’s discuss some effective strategies for smooth and firm skin free from cellulite.
What Causes Cellulite?
Cellulite is a common cosmetic concern for many individuals, particularly women. While the exact cause of cellulite is not fully understood, it is believed to result from a combination of factors. These factors may include genetics, hormones, diet, and lifestyle.
Specifically, the dimpled appearance of cellulite is caused by the accumulation of fat cells beneath the skin, which push against the connective tissue and create an uneven texture. Additionally, factors such as poor circulation, dehydration, and a sedentary lifestyle may contribute to the development of cellulite.
What Are Some Effective Treatments for Cellulite?
Even with advances in nutrition, exercise, and medical technology, many people still need help to reduce their cellulite because of misinformation or misunderstanding about how it forms and how to treat it. Fortunately, several proven strategies lessen the appearance of troublesome cellulite.
Lifestyle Changes and Exercise
Adopting a healthy lifestyle and engaging in regular exercise can significantly improve the appearance of cellulite. Focus on maintaining a balanced diet, staying hydrated, and avoiding smoking and excessive alcohol consumption. Incorporating targeted exercises like squats, lunges, and cardio workouts can help tone the muscles and reduce the visibility of cellulite. You can take a step towards smoother skin by making these simple lifestyle changes.
Topical Creams
Some over-the-counter and prescription creams contain ingredients like caffeine, retinol, and antioxidants, which can temporarily improve the appearance of cellulite by tightening the skin and increasing blood flow. While these creams may not provide long-term results, they can offer some short-term improvement.
Body Brushing
Dry brushing or body brushing with a soft-bristled brush can improve circulation, stimulate the lymphatic system, and exfoliate the skin. Regular body brushing may help reduce fluid retention and the appearance of cellulite.
Massage and Manual Lymphatic Drainage
Specialized massage techniques, like lymphatic drainage, can help reduce fluid retention and improve circulation, potentially reducing the appearance of cellulite. Massage also aids in breaking down fat cells and improving skin elasticity.
Non-Invasive Treatments
For more targeted cellulite reduction, non-invasive treatments have shown promising results. Technologies such as radiofrequency, ultrasound, and laser therapy stimulate collagen production, tighten the skin, and break down fat cells. These treatments are safe, effective, and require little to no downtime. At Perfect Skin Center, we provide three cellulite treatment options:
Cellfina
Cellfina is a highly effective and minimally invasive treatment for cellulite. Its microblade technology utilizes subcision to target the fatty connective structures responsible for the cellulite formation deep within the skin. The subcision treatment involves a needle-sized device that penetrates the skin to break up the troubling connective bands under the surface. This ultimately leads to the breakdown of adipose tissue, allowing the dimples caused by cellulite to bounce back out resulting in smoother skin.
ThermiSmooth®
ThermiSmooth® is a cutting-edge, non-invasive cellulite reduction treatment that uses radiofrequency energy to tighten and smooth the skin. By breaking down adipose tissue under the superficial layer, ThermiSmooth® can eliminate the appearance of cellulite on troublesome regions of the body, including the chest, breasts, and more.
One of the most significant benefits of ThermiSmooth® is that there is no set downtime following the treatment, allowing clients to return to their daily routine immediately after their appointment. While the treatment may work in one session, multiple sessions may be chosen for optimal results.
Thermage® Body
If you’re looking for a non-invasive way to reduce cellulite and get smoother, firmer skin, Thermage® Body might be just what you need. Using advanced radio frequency technology, this treatment penetrates deeper into the skin to help tighten the fibrous septae that cause cellulite.
Unlike other cellulite treatments, Thermage® Body is faster, more tolerable, and more effective, making it an excellent choice for anyone looking to get rid of cellulite. However, as with all cellulite treatments, individual results may vary, and more than one session may be needed to achieve optimal results.
How Do You Know Which Cellulite Treatment Is Right for You?
If you’re struggling with cellulite and looking for a treatment that will finally get rid of it, you may wonder how to choose the right one. With so many options available, it can be overwhelming to sort through them all and determine the most effective for your needs. We understand that finding the proper cellulite reduction treatment can be a challenge. That’s why we recommend scheduling a consultation with our experienced team to discuss your options. We’ll evaluate your unique situation during your consultation and suggest the best treatment plan.
Goodbye Cellulite: Get Smoother Skin in Tempe, AZ
At Perfect Skin Center in Tempe, AZ, we understand the frustration that comes with cellulite. That’s why we offer cellulite treatments to help reduce and even eliminate the appearance of this common condition. With options like Cellfina, ThermiSmooth, and Thermage Body, our team of experts is dedicated to helping you achieve smoother, more youthful-looking skin.
Say goodbye to the dimples and cottage cheese texture that often come with cellulite and say hello to the confidence that comes with a smoother, more toned appearance. Contact us today to schedule your consultation and take the first step toward getting rid of cellulite. |
Even with advances in nutrition, exercise, and medical technology, many people still need help to reduce their cellulite because of misinformation or misunderstanding about how it forms and how to treat it. Fortunately, several proven strategies lessen the appearance of troublesome cellulite.
Lifestyle Changes and Exercise
Adopting a healthy lifestyle and engaging in regular exercise can significantly improve the appearance of cellulite. Focus on maintaining a balanced diet, staying hydrated, and avoiding smoking and excessive alcohol consumption. Incorporating targeted exercises like squats, lunges, and cardio workouts can help tone the muscles and reduce the visibility of cellulite. You can take a step towards smoother skin by making these simple lifestyle changes.
Topical Creams
Some over-the-counter and prescription creams contain ingredients like caffeine, retinol, and antioxidants, which can temporarily improve the appearance of cellulite by tightening the skin and increasing blood flow. While these creams may not provide long-term results, they can offer some short-term improvement.
Body Brushing
Dry brushing or body brushing with a soft-bristled brush can improve circulation, stimulate the lymphatic system, and exfoliate the skin. Regular body brushing may help reduce fluid retention and the appearance of cellulite.
Massage and Manual Lymphatic Drainage
Specialized massage techniques, like lymphatic drainage, can help reduce fluid retention and improve circulation, potentially reducing the appearance of cellulite. Massage also aids in breaking down fat cells and improving skin elasticity.
Non-Invasive Treatments
For more targeted cellulite reduction, non-invasive treatments have shown promising results. Technologies such as radiofrequency, ultrasound, and laser therapy stimulate collagen production, tighten the skin, and break down fat cells. These treatments are safe, effective, and require little to no downtime. | yes |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | yes_statement | "exercise" can eliminate "cellulite".. regular "exercise" can help get "rid" of "cellulite". | https://www.insider.com/guides/health/fitness/how-to-get-rid-of-cellulite | How to Get Rid of Cellulite: 6 Ways to Reduce Its Appearance | This article was medically reviewed by Debra Jaliman, MD, a board-certified dermatologist with a private practice in New York City.
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Our stories are reviewed by medical professionals to ensure you get the most accurate and useful information about your health and wellness. For more information, visit our medical review board.
You can reduce the appearance of cellulite with retinoid creams and medical treatments like dermal fillers.
bymuratdeniz/ Getty Images
It's impossible to get rid of cellulite completely, but there are ways to reduce its appearance.
Strength training can help build muscle and reduce weight gain, which may help prevent cellulite.
Some topical treatments, home remedies, and procedures exist that claim to reduce its appearance.
Cellulite is a common condition that looks like puckered skin. It is both harmless and painless. Often described as dimpled or bumpy flesh, cellulite is found predominantly in female bodies, especially in the butt, thighs, hips, and stomach.
"Studies suggest that cellulite is found in 80%-90% of women who have gone through puberty, so by that measure, it is a normal part of the body," says Alicia Little, MD, PhD, assistant professor of dermatology at Yale University School of Medicine.
The dimpled appearance from cellulite happens when excess fat invades the fibrous tissues that separate fat from muscle.
What is cellulite?
Cellulite is an extremely common, normal part of the body where subcutaneous fat, the kind of fat that lies just under the skin, appears to be rippled, puckered, or dimpled.
Normally, you have cords, or bands, of fibrous connective tissue underneath your skin that are taut, giving the skin a smooth appearance. But sometimes excess fat will build up around the cords, which causes them to go slack, creating cellulite, says Tanya Kormeili, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California.
As fat pushes upward through the fibrous bands that connect the skin to the muscles, the fibrous tissue pulls the skin in, causing a lumpy appearance.
You don't have to be overweight to have cellulite, though this is a common misconception.
General advice: Having cellulite isn't dangerous, so unless it's a major cosmetic concern, you don't have to get rid of it. Misinformation surrounds cellulite, and a 2020 survey shows that a lot of physicians want people to know that having cellulite is not their fault.
While it's impossible to get rid of cellulite completely, there are some ways you can reduce its appearance.
"None of these options will permanently get rid of cellulite because they do not address the root cause of it, which are the fibrous bands under the surface of the skin," says Anne Chapas, MD, founder and medical director of Union Square Laser Dermatology.
1. Exercise regularly
Lack of physical activity can increase the appearance of cellulite. "Skin looks smoother and firmer over muscle rather than fat, so exercises that help replace fat with muscle can make cellulite less noticeable," says Little.
Cellulite usually forms around the hips, thighs, and buttocks because people tend to have more fatty deposits in those areas, says Chapas. Here are some exercises that target those muscles:
Wayne L. Westcott, PhD, the chair of exercise science at Quincy College, also suggests hamstring exercises — such as leg curls and leg presses, or dumbbell step-ups or dumbbell lunges, to help keep cellulite in check.
2. Give yourself a deep massage
There is little evidence that massage can tighten or improve the appearance of cellulite long-term, says Kormeili. However, deep massage can cause inflammation and swelling, which may improve the appearance of the cellulite temporarily.
4. Try dry brushing
Dry brushing is a technique that involves using a brush with stiff bristles to brush the affected skin in long circles or strokes. Dry brushing does not reduce cellulite, but as with deep massage, the swelling it induces may help the dimples look softer for a short period of time, says Kormeili.
5. Apply retinol
As far as topicals go, applying retinoids at a 0.3% concentration for at least six months can have a thickening effect on the skin around the cellulite, making it look smoother, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. Kormeili cautions that results are modest.
Important: Test any new products on a small area beforehand to ensure that you aren't allergic to them.
6. Consider medical treatments
Talk to a dermatologist or cosmetic surgeon about your in-office options for reducing the appearance of cellulite. There are several types of treatments available at a range of price points:
Injectable treatments: The injection of dermal fillers and collagenase enzymes may smooth skin irregularities due to cellulite. Dermal fillers like Radiesse cost about $900 and above, depending on the number of injections. Qwo, the first FDA-approved injectable treatment, is a new procedure with varying prices — up to several thousand dollars — depending on the cellulite's severity. It dissolves the fibrous bands that cause dimpling.
Energy-based procedures: Several sessions of radiofrequency, acoustic wave therapy, or laser treatments harness soundwaves or thermal and light energy to minimize the appearance of cellulite. Treatments like Velashape, Cellfina, and Cellulaze can range from $1,000 to $5,000.
Important: Cellulite is common and it's not necessary to reduce cellulite for health purposes.
What causes cellulite?
Though it's unclear why some people are more prone to cellulite than others, factors that can increase the likelihood of cellulite include:
Low estrogen levels: Cellulite becomes more prevalent during menopause when estrogen levels decrease triggering a subsequent reduction in collagen and fibers that give skin its elasticity.
Pregnancy: Weight gain during pregnancy can make cellulite more visible.
Genetics: Your genes play a key role in the overall structure, texture, and elasticity of your skin. And since skin elasticity is related to cellulite formation, it's common for cellulite to run in families.
Diet: Cellulite appears to be more common among individuals with a diet that is low in fiber and high in refined carbohydrates and added sugars, says Debra L. Clancy RD, CD, a clinical dietitian at the Center for Weight Loss and Metabolic Surgery, UW Medicine.
How to prevent cellulite
Strength training combats muscle loss and weight gain, which is why it can be an effective preventative for cellulite as you grow older.
"Extra weight can make cellulite more noticeable, so getting to a healthy weight may reduce the amount of cellulite you can see," says Little. However, in some cases, loose skin develops during weight loss and cellulite can become more visible, she says.
The severity of cellulite is linked to being overweight, so maintaining a healthy weight by having a balanced diet may help you avoid cellulite. Refrain from yo-yo dieting, or rapid weight loss fluctuation, and moderately consume sugar-sweetened beverages, baked goods, and processed meats.
Insider's takeaway
Cellulite is a normal and common skin condition that causes a dimpled or rippled appearance on the skin. It's unnecessary to get rid of cellulite unless you consider it a cosmetic concern.
Exercising and having a healthy diet can improve the appearance of cellulite, as well as topical agents, DIY remedies, injectable treatments, and energy-based procedures. However, they are only short-term solutions that cannot completely eliminate cellulite.
Overall, fitness may be the best option for reducing the look of cellulite, although results are neither guaranteed nor permanent. | As fat pushes upward through the fibrous bands that connect the skin to the muscles, the fibrous tissue pulls the skin in, causing a lumpy appearance.
You don't have to be overweight to have cellulite, though this is a common misconception.
General advice: Having cellulite isn't dangerous, so unless it's a major cosmetic concern, you don't have to get rid of it. Misinformation surrounds cellulite, and a 2020 survey shows that a lot of physicians want people to know that having cellulite is not their fault.
While it's impossible to get rid of cellulite completely, there are some ways you can reduce its appearance.
"None of these options will permanently get rid of cellulite because they do not address the root cause of it, which are the fibrous bands under the surface of the skin," says Anne Chapas, MD, founder and medical director of Union Square Laser Dermatology.
1. Exercise regularly
Lack of physical activity can increase the appearance of cellulite. "Skin looks smoother and firmer over muscle rather than fat, so exercises that help replace fat with muscle can make cellulite less noticeable," says Little.
Cellulite usually forms around the hips, thighs, and buttocks because people tend to have more fatty deposits in those areas, says Chapas. Here are some exercises that target those muscles:
Wayne L. Westcott, PhD, the chair of exercise science at Quincy College, also suggests hamstring exercises — such as leg curls and leg presses, or dumbbell step-ups or dumbbell lunges, to help keep cellulite in check.
2. Give yourself a deep massage
There is little evidence that massage can tighten or improve the appearance of cellulite long-term, says Kormeili. However, deep massage can cause inflammation and swelling, which may improve the appearance of the cellulite temporarily.
4. | no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | no_statement | "exercise" alone cannot eliminate "cellulite".. "cellulite" cannot be completely eliminated through "exercise". | https://alleganyplasticsurgery.com/cellulaze-cellulite-treatment/ | Cellulaze Cellulite Treatment | Allegany Plastic Surgery | Cellulaze Cellulite Treatment
The First and Only Long-Lasting Treatment for the Appearance of Cellulite CellulazeTM is Fast, Easy, and Effective, Resulting in Visibly Smoother Skin
According to a recent survey, over eighty percent of women reported not only that they have cellulite, but also that they believed cellulite could be eliminated through diet and exercise. Unfortunately, this is incorrect. Contrary to popular belief, cellulite is not a result of excess fat. Cellulite is caused by structural problems beneath the skin— which means that diet and exercise can’t always solve the problem.
What is Cellulaze Cellulite Treatment?
Cellulaze is a laser based treatment which corrects the causes of cellulite in a minimally invasive, one-time procedure. Patients in the Cumberland, Hagerstown, and Morgantown areas can now experience the effects Cellulaze. This new technology goes beyond traditional treatments for cellulite and offers a new approach to cellulite treatment that doesn’t blame the problem on excess fat. Instead, it addresses the structure of the tissue beneath the skin, treating the root of the problem and achieving lasting results.
What Happens During Treatment?
Cellulaze is a minimally-invasive procedure that uses an effective, laser-assisted cannula under local anesthesia. It works primarily in three steps: the first step uses laser energy to melt the bulging “lumps” of fat. The second step thermally divides the deep, dimple producing, fibrotic bands that pull down on the skin. The third step delivers laser energy to the dermis, producing thicker skin and increased elasticity. Cellulaze not only treats cellulite, but also jumpstarts your skin to naturally prevent it in the future.
What is the Recovery Like?
A Cellulaze procedure can take around 1-2 hours, depending on the area being treated. You may experience some bruising and fluid leakage at the incision site, and it’s recommended that you wear a compression garment to aid healing. You can generally return to your normal activities within a day or two. The results are immediate and the skin continues to tighten as collagen is produced over the next 6 months!
Cellulaze is ideal for patients who, despite their own diet and exercise routines, still struggle with cellulite. With Dr. Carpenter and this new technology, patients can finally achieve the smooth, youthful-looking skin they never thought was possible. Contact Allegany Plastic Surgery to learn more!
“Until now, it has been nearly impossible to effectively treat cellulite in any lasting kind of way. You’re not a happy doctor if your patients are unhappy. With Cellulaze, though, I can finally give my patients the results they’re looking for,” said Dr. Carpenter when asked about this new technology, “and we’re very thankful.” | Cellulaze Cellulite Treatment
The First and Only Long-Lasting Treatment for the Appearance of Cellulite CellulazeTM is Fast, Easy, and Effective, Resulting in Visibly Smoother Skin
According to a recent survey, over eighty percent of women reported not only that they have cellulite, but also that they believed cellulite could be eliminated through diet and exercise. Unfortunately, this is incorrect. Contrary to popular belief, cellulite is not a result of excess fat. Cellulite is caused by structural problems beneath the skin— which means that diet and exercise can’t always solve the problem.
What is Cellulaze Cellulite Treatment?
Cellulaze is a laser based treatment which corrects the causes of cellulite in a minimally invasive, one-time procedure. Patients in the Cumberland, Hagerstown, and Morgantown areas can now experience the effects Cellulaze. This new technology goes beyond traditional treatments for cellulite and offers a new approach to cellulite treatment that doesn’t blame the problem on excess fat. Instead, it addresses the structure of the tissue beneath the skin, treating the root of the problem and achieving lasting results.
What Happens During Treatment?
Cellulaze is a minimally-invasive procedure that uses an effective, laser-assisted cannula under local anesthesia. It works primarily in three steps: the first step uses laser energy to melt the bulging “lumps” of fat. The second step thermally divides the deep, dimple producing, fibrotic bands that pull down on the skin. The third step delivers laser energy to the dermis, producing thicker skin and increased elasticity. Cellulaze not only treats cellulite, but also jumpstarts your skin to naturally prevent it in the future.
What is the Recovery Like?
A Cellulaze procedure can take around 1-2 hours, depending on the area being treated. You may experience some bruising and fluid leakage at the incision site, and it’s recommended that you wear a compression garment to aid healing. You can generally return to your normal activities within a day or two. | no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | no_statement | "exercise" alone cannot eliminate "cellulite".. "cellulite" cannot be completely eliminated through "exercise". | https://www.aad.org/public/cosmetic/fat-removal/cellulite-treatments-what-really-works | Cellulite treatments: What really works? | Cellulite treatments: What really works?
Cellulite on thigh: Most women, even very fit women, have cellulite — fat that causes the skin to dimple.
If cellulite bothers you, you’re not alone. Our desire to get rid of — or at least diminish — cellulite has led to many treatment options. With so many treatments out there, it can be hard to know what, if anything, works.
To find out, dermatologists have been conducting research studies. You’ll be happy to know that the research shows some treatments can make cellulite less noticeable — at least for a while. Here’s the lowdown.
Best results according to research studies
Acoustic wave therapy
Bottom line: Studies show that this can reduce the appearance of cellulite. Several treatment sessions are needed to see a reduction.
Laser treatment
Different types of laser treatments are used to treat cellulite.
During one minimally invasive laser treatment called Cellulaze™, a tiny laser fiber is inserted beneath your skin. When the laser is fired, the laser energy breaks up the tough bands beneath the skin that cause us to see cellulite. This treatment can also thicken your skin, which is important. Skin often thins where cellulite forms. Thickening the skin can help reduce the appearance of cellulite.
Acoustic wave therapy: A handheld device uses sound waves to break up cellulite.
Bottom line: Cellulaze™ may reduce the appearance of cellulite. Patients are seeing results that last a year or longer. More research is needed to know for sure how helpful this laser can be.
With other laser treatments, some patients have seen less cellulite. Results can last 6 months or longer; however, a bit of dimpling usually returns.
Subcision
Called Cellfina™, this medical procedure involves your dermatologist inserting a needle just under the skin to break up the tough bands beneath the skin that cause us to see cellulite.
Bottom line: Cellfina™ has been shown to reduce the skin dimpling that you see with cellulite. In a study of 232 patients, 99% of them said they were satisfied with the results. The results can last 2 years and possibly longer.
Vacuum-assisted precise tissue release
This also breaks up the tough bands that cause us to see cellulite. During this procedure, your dermatologist will use a device that contains small blades to cut the tough bands. After the bands are cut, the tissue moves upward to fill out and eliminate the dimpled skin.
Bottom line: This may be an effective treatment for reducing cellulite. A small study shows that many patients who received this treatment had less cellulite for up to 3 years. It’s too soon to tell, but the results may last even longer.
Cellulite is different from fat
Cellulite differs from fat. Treatment that can effectively remove fat often has no effect on cellulite.
Weight loss
Bottom line: Extra weight can make cellulite more visible. For some people, losing weight and staying at a healthy weight reduces the amount of cellulite they see. If you develop loose skin while losing weight, however, cellulite can become more noticeable.
Exercise
Bottom line: Having more muscle makes your skin look smoother and firmer. Replacing fat with muscle can also make cellulite less noticeable.
Evidence the treatment may work
Carboxytherapy
During this medical procedure, carbon dioxide (CO2) gas is inserted just beneath the skin. CO2 differs from carbon monoxide, which can be deadly. Possible side effects from carboxytherapy are discomfort during treatment and temporary bruising.
Bottom line: Early studies show that women may see less cellulite. In one study, 10 women received 8 treatments. After these treatments, the researchers found that the women had a little less cellulite.
Creams and lotions
Bottom line: Researchers have found that some creams and lotions may have an effect on cellulite.
To avoid getting a rash from a cellulite cream or lotion, test it on a small area. If you don’t get a skin reaction in 48 hours, you can use more of the product.
Products containing caffeine may dehydrate cells, which can make cellulite less obvious. To maintain the results, you’ll have to apply the product every day.
A product that contains 0.3% retinol may also have some effect on cellulite. Some women who’ve used it say they see a little less cellulite. Retinol can help thicken the skin, which may reduce how much cellulite you see. Before you’ll know if retinol can help you, you’ll need to apply the product for 6 months or possibly longer.
If you’re interested in trying a cellulite cream or lotion, it helps to test it on a small area first. Some people have an allergic skin reaction.
Testing on a small area is also important because there have been reports of people becoming anxious or having a racing heart while using a product that contains aminophylline. People who use an asthma inhaler definitely want to avoid using any product that contains aminophylline. Even a cream that contains it can cause breathing problems.
endermologie®
Available at spas, this treatment uses a device that gives you a deep massage while also lifting up your skin with a vacuum-like tool. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this as a medical device that has little potential to cause harm. The FDA, however, hasn’t said that it works.
People who offer endermologie® say that a number of treatment sessions are necessary to see results. Each session lasts about 45 minutes.
Bottom line: Study results vary. Some studies found no difference in cellulite between the women who received endermologie® and those who didn’t. Other studies show that the women who received it had a noticeable reduction. These results, however, were temporary.
If you see results, it seems that you must continue the treatments to continue seeing results. The cellulite tends to return within 1 month of stopping treatment.
Ionithermie cellulite reduction treatments
If you opt for this spa treatment, the cellulite will be slathered with algae or clay — and sometimes a mixture of both. Next, electrodes are attached to the area. Before the technician leaves the room, the area will be wrapped in plastic. During the treatment, you’ll feel a mild electric current. Some people say the current feels painful or unpleasant.
This treatment is said to reduce the size of the treated area, which may reduce the appearance of cellulite.
Bottom line: Without independent published studies, it’s hard to know if this works. Some people say their skin feels more toned, but they still see cellulite. Others say they don’t notice any difference. If you see results, they’ll only last about 12 to 18 hours.
Radiofrequency
This is a type of treatment that heats the cellulite. One FDA-approved device combines radiofrequency with a laser, suction, and massage in order to target cellulite.
Bottom line: Recent studies suggest some patients see a little less cellulite. This result, however, is short lived and several treatments are needed to see this minor change.
After treatment, bruises are common. These fade with time.
Too early to tell if these work
Laser-assisted liposuction
Liposuction is an invasive medical procedure that works well for removing small amounts of fat.
Bottom line: While liposuction can remove unwanted fat very effectively, it’s not recommended for getting rid of cellulite. It can make the dimpling more obvious.
Adding a laser treatment to liposuction, however, may help get rid of cellulite. It’s too soon to tell whether laser-assisted liposuction is effective.
Ultrasound
A technique called ultrasonic liposculpting is a non-invasive procedure that targets and destroys fat.
Bottom line: There is no evidence that ultrasound alone can reduce cellulite. When combined with another cellulite treatment, however, ultrasound may reduce the appearance of cellulite. It’s too early to tell whether it will be effective. More studies are needed.
Not recommended for treating cellulite
Cryolipolysis
This treatment freezes unwanted fat to get rid of it.
Bottom line: While it can be very effective for getting rid of small pockets of unwanted fat, it currently cannot get rid of cellulite.
Mesotherapy
During this procedure, you receive a series of injections in the area(s) with cellulite. Different substances are injected into the area, including caffeine, hormones, enzymes, and herbal extracts. Because each practitioner uses a unique blend of ingredients, there’s no way to know what — if any — ingredients are effective.
Bottom line: Few studies show this works. Side effects are common and include redness and swelling, tender lumps beneath the skin, infection, allergic skin reaction, and skin changes.
Supplements
Some people say that taking supplements that contain ingredients like caffeine, grape seed extract, or gingko biloba can reduce cellulite.
Bottom line: There is no evidence that any supplement can reduce cellulite.
A dermatologist can help you decide what’s right for you
Before having any cosmetic (not medically necessary) treatment, it’s always best to consult a doctor who understands and treats the condition. Your results depend on the skill and experience of the person who performs the treatment.
Dermatologists are the skin experts, so they understand the skin and what lies just beneath it. A dermatologist who offers cellulite treatment can help you decide which treatment may be most effective for you and answer your questions. | Vacuum-assisted precise tissue release
This also breaks up the tough bands that cause us to see cellulite. During this procedure, your dermatologist will use a device that contains small blades to cut the tough bands. After the bands are cut, the tissue moves upward to fill out and eliminate the dimpled skin.
Bottom line: This may be an effective treatment for reducing cellulite. A small study shows that many patients who received this treatment had less cellulite for up to 3 years. It’s too soon to tell, but the results may last even longer.
Cellulite is different from fat
Cellulite differs from fat. Treatment that can effectively remove fat often has no effect on cellulite.
Weight loss
Bottom line: Extra weight can make cellulite more visible. For some people, losing weight and staying at a healthy weight reduces the amount of cellulite they see. If you develop loose skin while losing weight, however, cellulite can become more noticeable.
Exercise
Bottom line: Having more muscle makes your skin look smoother and firmer. Replacing fat with muscle can also make cellulite less noticeable.
Evidence the treatment may work
Carboxytherapy
During this medical procedure, carbon dioxide (CO2) gas is inserted just beneath the skin. CO2 differs from carbon monoxide, which can be deadly. Possible side effects from carboxytherapy are discomfort during treatment and temporary bruising.
Bottom line: Early studies show that women may see less cellulite. In one study, 10 women received 8 treatments. After these treatments, the researchers found that the women had a little less cellulite.
Creams and lotions
Bottom line: Researchers have found that some creams and lotions may have an effect on cellulite.
To avoid getting a rash from a cellulite cream or lotion, test it on a small area. If you don’t get a skin reaction in 48 hours, you can use more of the product.
Products containing caffeine may dehydrate cells, which can make cellulite less obvious. To maintain the results, you’ | yes |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | no_statement | "exercise" alone cannot eliminate "cellulite".. "cellulite" cannot be completely eliminated through "exercise". | https://alleganyplasticsurgery.com/cynosure-cellulaze-cellulite-reduction/ | Cynosure Cellulaze Cellulite Reduction | Allegany Plastic Surgery | Cynosure Cellulaze Cellulite Reduction
According to a recent survey, over eighty percent of women reported not only that they have cellulite, but also that they believed cellulite could be eliminated through diet and exercise. Unfortunately, however, this is incorrect. Contrary to popular opinion, cellulite is not a result of excess fat. Cellulite is caused by structural problems beneath the skin—which means that diet and exercise can’t always solve the problem.
Thankfully, for the first time, there is a safer and more effective treatment available to select physicians nationwide. Dr. Carpenter has recently added CellulazeTM to his practice! This new technology goes beyond traditional treatments for cellulite and offers a new approach to cellulite treatment that doesn’t blame the problem on excess fat. Instead, it addresses the structure of the tissue beneath the skin, going straight to the root of the problem and achieving lasting results. It works primarily in three steps: The first, delivering laser energy to the dermis, producing thicker skin and increased elasticity; the second, thermally subscising fibrotic bands that pull down on the skin; and the third, contouring for the improvement of ”pockets” or “lumps” of fat.
“Until now, it has been nearly impossible to effectively treat cellulite in any lasting kind of way. You’re not a happy doctor if your patients are unhappy. With Cellulaze, though, I can finally give my patients the results they’re looking for,” said Dr. Carpenter when asked about this new technology, “and we’re very thankful.”
Because Cellulaze targets the sub-skin structural problems that cause cellulite, it is ideal for those patients who, despite their own diet and exercise routines, retain the appearance of cellulite. WIth Dr. Carpenter and this new technology, patients can finally achieve the smooth, youthful-looking skin they never thought possible. Say goodbye to “cottage cheese bum” and “thunder thighs”—all in one simple procedure! | Cynosure Cellulaze Cellulite Reduction
According to a recent survey, over eighty percent of women reported not only that they have cellulite, but also that they believed cellulite could be eliminated through diet and exercise. Unfortunately, however, this is incorrect. Contrary to popular opinion, cellulite is not a result of excess fat. Cellulite is caused by structural problems beneath the skin—which means that diet and exercise can’t always solve the problem.
Thankfully, for the first time, there is a safer and more effective treatment available to select physicians nationwide. Dr. Carpenter has recently added CellulazeTM to his practice! This new technology goes beyond traditional treatments for cellulite and offers a new approach to cellulite treatment that doesn’t blame the problem on excess fat. Instead, it addresses the structure of the tissue beneath the skin, going straight to the root of the problem and achieving lasting results. It works primarily in three steps: The first, delivering laser energy to the dermis, producing thicker skin and increased elasticity; the second, thermally subscising fibrotic bands that pull down on the skin; and the third, contouring for the improvement of ”pockets” or “lumps” of fat.
“Until now, it has been nearly impossible to effectively treat cellulite in any lasting kind of way. You’re not a happy doctor if your patients are unhappy. With Cellulaze, though, I can finally give my patients the results they’re looking for,” said Dr. Carpenter when asked about this new technology, “and we’re very thankful.”
Because Cellulaze targets the sub-skin structural problems that cause cellulite, it is ideal for those patients who, despite their own diet and exercise routines, retain the appearance of cellulite. WIth Dr. Carpenter and this new technology, patients can finally achieve the smooth, youthful-looking skin they never thought possible. Say goodbye to “cottage cheese bum” and “thunder thighs”—all in one simple procedure! | no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | no_statement | "exercise" alone cannot eliminate "cellulite".. "cellulite" cannot be completely eliminated through "exercise". | https://www.drcedars.com/cellulaze.php | Dr Cedars - Cellulaze™ San Francisco to Oakland California | Cellulaze™ in Oakland, California
You know what it looks like: dimpled, uneven skin, most commonly on your thighs and buttocks.. Cellulite affects the vast majority of women. Many believe cellulite to be a fat problem that can be eliminated through diet and exercise. But, as you may have learned through experience, you may lessen the appearance of cellulite by losing weight, but you can't get rid of it completely. And crash diets can actually make it worse.
It's not your fault. Fat isn't the main problem. It's a structural issue below the skin that only your physician can treat. Men typically don't get cellulite, because the structure of their skin is different from women's. This also explains why even very thin women can get cellulite, and why some heavier women don't.
Cellulaze is the first cellulite treatment that attacks the structure of cellulite for clinically proven, longer-lasting results.
WHAT CAUSES CELLULITE?
There are three structural problems that cause the appearance of cellulite. First, connective tissue bands that tether the skin to the deeper tissue can become tight. Second, enlarged pockets of fat trapped by the rigid bands push up against skin. Finally, thin skin makes the appearance of cellulite even worse. And you know what that means-the dimpled, orange peel look that makes you cringe.
Other factors associated with cellulite are aging, heredity, hormones and weight. Any effective cellulite treatment has to address more than fat and the surface of skin. Cellulaze is the first cellulite treatment that attacks the structure of cellulite, for longer-lasting results.
HOW IS CELLULAZE DIFFERENT FROM OTHER CELLULITE TREATMENTS?
Creams, lotions, pills and many other cellulite treatments must be used repetitively to treat the appearance of cellulite.
And while staying in shape through diet and exercise is always a good idea, no amount of sweating or starving will make a significant dent, or significantly reduce the dent in your dimples. Why? Because cellulite isn't a fat problem. No, the problem lies beneath your skin where other treatments don't reach.
Cellulaze is different. It's the first and only cellulite treatment that targets the actual structural problems underneath the skin, to give you proven, longer-lasting results from just one simple cellulite treatment. Cellulaze uses a laser fiber to release the tethering bands of tissue, reduce bulging fat and help shrink loose skin. | Cellulaze™ in Oakland, California
You know what it looks like: dimpled, uneven skin, most commonly on your thighs and buttocks.. Cellulite affects the vast majority of women. Many believe cellulite to be a fat problem that can be eliminated through diet and exercise. But, as you may have learned through experience, you may lessen the appearance of cellulite by losing weight, but you can't get rid of it completely. And crash diets can actually make it worse.
It's not your fault. Fat isn't the main problem. It's a structural issue below the skin that only your physician can treat. Men typically don't get cellulite, because the structure of their skin is different from women's. This also explains why even very thin women can get cellulite, and why some heavier women don't.
Cellulaze is the first cellulite treatment that attacks the structure of cellulite for clinically proven, longer-lasting results.
WHAT CAUSES CELLULITE?
There are three structural problems that cause the appearance of cellulite. First, connective tissue bands that tether the skin to the deeper tissue can become tight. Second, enlarged pockets of fat trapped by the rigid bands push up against skin. Finally, thin skin makes the appearance of cellulite even worse. And you know what that means-the dimpled, orange peel look that makes you cringe.
Other factors associated with cellulite are aging, heredity, hormones and weight. Any effective cellulite treatment has to address more than fat and the surface of skin. Cellulaze is the first cellulite treatment that attacks the structure of cellulite, for longer-lasting results.
HOW IS CELLULAZE DIFFERENT FROM OTHER CELLULITE TREATMENTS?
Creams, lotions, pills and many other cellulite treatments must be used repetitively to treat the appearance of cellulite.
And while staying in shape through diet and exercise is always a good idea, no amount of sweating or starving will make a significant dent, or significantly reduce the dent in your dimples. Why? | no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | no_statement | "exercise" alone cannot eliminate "cellulite".. "cellulite" cannot be completely eliminated through "exercise". | https://naomedical.com/info/can-you-get-rid-of-cellulite.html | Can You Get Rid Of Cellulite - Nao Medical | Can You Get Rid Of Cellulite: The Truth Revealed
Cellulite is a common concern for many people, especially women. It refers to the dimpled appearance of the skin, often found on the thighs, buttocks, and abdomen. While cellulite is not harmful, it can affect one's self-confidence and body image. If you're wondering whether it's possible to get rid of cellulite, you're not alone. In this blog post, we will explore the truth about cellulite and provide you with effective strategies to reduce its appearance.
Understanding Cellulite
Cellulite occurs when fat deposits push through the connective tissue beneath the skin, causing a lumpy, dimpled appearance. It is more common in women due to differences in fat distribution, connective tissue structure, and hormonal factors. Contrary to popular belief, cellulite is not solely related to weight or body fat percentage. Even individuals with a healthy weight can have cellulite.
Myth vs. Reality
There are numerous myths surrounding cellulite, which can make it challenging to separate fact from fiction. Let's debunk some common misconceptions:
Myth 1: Only overweight people have cellulite. As mentioned earlier, cellulite can affect individuals of all body types and sizes.
Myth 2: Cellulite can be completely eliminated through exercise or diet. While a healthy lifestyle can help reduce the appearance of cellulite, it may not completely eliminate it.
Myth 3: Topical creams can cure cellulite. While some creams may temporarily improve the appearance of cellulite, they cannot eliminate it.
Effective Strategies to Reduce Cellulite
While it may not be possible to completely get rid of cellulite, there are several strategies that can help minimize its appearance:
Maintain a Healthy Diet: Eating a balanced diet rich in fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains can support overall skin health and reduce the appearance of cellulite.
Stay Hydrated: Drinking an adequate amount of water can help improve skin elasticity and reduce the appearance of cellulite.
Engage in Regular Exercise: Incorporating both cardiovascular exercises and strength training can help tone the muscles and improve the overall appearance of the skin.
Try Dry Brushing: Dry brushing involves using a natural bristle brush to gently massage the skin in circular motions. This technique can help stimulate blood flow, exfoliate dead skin cells, and improve the appearance of cellulite.
Consider Professional Treatments: There are various professional treatments available that can help reduce the appearance of cellulite, such as laser therapy, radiofrequency treatments, and massage therapies.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Can losing weight get rid of cellulite?
A: While weight loss can help reduce the appearance of cellulite, it may not completely eliminate it. Cellulite is influenced by various factors, including genetics and hormonal changes.
Q: Are there any creams that can effectively get rid of cellulite?
A: While some creams may temporarily improve the appearance of cellulite, they cannot eliminate it completely. It's important to manage expectations and focus on overall lifestyle changes for long-term results.
Q: Can cellulite be a sign of an underlying health condition?
A: In most cases, cellulite is not a sign of an underlying health condition. However, if you notice sudden changes in the appearance of cellulite or experience pain or discomfort, it's advisable to consult a healthcare professional.
Conclusion
While it may not be possible to completely get rid of cellulite, there are effective strategies to reduce its appearance. By adopting a healthy lifestyle, considering professional treatments, and managing expectations, you can achieve smoother, firmer skin. Remember, cellulite is a common concern, and you're not alone in your journey to minimize its impact. Embrace your body and prioritize overall well-being. Start your cellulite-free journey today!
Discover the secrets to banishing cellulite for good and achieve smooth, firm skin. Start your journey to cellulite-free confidence today!
Disclaimer: The content in this article is provided for general informational purposes only. It may not be accurate, complete, or up-to-date and should not be relied upon as medical, legal, financial, or other professional advice. Any actions or decisions taken based on this information are the sole responsibility of the user. Medical Health Authority expressly disclaims any liability for any loss, damage, or harm that may result from reliance on this information. Please note that this article may contain affiliate endorsements and advertisements. The inclusion of such does not indicate an endorsement or approval of the products or services linked. Medical Health Authority does not accept responsibility for the content, accuracy, or opinions expressed on any linked website. When you engage with these links and decide to make a purchase, we may receive a percentage of the sale. This affiliate commission does not influence the price you pay, and we disclaim any responsibility for the products or services you purchase through these links. | Let's debunk some common misconceptions:
Myth 1: Only overweight people have cellulite. As mentioned earlier, cellulite can affect individuals of all body types and sizes.
Myth 2: Cellulite can be completely eliminated through exercise or diet. While a healthy lifestyle can help reduce the appearance of cellulite, it may not completely eliminate it.
Myth 3: Topical creams can cure cellulite. While some creams may temporarily improve the appearance of cellulite, they cannot eliminate it.
Effective Strategies to Reduce Cellulite
While it may not be possible to completely get rid of cellulite, there are several strategies that can help minimize its appearance:
Maintain a Healthy Diet: Eating a balanced diet rich in fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains can support overall skin health and reduce the appearance of cellulite.
Stay Hydrated: Drinking an adequate amount of water can help improve skin elasticity and reduce the appearance of cellulite.
Engage in Regular Exercise: Incorporating both cardiovascular exercises and strength training can help tone the muscles and improve the overall appearance of the skin.
Try Dry Brushing: Dry brushing involves using a natural bristle brush to gently massage the skin in circular motions. This technique can help stimulate blood flow, exfoliate dead skin cells, and improve the appearance of cellulite.
Consider Professional Treatments: There are various professional treatments available that can help reduce the appearance of cellulite, such as laser therapy, radiofrequency treatments, and massage therapies.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Can losing weight get rid of cellulite?
A: While weight loss can help reduce the appearance of cellulite, it may not completely eliminate it. Cellulite is influenced by various factors, including genetics and hormonal changes.
Q: Are there any creams that can effectively get rid of cellulite?
A: While some creams may temporarily improve the appearance of cellulite, they cannot eliminate it completely. | no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | no_statement | "exercise" alone cannot eliminate "cellulite".. "cellulite" cannot be completely eliminated through "exercise". | https://www.womenshealthmag.com/weight-loss/a19943629/cellulite-weight-loss-connection/ | What You Need To Know About The Connection Between Cellulite ... | What You Need To Know About The Connection Between Cellulite And Weight Loss
When you lose weight, you'd probably expect that you'd lose (or at least reduce the appearance of) your cellulite, too. But, unfortunately, that's often not the case. What gives?
John Layke M.D., a board-certified plastic surgeon and practitioner at the Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery Group, explains that cellulite is caused by fibrous bands that attach to the underside of the skin, causing the dimpling (think of a pin cushion—it's like the pins are the fibrous band).
Cellulite is incredibly common—studies estimate that 80 to 90 percent of women have it. But what causes it varies person to person, says Jennifer Caudle, D.O., a family physician and Associate Professor at Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine. She says that how much cellulite a person has depends on a number of factors, including genetics, age, skin thickness, sex, and the amount of fat on the body.
Caudle notes that people of all weights and sizes can and do have cellulite. Case in point? Back in August, actress Hilary Duff hit back at body-shamers who criticized her for having cellulite. "My body has given me the greatest gift of my life: Luca, 5 years ago. I'm turning 30 in September and my body is healthy and gets me where I need to go," Hilary wrote in the caption.
The bottom line: Losing weight won't automatically get rid of cellulite, but Layke does say that diet and exercise could maybe help reduce the appearance over time. He recommends high-intensity workouts, which provide a mixture of fat loss and muscle toning. This can cause the layer of fat under your skin to decrease in thickness, also decreasing the tautness of the fibrous bands. But again, cellulite might never go away completely simply because of your body's makeup. Research suggests that there's a genetic component to cellulite, meaning it can't necessarily be eliminated through exercise alone.
“Contrary to popular belief, cellulite is not a weight issue,” Dendy Engelman, M.D., of Manhattan Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery, previously told Women's Health. “Even very thin people can have cellulite and it is considered normal from a medical standpoint to have some.”
Here are 3 stretch mark treatments that actually work:
Some beauty treatments and creams claim to target cellulite, but experts are skeptical of their efficacy. "The skepticism arrives from the fact that no topical treatment can effectively treat something that occurs on the complete undersurface of the skin," Layke explains. "However, topical creams CAN target dry, crepe-y skin by hydrating and moisturizing the skin—thereby creating the illusion that cellulite is reduced." (Torch fat, get fit, and look and feel great with Women's Health's All in 18 DVD!) | What You Need To Know About The Connection Between Cellulite And Weight Loss
When you lose weight, you'd probably expect that you'd lose (or at least reduce the appearance of) your cellulite, too. But, unfortunately, that's often not the case. What gives?
John Layke M.D., a board-certified plastic surgeon and practitioner at the Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery Group, explains that cellulite is caused by fibrous bands that attach to the underside of the skin, causing the dimpling (think of a pin cushion—it's like the pins are the fibrous band).
Cellulite is incredibly common—studies estimate that 80 to 90 percent of women have it. But what causes it varies person to person, says Jennifer Caudle, D.O., a family physician and Associate Professor at Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine. She says that how much cellulite a person has depends on a number of factors, including genetics, age, skin thickness, sex, and the amount of fat on the body.
Caudle notes that people of all weights and sizes can and do have cellulite. Case in point? Back in August, actress Hilary Duff hit back at body-shamers who criticized her for having cellulite. "My body has given me the greatest gift of my life: Luca, 5 years ago. I'm turning 30 in September and my body is healthy and gets me where I need to go," Hilary wrote in the caption.
The bottom line: Losing weight won't automatically get rid of cellulite, but Layke does say that diet and exercise could maybe help reduce the appearance over time. He recommends high-intensity workouts, which provide a mixture of fat loss and muscle toning. This can cause the layer of fat under your skin to decrease in thickness, also decreasing the tautness of the fibrous bands. But again, cellulite might never go away completely simply because of your body's makeup. Research suggests that there's a genetic component to cellulite, meaning it can't necessarily be eliminated through exercise alone.
| no |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | no_statement | "exercise" alone cannot eliminate "cellulite".. "cellulite" cannot be completely eliminated through "exercise". | https://www.webmd.com/beauty/get-rid-of-cellulite | Can You Get Rid of Cellulite? Healthy Treatments and What to Avoid. | In this Article
What Is Cellulite?
Cellulite is fat beneath your skin that causes a lumpy, âcottage cheeseâ look on your thighs, rear end, hips, and belly. You might not like it, but itâs really common and harmless.
Cellulite Causes and Risk Factors
It's just normal fat. It looks lumpy because it pushes against connective tissue, causing the skin above it to pucker. Itâs not clear why it happens.
You can have it whether you're heavy or thin. Muscle tone can affect it, and very fit people sometimes have it. Hormonal factors and genetics both play a role. It might also be related to the thickness of your skin. Women are more likely to get it than men. It tends to form more as you get older.
Lifestyle factors may play a role. For example, cellulite may be related to:
Cellulite Treatment
Cellulite shows up less on darker skin. So if you have light skin, a self-tanner may make the bumps and dimples harder to spot. You donât have to do anything about cellulite, but there are ways to get rid of or reduce it. Some work better than others.
Cryolipolysis
This noninvasive procedure freezes and kills fat cells. Once theyâre dead, your body naturally removes them. This treatment is usually used for body shaping, but fat removal can also improve your cellulite. It can take three treatments and 3 or 4 months for you to see results.
Laser treatments
Also called radiofrequency systems, they show promise for cellulite. Treatment usually mixes massage, liposuction, or light therapy. It can liquefy fat, cut connective tissue to loosen puckering, boost collagen growth and skin tightening, increase blood flow, and lessen fluid retention. Expect results to last at least 6 months.
One popular FDA-approved laser treatment is Cellulaze. The doctor injects a numbing solution into the area, then puts a laser under your skin. It shoots heat in three directions. You can expect about a 75% improvement in your cellulite for about a year.
Massage
Most options are based on the idea that massaging the problem area will increase blood flow and reduce fluid buildup. The result: Better-looking hips and buttocks.
Endermologie (or lipomassage or endermology) is a specific type of mechanical massage. A machine with low-pressure suction kneads your skin between two spinning rollers. The theory is that the deep massage will break up the connective tissue that causes dimples. Most studies show that massage techniques, including endermologie, make your skin look better for a short time but offer no long-term benefit. Some experts worry that the suction can cause your skin to slacken prematurely, making it look worse.
Shockwave therapy
This is a low-energy version of the technology that treats kidney stones. Itâs a noninvasive treatment thatâs given twice a week for 6 or more weeks. It could give results for 2 to 6 months, but more research about how well it works and how long results may last is needed.
Shrink fat, build muscle
People of all sizes can have cellulite. But if youâre overweight, the most effective treatment is to shed extra pounds and tone your body. Eat less and add more cardio and strength training exercise. Lift weights at least 2 days a week. Focus on your legs, hips, and backside. Strong, defined muscles under a thinner fat layer will make your skin smoother and less puckered.
Subcision
This minimally invasive procedure can improve your cellulite. Results have been shown to last for at least 2 years. The doctor marks the area, injects a numbing solution, and then inserts a tiny blade to cut the connective tissue that holds your fat onto those dimples.
A hand-held device called Cellfina was approved in 2015 to make this procedure more precise. It provides vacuum-assisted control of the depth and area treated. About 20 to 30 individual cellulite dimples are treated during an average 1-hour session. Results can last up to 2 years.
Topical products
A variety of creams on the market claim to reduce cellulite. Many have ingredients intended to promote fat breakdown (caffeine, aminophylline, theophylline). Others contain vitamins, minerals, and herbal extracts. Generally, these products offer little benefit alone, but they may add some value when combined with other treatments.
Some evidence suggests that retinol cream can help with cellulite, but the results arenât great. Twice-daily application of a 0.3% retinol cream for 6 months can thicken your skin and reduce that orange-peel look.
Cellulite Treatments to Use With Caution or Avoid
Injectables
Some doctors inject chemicals into the fat layer below the skin to encourage breakdown and make cellulite less noticeable. This procedure is often called mesotherapy. The chemicals used include phosphatidylcholine, aminophylline, hormones, herbal extracts, vitamins, and minerals. Thereâs little proof these treatments help. Most doctors donât recommend the procedure because thereâs a risk of infection, swelling, rashes, and lumpy skin.
Liposuction
This fat removal procedure is often used on the thighs, buttocks, and abdomen. However, it can actually make the dimpled fat left behind look worse. | Shrink fat, build muscle
People of all sizes can have cellulite. But if youâre overweight, the most effective treatment is to shed extra pounds and tone your body. Eat less and add more cardio and strength training exercise. Lift weights at least 2 days a week. Focus on your legs, hips, and backside. Strong, defined muscles under a thinner fat layer will make your skin smoother and less puckered.
Subcision
This minimally invasive procedure can improve your cellulite. Results have been shown to last for at least 2 years. The doctor marks the area, injects a numbing solution, and then inserts a tiny blade to cut the connective tissue that holds your fat onto those dimples.
A hand-held device called Cellfina was approved in 2015 to make this procedure more precise. It provides vacuum-assisted control of the depth and area treated. About 20 to 30 individual cellulite dimples are treated during an average 1-hour session. Results can last up to 2 years.
Topical products
A variety of creams on the market claim to reduce cellulite. Many have ingredients intended to promote fat breakdown (caffeine, aminophylline, theophylline). Others contain vitamins, minerals, and herbal extracts. Generally, these products offer little benefit alone, but they may add some value when combined with other treatments.
Some evidence suggests that retinol cream can help with cellulite, but the results arenât great. Twice-daily application of a 0.3% retinol cream for 6 months can thicken your skin and reduce that orange-peel look.
Cellulite Treatments to Use With Caution or Avoid
Injectables
Some doctors inject chemicals into the fat layer below the skin to encourage breakdown and make cellulite less noticeable. This procedure is often called mesotherapy. The chemicals used include phosphatidylcholine, aminophylline, hormones, herbal extracts, vitamins, and minerals. | yes |
Dermatology | Can you get rid of cellulite with exercise? | no_statement | "exercise" alone cannot eliminate "cellulite".. "cellulite" cannot be completely eliminated through "exercise". | https://www.plasticsurgery.org/news/blog/what-is-the-best-treatment-for-cellulite | What is the best treatment for cellulite? | ASPS | Post your question to Ask a Surgeon to get an authoritative and trustworthy answer from our ASPS member
surgeons or share your journey with other people just like you on the Patient Community. The views expressed in Ask a Surgeon and the
Patient Community are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons
Share your journey with other people just like you on the Patient Community or post your question to Ask a Surgeon to get an authoritative and trustworthy answer from our ASPS member surgeons.
The views expressed in Ask a Surgeon and the Patient Community are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Post your question to Ask a Surgeon to get an authoritative and trustworthy answer from our ASPS member surgeons
or share your journey with other people just like you on the Patient Community. The views expressed in Ask a Surgeon and the Patient Community are those of the
participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Share your journey with other people just like you on the Patient Community
or post your question to Ask a Surgeon to get an authoritative and trustworthy answer from our ASPS member surgeons.
The views expressed in Ask a Surgeon and the Patient Community are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Additional Resources
What is the best treatment for cellulite?
Cellulite affects up to 85% of adult women and can be extremely difficult to correct. Many treatments are ineffective or take multiple sessions to complete with very temporary results. "Orange peel skin" or "cottage cheese" affects all body shapes and sizes, from the slim to the full-figured.
It is common to confuse the concept of cellulite with that of normal fat and assume that cellulite is a direct response to overeating or lack of exercise. However, this is not the case. Normal fat and cellulite respond very differently to diet and/or exercise. When you diet, your body automatically burns its own reserves of stored fat. But cellulite is fat that is trapped in the dermal layer of skin and the body cannot effectively process it as fuel, so it remains.
Given the perplexing nature of cellulite, how can it be treated? Fortunately, there are a number of options available. Topical creams contain retinol or caffeine that can increase blood flow to the affected area, thus temporarily reducing the appearance of cellulite. Rollers (like Endermologie) can similarly reduce swelling and inflammation in the affected tissues and temporarily reduce the appearance of cellulite. Radiofrequency devices (e.g., BTL Vanquish, Thermi) can reduce the connective tissue in the affected area and increase blood flow to reduce the appearance of cellulite. However, each of these approaches is limited by the fact that the results are reversible and may only last weeks, days, or even hours. Similarly, they can only address relatively minor areas.
For more significant dimpling and for permanent results, patients require more intensive treatment. Liposuction and/or fat grafting can improve the appearance of cellulite in properly-selected patients. But for the best results, techniques that are specifically designed to treat cellulite are most often the best. Laser therapy (e.g., Cellulaze, CelluSmooth) works by placing a small laser probe under the skin through small stab incisions. The laser then specifically melts that fat and cuts through the fibrous bands that cause skin dimpling. These treatments require a single session and show immediate results. However, they do cause significant bruising and swelling, and can require touch-ups yearly.
Cellfina is the development for the treatment of cellulite. The treatment targets the fibrous bands which are the source of the dimpling in cellulite. It is most effective for the treatment of deep dimples and depressions of the buttocks and back of the thighs. It is less effective in the treatment of generalized waviness. To perform the procedure, a vacuum hand piece is placed over the dimpled tissue through which the surgeon will deliver a local anesthetic. Then a small, needle-like microblade is inserted to release the fibrous bands causing the cellulite. Investigational studies for Cellfina show a patient satisfaction rate of 85% at 3 months, 94% at one year and 96% at 2 years. This is a very exciting solution for the many women who suffer from the embarrassment of cellulite.
As always, it is essential that patients have an in-person consultation to develop a treatment plan that specifically addresses their personal surgical goals anatomy. I recommend that patients find a board-certified plastic surgeon with whom they are comfortable. Be sure to have all of your questions answered during a face-to-face meeting with your plastic surgeon and review before and after pictures of similar patients whom have had this procedure.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. | Patient Community
or post your question to Ask a Surgeon to get an authoritative and trustworthy answer from our ASPS member surgeons.
The views expressed in Ask a Surgeon and the Patient Community are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Additional Resources
What is the best treatment for cellulite?
Cellulite affects up to 85% of adult women and can be extremely difficult to correct. Many treatments are ineffective or take multiple sessions to complete with very temporary results. "Orange peel skin" or "cottage cheese" affects all body shapes and sizes, from the slim to the full-figured.
It is common to confuse the concept of cellulite with that of normal fat and assume that cellulite is a direct response to overeating or lack of exercise. However, this is not the case. Normal fat and cellulite respond very differently to diet and/or exercise. When you diet, your body automatically burns its own reserves of stored fat. But cellulite is fat that is trapped in the dermal layer of skin and the body cannot effectively process it as fuel, so it remains.
Given the perplexing nature of cellulite, how can it be treated? Fortunately, there are a number of options available. Topical creams contain retinol or caffeine that can increase blood flow to the affected area, thus temporarily reducing the appearance of cellulite. Rollers (like Endermologie) can similarly reduce swelling and inflammation in the affected tissues and temporarily reduce the appearance of cellulite. Radiofrequency devices (e.g., BTL Vanquish, Thermi) can reduce the connective tissue in the affected area and increase blood flow to reduce the appearance of cellulite. However, each of these approaches is limited by the fact that the results are reversible and may only last weeks, days, or even hours. Similarly, they can only address relatively minor areas.
For more significant dimpling and for permanent results, patients require more intensive treatment. Liposuction and/or fat grafting can improve the appearance of cellulite in properly-selected patients. | no |
Genomics | Can you inherit genes for talent and skill? | yes_statement | "genes" can determine "talent" and "skill".. "talent" and "skill" can be "inherited" through "genes". | https://blog.genleap.co/answers-in-your-genes-changing-the-face-of-career-planning-with-genetics | Answers in your Genes: Changing the Face of Career Planning with ... | Answers in your Genes: Changing the Face of Career Planning with Genetics
Planning for your career is a long and exhausting process and can be overwhelming for many. With DNA-based skill assessments, however, the career counseling process can be facilitated using key insights drawn from one’s genetic makeup. This blog decodes the profound impact of genetic testing and DNA-based self-discovery on career planning, and how you can use these tools to find your ideal career path.
What you will learn -
What constitutes the process of career planning and why it is essential to have a systematic approach to career selection
The effect of your genetic makeup on career choices, educational attainment, and professional success
DNA-driven career planning and how you can use genetic testing to evaluate plausible options
Career guidance and counselling are becoming more complex as we move through a technology-fuelled world, with people juggling multiple careers and skillsets. There has been a steady rise in multidisciplinary careers and jobs that leverage focused skill sets, thanks to the evolving work cultures and labour markets. Simply put, career planning is the process of evaluating your skills, interests, hobbies, talent, and values to explore the right career choices or job roles for yourself.
Career planning isn’t simply choosing a job and sticking with it for the rest of your life. It is anything but that; smart career planning considers your overall personality, short-term and long-term goals, changing interests, and transferable skills, and aligns them with your chosen career path. The process of career planning must begin at the earliest, preferably when one is in school so that they can make thoughtful choices about their areas of specialisation and study. If students are exposed to the right career guidance and counselling at the right age, they get the authority and confidence to make their own decisions governing their career choices.
Robust career planning can help students find confidence and unwavering motivation toward their chosen goals and career path, and enable them to give their best.
Why should you concretise career planning?
As mentioned before, career planning is the process of evaluation and choice of interests, academic and career options that best serve your goals and aspirations, and helps you achieve your highest potential. The process includes an understanding of your priorities, academic interests, natural talents and dispositions, personality traits, cognitive and educational capabilities, level of skills and experience, and career goals.
Career goals constitute the ultimate job that you aspire to have that fulfils you intellectually, financially, and psychologically. This can be any career path that appeals to you and is realistic enough to accomplish. Having a clear career goal is the first step to achieving your professional dreams, and directs your every major decision, including your choice of academic discipline, the college or university you attend, the interests and hobbies you pursue, the certifications and mentors you seek, and more.
Having a robust system of career guidance and counselling can help you optimise your approach to your dream career, and break down the process into smaller, achievable steps. After all, as important and serious as it is to plan a career, it doesn’t hurt to have fun in the process.
Genetics - Your pathway to a fulfilling career
Genetics or the scientific discipline of how genes and traits are passed down across generations is proving to be significantly important while assessing one’s career choices. Multiple studies and research have shown the impact of genetics and DNA on job choice.
There are several examples, one of them being entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs often possess certain psychological and cognitive traits that help them succeed in this challenging career path. These include optimism, risk-taking capacity, sociability, talkative nature, and extraversion, all of which have a genetic component.
Some of the ways genetics affect job choice and performance are -
Choosing a job that ensures high social status can be up to 60% influenced by your genetic makeup
An inclination towards mathematics and pure sciences
Liking sales is up to 19% genetically determined
Your interest in finance, numbers, and investment is up to 36% impacted by genetics
Genetic factors influence academic subject choice across a diverse range of school subjects, including second language learning, mathematics, and psychology.
21 percent of the difference between people in their interest in law enforcement is genetic
25 percent of the variation in interest in managerial roles is because of genetics, while family environment influences only 8 percent of this interest
Genetics accounts for 29 percent of the difference in people’s interest in merchandising
Over 53 percent of categories of interests, such as affinity for adventurous, intellectual, or agrarian work, are in fact genetic.
32 percent of the difference between people with respect to their responses about occupational interests are genetic
Genes are expressed only in certain environments, as is being studied by the emerging science of epigenetics. With the changing environment, different genes may be expressed or activated, while others may remain dormant. This makes it even more essential to first decode what information is being carried in your genetic makeup, and then create the ideal environment for your gifts and talents to bloom into their full potential.
Planning your career with the help of your DNA
Career planning can be overwhelming without the right guidance and support system. Having an understanding of your genetics can help you start with data and science-based insights about your inherited potential and environmental influences. The information in your genes is powerful and can be leveraged to plan your career path in the most realistic and fulfilling way.
Scientific skill discovery and DNA-based skill assessments have simplified career planning by helping individuals incorporate their innate traits, gifts, talents, strengths, and interests into their career plans. By first assessing what you aspire to, what your current and future goals are, and what kind of opportunities appeal to you, you can systematically approach your career by leveraging the information drawn from your genetic skill assessment.
Music capabilities - It is true that musical acumen is a highly heritable trait, with as much as 50% genetic heritability. Perfect pitch or the ability to discern and sing musical notes without a reference note is also genetically determined.
Cognitive and intellectual capabilities such as educational attainment, logical thinking, learning from errors, spatial reasoning, working memory, reading, and verbal abilities are all genetically influenced and can be identified through a DNA-based skill assessment test.
Personality traits such as perseverance, extraversion, sociability, flexibility, openness, and hundreds of others all have genetic influence and affect your work life in more ways than one. Genetic testing can help uncover major and minor personality traits that you have inherited from your parents.
Knowing yourself through your DNA is only the beginning of your career counselling process, but it is a powerful tool to help you navigate the myriad choices that you will face as you grow in your career and in life. By decoding your genetic makeup, you can strategically make career and academic decisions that help you achieve success while fulfilling your innate drives and interests. The importance of the environment cannot be understated here. Once you have access to your genetic information, you can actually have an impact on your gene expression by nurturing and creating the right environment for your career growth.
Career planning is not about landing a job that pays your bills and helps you survive; it involves making choices that keep your short-term and long-term career goals at the centre, including job status, travelling, exploration, areas of specialisation, industry, job type, and others. Nurturing your inherited talents and potential can only be done in a growth-focused environment, with the right company and guidance, and learning resources that can help you reach the next level of success in your career.
Career Planning with Genleap
Genleap, the world’s first DNA-based patented* skill discovery, upskilling, and employability is set to revolutionise career planning with its flagship product - GenDiscover. GenDiscover is a thorough self-discovery tool that helps individuals discover their natural talents, interests, personality traits, and gifts through a unique triangulation of three knowledge streams - Genomics, Cognitive Astromancy, and Psychometrics.
Using proprietary frameworks and assessments, Genleap helps you uncover your inherited and acquired potential and move beyond a traditional 9-5 job to build a meaningful career. Genleap believes in the power of self-discovery, and thus helps you find your best version.
Using a saliva sample and your birth information, Genleap provides an in-depth analysis of your personality, potential, and interests to help you tap into latent strengths and talents.
The tenets of Vedic Astrology combined with the widely recognised Big 5 Personality test offer a deep dive into the mystery of your SELF, and help you find your ideal career path. Genleap’s partner ecosystem further enhances your career-building efforts by exposing you to a world of career resources, counsellors, mentors, coaches, universities, organisations, and skilling partners that help you grow at a fast pace with the right support.
Combined with lifetime handholding and talent nurturing, Genleap equips individuals with the right tools to become their best selves and explore their highest potential. What’s more, you get access to the top 99 career choices with GenDiscover to gauge which careers are suitable or not ideal for you. | Over 53 percent of categories of interests, such as affinity for adventurous, intellectual, or agrarian work, are in fact genetic.
32 percent of the difference between people with respect to their responses about occupational interests are genetic
Genes are expressed only in certain environments, as is being studied by the emerging science of epigenetics. With the changing environment, different genes may be expressed or activated, while others may remain dormant. This makes it even more essential to first decode what information is being carried in your genetic makeup, and then create the ideal environment for your gifts and talents to bloom into their full potential.
Planning your career with the help of your DNA
Career planning can be overwhelming without the right guidance and support system. Having an understanding of your genetics can help you start with data and science-based insights about your inherited potential and environmental influences. The information in your genes is powerful and can be leveraged to plan your career path in the most realistic and fulfilling way.
Scientific skill discovery and DNA-based skill assessments have simplified career planning by helping individuals incorporate their innate traits, gifts, talents, strengths, and interests into their career plans. By first assessing what you aspire to, what your current and future goals are, and what kind of opportunities appeal to you, you can systematically approach your career by leveraging the information drawn from your genetic skill assessment.
Music capabilities - It is true that musical acumen is a highly heritable trait, with as much as 50% genetic heritability. Perfect pitch or the ability to discern and sing musical notes without a reference note is also genetically determined.
Cognitive and intellectual capabilities such as educational attainment, logical thinking, learning from errors, spatial reasoning, working memory, reading, and verbal abilities are all genetically influenced and can be identified through a DNA-based skill assessment test.
| yes |
Genomics | Can you inherit genes for talent and skill? | yes_statement | "genes" can determine "talent" and "skill".. "talent" and "skill" can be "inherited" through "genes". | https://seniorslifestylemag.com/featured/5-skills-and-talents-that-are-influenced-by-your-genes/ | SLM | 5 Skills and Talents That Are Influenced by Your Genes | 5 Skills and Talents That Are Influenced by Your Genes
Did someone ever tell you that you look like your dad or that you have your mom’s eyes? DNA molecules in every human cell carry the genetic instructions for these characteristics. Physical qualities such as eye, hair color, and height are passed down from parents to their offspring.
James Watson’s discovery of DNA in the 1950s shifted the focus of genetics to the molecule’s structure and its role in the transmission of physical features. The traits we are born with, such as eye and hair color, skills, and talents, are heavily influenced by our genes. Using at-home DNA testing, you may see how your genes affect your health, your family tree, and the traits you exhibit.
Due to advances in accuracy and cost, DNA testing services now provide more options than ever before. DNA testing has made it possible to trace ancestral lines, establish parentage, and even trace historical migrations. In addition, you can get reliable genetic testing results from top genetic testing companies.
What are Genes?
Genes are the essential elements that make up an organism’s hereditary makeup. Genes are the building blocks of heredity, consisting of DNA sequences passed down from parents to offspring. They consist of two separate components, one from each parent.
They store instructions for the creation of proteins that perform a specific biological function that induce the expression of a particular characteristic, such as the color of one’s hair or eyes. They are sequentially placed at designated positions on chromosomes in the nucleus of cells.
Skills and Talents Influenced by Your Genes
Aptitude and talent in various fields, such as intelligence, creativity, and athleticism, are attributed to genetic factors. For example, drawing, playing an instrument, or dancing may come more naturally to some people than to others. Similarly, genetic factors can influence traits like analytical and critical thinking, communication, and research skills.
Analytical Skills
From kindergarten to the conclusion of compulsory schooling at age 16, there is a strong genetic component to differences in students’ academic performance. Recent research in the UK suggests that hereditary characteristics may account for approximately 62 percent of the individual differences in academic success when it comes to GCSE results.
This type of academic achievement typically requires a considerable amount of analytical ability. Analytical skills are used to incorporate background knowledge into conclusions and interpret information. In addition, analytical thinking allows you to recognize and address complex challenges in a timely manner.
It helps gather information, settle on a course of action, and find answers to challenging problems. For example, using your analytical skill in the workplace demonstrates that you are a rounded person capable of making well-informed judgments.
Critical Thinking
In the same way, that physical qualities are passed down from one generation to the next, cognitive skills can also be inherited. Genes, taken as a whole, are responsible for more than half, or fifty percent, of the variances in cognitive function that exist between individuals.
In other words, some people may have superior critical thinking abilities compared to the general population. Thinking critically entails analyzing given circumstances, spotting problems, and developing workable solutions.
Communication Ability
Differences in intelligence, character, communication skills and psychological well-being are primarily the result of a person’s genetic makeup. Your genes can strongly influence your natural ability to communicate and interact with others.
Communication ability involves being able to send and receive information effectively. Communication can be in written, verbal, or nonverbal modes that are meaningful to others. People who are physically and mentally healthy usually have little trouble initiating conversations with others.
However, you might find communicating more challenging if you have a genetic disease known as Angelman syndrome. Angelman syndrome is a hereditary condition caused by problems with the ubiquitin protein ligase E3A (UBE3A) gene on chromosome 15.
People with it have trouble communicating with others due to their delayed developmental age, difficulties with speech and coordination, intellectual handicap, and even seizures.
Research Skills
Research skills refer to the capacity to search for, identify, extract, organize, assess, and use or present information that is pertinent to a given subject matter. Research skills incorporate various abilities that help gather accurate and reliable information on a topic.
The fact that you inherit cognitive function from your parents also indicates that you inherit their research skills. However, depending on their circumstances, people vary greatly in their research skills and other cognitive skills.
Environment Influences
There is little doubt that genetics play a significant role in shaping personality, skills, and conduct, but this does not minimize the impact on the environment. Who you are now is a mixed result of genetics, personal nurturing, and experience.
Seniors Lifestyle Magazine is a hub of news, information, and resources for all of us reaching our 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 100s, and those with aging parents and loved ones to care for. Baby Boomers are becoming the largest demographic and their needs are increasing. We must keep up to date with the ever changing landscape of health care, social programs, and services the cater to our specific needs. | 5 Skills and Talents That Are Influenced by Your Genes
Did someone ever tell you that you look like your dad or that you have your mom’s eyes? DNA molecules in every human cell carry the genetic instructions for these characteristics. Physical qualities such as eye, hair color, and height are passed down from parents to their offspring.
James Watson’s discovery of DNA in the 1950s shifted the focus of genetics to the molecule’s structure and its role in the transmission of physical features. The traits we are born with, such as eye and hair color, skills, and talents, are heavily influenced by our genes. Using at-home DNA testing, you may see how your genes affect your health, your family tree, and the traits you exhibit.
Due to advances in accuracy and cost, DNA testing services now provide more options than ever before. DNA testing has made it possible to trace ancestral lines, establish parentage, and even trace historical migrations. In addition, you can get reliable genetic testing results from top genetic testing companies.
What are Genes?
Genes are the essential elements that make up an organism’s hereditary makeup. Genes are the building blocks of heredity, consisting of DNA sequences passed down from parents to offspring. They consist of two separate components, one from each parent.
They store instructions for the creation of proteins that perform a specific biological function that induce the expression of a particular characteristic, such as the color of one’s hair or eyes. They are sequentially placed at designated positions on chromosomes in the nucleus of cells.
Skills and Talents Influenced by Your Genes
Aptitude and talent in various fields, such as intelligence, creativity, and athleticism, are attributed to genetic factors. For example, drawing, playing an instrument, or dancing may come more naturally to some people than to others. Similarly, genetic factors can influence traits like analytical and critical thinking, communication, and research skills.
Analytical Skills
From kindergarten to the conclusion of compulsory schooling at age 16, there is a strong genetic component to differences in students’ academic performance. | yes |
Genomics | Can you inherit genes for talent and skill? | yes_statement | "genes" can determine "talent" and "skill".. "talent" and "skill" can be "inherited" through "genes". | https://www.td.org/insights/leadership-skills-can-be-inherited | Leadership Skills Can Be Inherited | ATD | (From Psych Central) -- Many believe the skill to be a successful leader is a talent acquired over time and reflects experience and opportunity.
But new research suggests that while experience is helpful, leadership acumen may also be an inherited trait, with some people genetically endowed with a greater likelihood of taking on managerial responsibilities.
The study, published online in Leadership Quarterly, is the first to identify a specific DNA sequence associated with the tendency for individuals to occupy a leadership position.
An international team of researchers studied a large group of twins and discovered that a quarter of the observed variation in leadership behavior between individuals can be explained by genes passed down from their parents.
“We have identified a genotype, called rs4950, which appears to be associated with the passing of leadership ability down through generations,” said lead author Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Ph.D., of University College London.
“The conventional wisdom — that leadership is a skill — remains largely true, but we show it is also, in part, a genetic trait,” he said.
To find the genotype, De Neve and his colleagues analysed data from two large-scale samples in the United States, available through the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and the Framingham Heart Study.
They compared genetic samples of approximately 4,000 individuals with information about jobs and relationships, finding that in both surveys there was a significant association between rs4950 and leadership. Leadership behavior was measured by determining whether or not individuals occupy supervisory roles in the workplace.
The team found that although acquiring a leadership position mostly depends on developing skills, inheriting the leadership trait can also play an important role.
De Neve said: “As recent as last August, Professor John Antonakis, who is known for his work on leadership, posed the question: ‘is there a specific leadership gene?’
“This study allows us to answer yes — to an extent. Although leadership should still be thought of predominantly as a skill to be developed, genetics — in particular the rs4950 genotype — can also play a significant role in predicting who is more likely to occupy leadership roles.”
The Association for Talent Development (ATD) is a professional membership organization supporting those who develop the knowledge and skills of employees in organizations around the world. The ATD Staff, along with a worldwide network of volunteers work to empower professionals to develop talent in the workplace. | (From Psych Central) -- Many believe the skill to be a successful leader is a talent acquired over time and reflects experience and opportunity.
But new research suggests that while experience is helpful, leadership acumen may also be an inherited trait, with some people genetically endowed with a greater likelihood of taking on managerial responsibilities.
The study, published online in Leadership Quarterly, is the first to identify a specific DNA sequence associated with the tendency for individuals to occupy a leadership position.
An international team of researchers studied a large group of twins and discovered that a quarter of the observed variation in leadership behavior between individuals can be explained by genes passed down from their parents.
“We have identified a genotype, called rs4950, which appears to be associated with the passing of leadership ability down through generations,” said lead author Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Ph.D., of University College London.
“The conventional wisdom — that leadership is a skill — remains largely true, but we show it is also, in part, a genetic trait,” he said.
To find the genotype, De Neve and his colleagues analysed data from two large-scale samples in the United States, available through the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and the Framingham Heart Study.
They compared genetic samples of approximately 4,000 individuals with information about jobs and relationships, finding that in both surveys there was a significant association between rs4950 and leadership. Leadership behavior was measured by determining whether or not individuals occupy supervisory roles in the workplace.
The team found that although acquiring a leadership position mostly depends on developing skills, inheriting the leadership trait can also play an important role.
De Neve said: “As recent as last August, Professor John Antonakis, who is known for his work on leadership, posed the question: ‘is there a specific leadership gene?’
“This study allows us to answer yes — to an extent. Although leadership should still be thought of predominantly as a skill to be developed, genetics — in particular the rs4950 genotype — can also play a significant role in predicting who is more likely to occupy leadership roles.”
| yes |
Genomics | Can you inherit genes for talent and skill? | yes_statement | "genes" can determine "talent" and "skill".. "talent" and "skill" can be "inherited" through "genes". | https://www.xcode.life/genes-and-personality/is-music-ability-genetic/ | Is Music Ability Genetic? | The results reported that "success may not always result from determination, hard work, or practice.
A person’s genes may play a more significant role than once assumed in helping the person succeed.
These researchers identified 850 same-sex twins and questioned them on their musical abilities and their practice schedule.
Here are some of the takeaways from the study.
Some genes may encourage people to practice more, while others prevent individuals from enjoying the process of practicing.
Up to one-fourth of the influence of genes in determining musical ability may be related to the act of encouraging practice.
People with the right balance of genetic traits and environmental influences seem to be the most successful. This means a person could try out an activity and be good at it, thanks to genes. However, practice and other environmental factors like social encouragement and opportunities are essential to nurture the skill and make them more successful.
Summary
Studies claim that genes could determine 40-50% of a person’s music ability.
While many unidentified genes could contribute to a person’s musical ability, one particular gene of interest is the UDP Glycosyltransferase 8 (UGT8).
The UGT8 gene controls the production of the 2-hydroxyacylsphingosine 1-beta-galactosyltransferase enzyme. This enzyme produces lipids that cover the myelin sheaths of nerves in the central nervous system.
An SNP in the UGT8 gene may affect a person's musical ability and make them musically inclined or challenged.
Factors like family support, practice hours, and other socioeconomic elements may also influence a person’s musical ability.
Customer Reviews
I uploaded my 23&me raw data. The personal medicine report is really good. Find out why that medicine did not work for you and what will. It was fast showed level of evidence and both likelihood of bad reactions and effectiveness.
Carole Warner
February 7, 2023
I have used Xcode more than once & am pleased with the information I get.
I first found Xcode when I was looking for a better and more thorough analysis than what the original 23&Me reports gave me in 2018. I wanted my raw data analyzed by an independent company and I found Xcode. I was pleased with the initial report and returned to Xcode for subsequent reports as they became available. I recommend Xcode to anyone seeking more information.
Definitely worth the money! I had recently did the 23andMe testing and I've always been more curious on my MTHFR mutations, as it can be tied to many health issues. I came across Xcode Life where I could upload the raw data from 23andMe (which was very easy by the way) and get additional info. While I was doing it I decided to also get the Covid related test out of curiosity. I got the results the same day. I even had some questions and their customer service is on point. Extremely helpful and quick response time.
Jaclyn Galvin
July 29, 2022
This has been really helpful for me
This has been really helpful for me. A while back I had gotten the nutrition report from Xcode and it really helped me understand certain aspects of my diet. Fast forward about two years and I am sluggish, irritable, tired, etc. I discussed it with my doctor and they ran some bloodwork. Turns out I'm deficient in some vitamins and needed to supplement. I went back and reread my xcode report and they are the exact same vitamins that the report told me I would need to supplement. Turns out I don't metabolize them as efficiently and need some additional help to meet my requirements. Overall, it was a really great experience and I look forward to ordering more of the reports. | The results reported that "success may not always result from determination, hard work, or practice.
A person’s genes may play a more significant role than once assumed in helping the person succeed.
These researchers identified 850 same-sex twins and questioned them on their musical abilities and their practice schedule.
Here are some of the takeaways from the study.
Some genes may encourage people to practice more, while others prevent individuals from enjoying the process of practicing.
Up to one-fourth of the influence of genes in determining musical ability may be related to the act of encouraging practice.
People with the right balance of genetic traits and environmental influences seem to be the most successful. This means a person could try out an activity and be good at it, thanks to genes. However, practice and other environmental factors like social encouragement and opportunities are essential to nurture the skill and make them more successful.
Summary
Studies claim that genes could determine 40-50% of a person’s music ability.
While many unidentified genes could contribute to a person’s musical ability, one particular gene of interest is the UDP Glycosyltransferase 8 (UGT8).
The UGT8 gene controls the production of the 2-hydroxyacylsphingosine 1-beta-galactosyltransferase enzyme. This enzyme produces lipids that cover the myelin sheaths of nerves in the central nervous system.
An SNP in the UGT8 gene may affect a person's musical ability and make them musically inclined or challenged.
Factors like family support, practice hours, and other socioeconomic elements may also influence a person’s musical ability.
Customer Reviews
I uploaded my 23&me raw data. The personal medicine report is really good. Find out why that medicine did not work for you and what will. It was fast showed level of evidence and both likelihood of bad reactions and effectiveness.
Carole Warner
February 7, 2023
I have used Xcode more than once & am pleased with the information I get.
| yes |
Genomics | Can you inherit genes for talent and skill? | yes_statement | "genes" can determine "talent" and "skill".. "talent" and "skill" can be "inherited" through "genes". | http://www.80percentmental.com/blog/0percentmental.com/2014/08/maybe-your-kids-inherited-your-couch.html | Maybe Your Kids Inherited Your Couch Potato Genes — 80 Percent ... | The 80 Percent Mental Blog
On the road to sports success, young athletes need two ingredients, innate skills and the willingness and determination to get better.
We all know boys and girls who showed early promise that got them noticed but then didn’t have the drive to practice every day to develop that talent. Often labeled lazy or unmotivated, the assumption was that they chose their own path by not working hard.
However, new research shows evidence that genetics may play a role not only in the natural abilities of a developing superstar but also in their practice persistence and physiological response to training.
In his bestselling book The Sports Gene, David Epstein introduced us to the notion that your inherited genes may affect how your body reacts to training, both psychologically and physiologically.
He references an ongoing project at the University of Miami, known as Genetics of Exercise and Research (GEAR), whose stated purpose is: “to identify genetic biomarkers and environmental risk factors that are associated with variation in exercise response among participants who undergo a 12 week exercise protocol.”
Last year, one of the first GEAR studies put a group of women, ages 18-65, through a 12-week aerobic and strength conditioning program.
None of the women had exercised regularly in the previous 6 months.
Based on their performance increases from start to finish, they were divided into 4 subgroups, with the best performing quartile being labeled “high responders” and those showing the lowest fitness gains were “low responders.”
In a genetic analysis of the two groups, 39 different gene variations were found, including how oxygen is converted to energy fuel, how fat molecules are broken down and the ability to create new blood vessels.
In other words, the high responders had genes that were more amenable to changes from exercise than the low responders.
“Scientists are pinpointing some of the genetic influences on an individual’s ability to adapt to a training regimen,” said Epstein in a recent interview. “And that now looks to be a key component of ‘talent,’ not simply some skill that manifests prior to training, but the very biological setup that makes one athlete better at adapting to a particular training plan.
In recent years, both with respect to endurance and strength training, the science has increasingly shown that genes mediate the ability to “respond” to training, and it appears that work will continue to be bolstered. People often say ‘I’m not very talented in this or that area,’ but the genetic work is increasingly showing that we can’t necessarily know if we have talent before we try training.”
So, our body’s reaction to exercise may be related to our genes but what about our attitude towards a workout?
Is there a “lazy” gene variation?
Researchers at the University of Missouri have been working with rats to find the answer.
They gave a group of rats equal access to a running wheel, then observed which ones were the avid runners and which ones were “cage potatoes.” Then they bred the high mileage rats with each other and the less active rats with their peers.
After ten generations of selective breeding, active vs inactive, they had a set of super-runners that ran 10 times more than their sedentary counterparts.
When they examined the two different groups, they found significant genetic differences in a part of the brain that repeats behavior that is found to be enjoyable.
In the tenth generation running rats, they were so in love with the idea of running that they were obsessed with it, while the inactive rats showed very little gene expression in that brain area. | The 80 Percent Mental Blog
On the road to sports success, young athletes need two ingredients, innate skills and the willingness and determination to get better.
We all know boys and girls who showed early promise that got them noticed but then didn’t have the drive to practice every day to develop that talent. Often labeled lazy or unmotivated, the assumption was that they chose their own path by not working hard.
However, new research shows evidence that genetics may play a role not only in the natural abilities of a developing superstar but also in their practice persistence and physiological response to training.
In his bestselling book The Sports Gene, David Epstein introduced us to the notion that your inherited genes may affect how your body reacts to training, both psychologically and physiologically.
He references an ongoing project at the University of Miami, known as Genetics of Exercise and Research (GEAR), whose stated purpose is: “to identify genetic biomarkers and environmental risk factors that are associated with variation in exercise response among participants who undergo a 12 week exercise protocol.”
Last year, one of the first GEAR studies put a group of women, ages 18-65, through a 12-week aerobic and strength conditioning program.
None of the women had exercised regularly in the previous 6 months.
Based on their performance increases from start to finish, they were divided into 4 subgroups, with the best performing quartile being labeled “high responders” and those showing the lowest fitness gains were “low responders.”
In a genetic analysis of the two groups, 39 different gene variations were found, including how oxygen is converted to energy fuel, how fat molecules are broken down and the ability to create new blood vessels.
In other words, the high responders had genes that were more amenable to changes from exercise than the low responders.
“Scientists are pinpointing some of the genetic influences on an individual’s ability to adapt to a training regimen,” said Epstein in a recent interview. | yes |
Genomics | Can you inherit genes for talent and skill? | yes_statement | "genes" can determine "talent" and "skill".. "talent" and "skill" can be "inherited" through "genes". | https://osgamers.com/frequently-asked-questions/how-talent-is-genetic | How talent is genetic? | How talent is genetic?
Aptitude and talent in various fields, such as intelligence, creativity, and athleticism, are attributed to genetic factors. For example, drawing, playing an instrument, or dancing may come more naturally to some people than to others.
How much of talent is genetic?
Studies have shown that genetic factors underlie 30 to 80 percent of the differences among individuals in traits related to athletic performance. There are more than 200 genetic variations found to be associated with athletic performance, with many more that are yet to be discovered.
Is talent genetic or learned?
Both. Some people are born with greater potential, but without hard work and practising their talent will come to nothing. Music is a good example, with some evidence of genetic differences. For example, a study of 500 twins found that 80 per cent of tone deafness is inherited.
Are you born with talent or is it learned?
Talent is not taught, it's a natural ability to see or do something in a certain way. But skill is something that we have become good at and love doing but have been taught. It's taken hours, days, weeks, months, years to master. It's something that you get better at over time and that you desire to do and master.
Talent vs Training
Are some people naturally gifted?
Gifted children are born with natural abilities well above the average for their age. If your child is gifted, you might notice these natural abilities in the way they're learning and developing. Children can be gifted in any area of ability, and they can also be gifted in more than one area.
Does everyone have natural talent?
Every human being has been blessed with different abilities, talents and capabilities. We differ from each other in that we have different interests and inclinations. One might be good at music but not in drawing, while another might be great at dancing but not at writing.
Why some people are so talented?
Talented individuals think of themselves as being able to manage time, meet deadlines, and find ways to break down formidable tasks into smaller and manageable pieces. They produce prime results because they are committed to making sure that each and every piece makes it to the finish line – finishing power.
What causes talent?
As Matt Ridley notes: "Genes are the mechanisms of experience." Talent develops through the interaction of genes and the environment. Talent and practice are complementary, not at odds. One key to this mystery is recognising that tiny genetic and environmental advantages multiply over the years.
Is talent a natural skill?
Talent is generally considered inborn, inherited and hardwired into who we are from birth. Skill is something we've been taught, either through mandatory education or parental or personal choice. Everyone is born with talents, but if they're not recognized and nurtured, they won't develop.
Are gifted kids more intelligent?
While an average intelligence score is 90-110, gifted kids will typically score well above this. Giftedness may also be somewhat hereditary and a child may score within 10 points of a sibling or parent. The earlier giftedness is identified, the sooner exceptional talents can be nurtured.
Is child gifted or just smart?
an insatiable curiosity, as demonstrated by endless questions and inquiries. ability to comprehend material several grade levels above their age peers. surprising emotional depth and sensitivity at a young age. enthusiastic about unique interests and topics.
Is talent a gift or skill?
Talent is God gifted ability, whereas Skill is an ability in which you put your time and efforts to develop. Talent is often possessed by a limited number of people. On the other hand, any person can learn a particular skill, if he has the capacity, capability, and willingness.
Can skills be passed down?
As individuals, we vary widely in the level of our thinking skills, or 'cognitive function'. We inherit cognitive function from our parents, in the same way that physical characteristics are passed down. Scientists have discovered that, unlike eye colour, cognitive function is not influenced by a few genes but by many.
What are inherited talents?
Aptitude and talent in various fields, such as intelligence, creativity, and athleticism, are attributed to genetic factors. For example, drawing, playing an instrument, or dancing may come more naturally to some people than to others.
Is singing a talent you are born with?
The ability to sing isn't necessarily something you're born with. You can be born with the right genetics and physiological features that put you at a better vocal disposition to become a singer, but that doesn't mean singing is innate. You have to learn how to use this vocal apparatus to be able to sing.
Is talent a nature or nurture?
It is likely that both nature and nurture play a role in shaping our skills and abilities. Our genes may give us a head start, but it is ultimately up to us to cultivate our talents and develop our skills.
Can you inherit talent from your parents?
This means that a parent's experiences can be passed down to their children too. If both parents happen to be musicians for example, then the chances are that their child will inherit a natural talent for playing a musical instrument or singing.
How rare are highly gifted people?
Gifted people have the intellectual ability to perform at higher levels than other people of the same age, grade, experience, etc. People with extraordinary intellectual abilities, or exceptionally gifted people, make up approximately 5% of the population, so they are rare. |
What causes talent?
As Matt Ridley notes: "Genes are the mechanisms of experience." Talent develops through the interaction of genes and the environment. Talent and practice are complementary, not at odds. One key to this mystery is recognising that tiny genetic and environmental advantages multiply over the years.
Is talent a natural skill?
Talent is generally considered inborn, inherited and hardwired into who we are from birth. Skill is something we've been taught, either through mandatory education or parental or personal choice. Everyone is born with talents, but if they're not recognized and nurtured, they won't develop.
Are gifted kids more intelligent?
While an average intelligence score is 90-110, gifted kids will typically score well above this. Giftedness may also be somewhat hereditary and a child may score within 10 points of a sibling or parent. The earlier giftedness is identified, the sooner exceptional talents can be nurtured.
Is child gifted or just smart?
an insatiable curiosity, as demonstrated by endless questions and inquiries. ability to comprehend material several grade levels above their age peers. surprising emotional depth and sensitivity at a young age. enthusiastic about unique interests and topics.
Is talent a gift or skill?
Talent is God gifted ability, whereas Skill is an ability in which you put your time and efforts to develop. Talent is often possessed by a limited number of people. On the other hand, any person can learn a particular skill, if he has the capacity, capability, and willingness.
Can skills be passed down?
As individuals, we vary widely in the level of our thinking skills, or 'cognitive function'. We inherit cognitive function from our parents, in the same way that physical characteristics are passed down. Scientists have discovered that, unlike eye colour, cognitive function is not influenced by a few genes but by many.
What are inherited talents?
Aptitude and talent in various fields, such as intelligence, creativity, and athleticism, are attributed to genetic factors. For example, drawing, playing an instrument, or dancing may come more naturally to some people than to others.
| yes |
Genomics | Can you inherit genes for talent and skill? | no_statement | "genes" have no influence on "talent" and "skill".. inheritance does not play a role in determining "talent" and "skill". | https://www.wired.com/2011/03/what-is-success-true-grit/ | Which Traits Predict Success? (The Importance of Grit) | WIRED | Which Traits Predict Success? (The Importance of Grit)
What are the causes of success? At first glance, the answer is easy: success is about talent. It’s about being able to do something – hit a baseball, play chess, trade stocks, write a blog – better than most anyone else. That’s a fine answer, but it immediately invites another question: What is talent? How […]
What are the causes of success? At first glance, the answer is easy: success is about talent. It's about being able to do something - hit a baseball, play chess, trade stocks, write a blog - better than most anyone else. That's a fine answer, but it immediately invites another question: What is talent? How did that person get so good at hitting a baseball or trading stocks? For a long time, talent seemed to be about inheritance, about the blessed set of genes that gave rise to some particular skill. Einstein had the physics gene, Beethoven had the symphony gene, and Tiger Woods (at least until his car crash) had the golf swing gene. The corollary, of course, is that you and I can’t become chess grandmasters, or composers, or golf pros, simply because we don’t have the necessary anatomy. Endless hours of hard work won’t compensate for our biological limitations. When fate was handing out skill, we got screwed.
In recent years, however, the pendulum has shifted. It turns out that the intrinsic nature of talent is overrated - our genes don't confer specific gifts. (There is, for instance, no PGA gene.) This has led many researchers, such as K. Anders Ericsson, to argue that talent is really about deliberate practice, about putting in those 10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours). Beethoven wasn't born Beethoven - he had to work damn hard to become Beethoven. As Ericsson wrote in his influential review article “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”: “The differences between expert performers and normal adults are not immutable, that is, due to genetically prescribed talent. Instead, these differences reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance.”
That's interesting, right? Talent is about practice. Talent takes effort. Talent requires a good coach. But these answers only raise more questions. What, for instance, allows someone to practice for so long? Why are some people so much better at deliberate practice? If talent is about hard work, then what factors influence how hard we can work?
The ability to ask these questions, to peel away layers of explanation, is one of the reasons I'm drawn to the psychological sciences. And this leads me to one of my favorite recent papers, "Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee." The research, published this month in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, was led by Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at Penn. (Anders-Ericsson is senior author.) The psychologists were interested in the set of traits that allowed kids to practice deliberately. Their data set consisted of 190 participants in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a competition that requires thousands of hours of practice. After all, there are no natural born spellers.
The first thing Duckworth, et. al. discovered is that deliberate practice works. Those kids who spent more time in deliberate practice mode - this involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards - performed much better at the competition than those children who were quizzed by others or engaged in leisure reading. The bad news is that deliberate practice isn't fun and was consistently rated as the least enjoyable form of self-improvement. Nevertheless, as spellers gain experience, they devote increasing amounts of time to deliberate practice. This suggests that even twelve year olds realize that this is what makes them better, that success isn't easy.
But that still begs the question: Why were some kids better at drilling themselves with note cards? What explained this variation in hours devoted to deliberate practice? After analyzing the data, Duckworth discovered the importance of a psychological trait known as grit. In previous papers, Duckworth has demonstrated that grit can be reliably measured with a short survey that measures consistency of passions (e.g., ‘‘I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest’’) and consistency of effort (e.g., ‘‘Setbacks don’t discourage me’’) over time using a 5-point scale. Not surprisingly, those with grit are more single-minded about their goals - they tend to get obsessed with certain activities - and also more likely to persist in the face of struggle and failure. Woody Allen famously declared that “Eighty percent of success is showing up”. Grit is what allows you show up again and again. Here are the scientists:
Our major findings in this investigation are as follows: Deliberate practice—operationally defined in the current investigation as the solitary study of word spellings and origins—was a better predictor of National Spelling Bee performance than either being quizzed by others or engaging in leisure reading. With each year of additional preparation, spellers devoted an increasing proportion of their preparation time to deliberate practice, despite rating the experience of such activities as more effortful and less enjoyable than the alternative preparation activities. Grittier spellers engaged in deliberate practice more so than their less gritty counterparts, and hours of deliberate practice fully mediated the prospective association between grit and spelling performance.
There are two interesting takeaways from this study. The first is that there's a major contradiction between how we measure talent and the causes of talent. In general, we measure talent using tests of maximal performance. Think, for instance, of the NFL Combine: Players perform in short bursts (40 yard dash, short IQ test, catching drills, etc.) under conditions of high motivation. The purpose of the event is to see what players are capable of, to determine the scope of their potential. The problem with these tests, however, is that the real world doesn't resemble the NFL Combine. Instead, success in the real world depends on sustained performance, on being able to work hard at practice, and spend the weekend studying the playbook, and reviewing hours of game tape. Those are all versions of deliberate practice, and our ability to engage in such useful exercises largely depends on levels of grit. The problem, of course, is that grit can't be measured in a single afternoon on a single field. (By definition, it's a metric of personality that involves long periods of time.) The end result is that our flawed beliefs about talent have led to flawed tests of talent. Perhaps that explains why there is no "consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and professional football performance." We need to a test that measures how likely people are to show up, not just how they perform once there.
The second takeaway involves the growing recognition of "non-cognitive" skills like grit and self-control. While such traits have little or nothing to do with intelligence (as measured by IQ scores), they often explain a larger share of individual variation when it comes to life success. It doesn't matter if one is looking at retention rates at West Point or teacher performance within the Teach for America program or success in the spelling bee: Factors like grit are often the most predictive variables of real world performance. Thomas Edison was right: even genius is mostly just perspiration.
Taken together, these studies suggest that our most important talent is having a talent for working hard, for practicing even when practice isn't fun. It's about putting in the hours when we'd rather be watching TV, or drilling ourselves with notecards filled with obscure words instead of getting quizzed by a friend. Success is never easy. That's why talent requires grit.
Chronic drinking depletes the brain’s dopamine levels. A single dose of a gene therapy reset them, and stopped the craving for alcohol.
Emily Mullin
WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives—from culture to business, science to design. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. | Which Traits Predict Success? (The Importance of Grit)
What are the causes of success? At first glance, the answer is easy: success is about talent. It’s about being able to do something – hit a baseball, play chess, trade stocks, write a blog – better than most anyone else. That’s a fine answer, but it immediately invites another question: What is talent? How […]
What are the causes of success? At first glance, the answer is easy: success is about talent. It's about being able to do something - hit a baseball, play chess, trade stocks, write a blog - better than most anyone else. That's a fine answer, but it immediately invites another question: What is talent? How did that person get so good at hitting a baseball or trading stocks? For a long time, talent seemed to be about inheritance, about the blessed set of genes that gave rise to some particular skill. Einstein had the physics gene, Beethoven had the symphony gene, and Tiger Woods (at least until his car crash) had the golf swing gene. The corollary, of course, is that you and I can’t become chess grandmasters, or composers, or golf pros, simply because we don’t have the necessary anatomy. Endless hours of hard work won’t compensate for our biological limitations. When fate was handing out skill, we got screwed.
In recent years, however, the pendulum has shifted. It turns out that the intrinsic nature of talent is overrated - our genes don't confer specific gifts. (There is, for instance, no PGA gene.) This has led many researchers, such as K. Anders Ericsson, to argue that talent is really about deliberate practice, about putting in those 10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours). Beethoven wasn't born Beethoven - he had to work damn hard to become Beethoven. As Ericsson wrote in his influential review article “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”: “The differences between expert performers and normal adults are not immutable, that is, due to genetically prescribed talent. | no |
Zymology | Can you make beer at home without a license? | yes_statement | it is possible to make "beer" at "home" without a "license".. brewing "beer" at "home" can be done without a "license". | https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/age/alcohol/Pages/FAQ/faqGeneral.aspx | Alcohol - General FAQ | General FAQ
How do I fill out my buyer’s card?
How do I look up my license number (identification number)? It’s not listed on my license.
You can look up your license information via our website. Under the “Select a popular function” drop down, choose “Search Liquor License Database”. Type in the first word of your licensee name, or business name, and click the search button. Your identification number will be listed to the left of your licensee name.
Wine and beer can be manufactured in the home and for family use, without a license. It is a felony offense to manufacture distilled spirits by use of a still in a person’s home.
Can I bring my home brewed beer or wine to an organized affair, exhibit, competition or tasting (340a.301 subd. 9)?
Yes you can bring your home brewed beer or wine to one of the above types of events. Any tasting of the homemade product by the public is done so at their own risk. A notice must be given in writing or signage disclosing that the product offered is homemade and not subject to any government regulation, or safety and cleanliness requirements. The notice must also include the name and address of the person who processed the product.
No person under 18 years of age may serve or sell intoxicating liquor in a retail intoxicating liquor establishment.
Selling Alcohol to People under 21-Years-Old
Entering Licensed Premises It is unlawful for a person under 21 to enter an establishment licensed to sell alcohol for the purpose of purchasing or being served alcoholic beverages. However, no city ordinance may prohibit a person 18-20-years old from entering an establishment to:
Perform work for the establishment, including the serving of alcoholic beverages.
Eat.
Attend social functions in areas of the establishment where liquor is not sold.
Unlawful Serving of People Under 21
It is unlawful for a retail licensee to permit anyone under the age of 21 to consume alcohol on the premise.
It is unlawful for a person under 21 to consume or possess alcohol unless it is in the home of their parents or guardian, and with the consent of the parent or guardian.
It is unlawful for anyone to sell, furnish or give alcohol to a person under 21.
A person under the age of 21 can’t purchase or attempt to purchase, obtain or possess alcohol.
It is unlawful to lend or knowingly let a person use their driver’s license or identification card by a person under the age of 21 to purchase or attempt to purchase alcohol.
It is unlawful for a person under 21 to claim to be 21-years-old for the purpose of purchasing alcohol.
Proof of Age
Proof of age for purchasing or consuming alcohol may be established only by one of the following:
A valid driver’s license
A valid state identification card or from Canada, which includes a photograph and date of birth of the person.
A valid military I.D. issued by the U.S. Dept. of Defense
A valid passport
A valid tribal I.D
Selling to Minors Defense A defense may be used by an individual who is prosecuted for a sale to a person under 21 that they relied upon representations of proof-of-age in good faith. (see Minnesota Statute section 340A.503, Subd. 6)
Purchasing Alcohol on 21st Birthday
In order to purchase or consume alcohol, a person is not 21-years-old until 8 a.m. on the day of that person's 21st birthday under Minnesota law.
When is a license required?
No person may directly or indirectly, on any pretense, sell, barter, charge for possession or otherwise dispose of alcoholic beverages as part of a commercial transaction without having obtained the proper license or permit.
Are there limitations placed on an alcohol beverage license?
Alcoholic beverage licenses are prohibited in certain areas under the provisions of Minnesota Statute 340A.412 subdivision 4. No license to sell intoxicating liquor may be issued within the following areas:
where restricted against commercial use through zoning ordinances and other proceedings or legal processes regularly had for that purpose, except licenses may be issued to restaurants in areas which were restricted against commercial uses after the establishment of the restaurant;
within the Capitol or on the Capitol grounds, except as provided under Laws 1983, chapter 259, section 9, or Laws 1999, chapter 202, section 13;
on the State Fairgrounds, except as provided under section 37.21, subdivision 2;
on the campus of the College of Agriculture of the University of Minnesota;
within 1,000 feet of a state hospital, training school, reformatory, prison, or other institution under the supervision or control, in whole or in part, of the commissioner of human services or the commissioner of corrections;
in a town or municipality in which a majority of votes at the last election at which the question of license was voted upon were not in favor of license under section 340A.416, or within one-half mile of any such town or municipality, except that intoxicating liquor manufactured within this radius may be sold to be consumed outside it; and
within 1,500 feet of any public school that is not within a city. (b) The restrictions of this subdivision do not apply to a manufacturer or wholesaler of intoxicating liquor or to a drug store or to a person who had a license originally issued lawfully prior to July 1, 1967.
Restrictions on the number of off-sale licenses
A municipality may not issue more than one off-sale license to any person or for any one place. (340A.412, Subdivision 3)
In cities of the first class, not more than one off-sale license for each 5,000 population. In all other cities the limit shall be determined by the city. (340A.413, Subdivision 5)
Who may have an off-sale license?
Minnesota Statute 340A.405 states that a city/county may issue an off-sale liquor license to an exclusive liquor store.
What type of business qualifies for an on-sale liquor license?
Under the provisions of Minnesota Statute 340A.404 an on-sale liquor license may be issued by a city to numbers 1-9, by a county to numbers 1, 2, 3 or 4:
Hotels
Restaurants
Bowling centers
Clubs - provided:
The organization has been in existence for at least 3 years and has owned and rented space in a building for more than 1 year
Sales will only be to members and bona fide guests
Sports facilities, restaurants, clubs, or bars located on land owned or leased by the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority;
Sports facilities located on land owned by the Metropolitan Sports Commission
Exclusive liquor stores
Theaters
Auto racing facilities
When may I be open for business?
Hours and Days of Sale (340A.504)
No sale of 3.2 beer may be made between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. on the days of Monday through Saturday, nor between 2 a.m. and Noon on Sunday, with certain exceptions for the airport and sports commission.
No sale of intoxicating liquor on-sale may be made:
Between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m.. on the days of Monday through Saturday.
After 2 a.m. on Sundays, except as provided by the Sunday sale law.
A city may issue a Sunday on sale intoxicating liquor license only if authorized to do so by the voters of the city voting on the question at a general or special election. A restaurant, club, bowling center or hotel with at least 30 seats and which holds an on-sale license may sell intoxicating liquor on-sale in conjunction with the sale of food between the hours of 8 a..m. on Sundays and 1 a.m. on Monday after a public hearing, ordinance and separate Sunday license. The fee for the Sunday license may not exceed $200. A county may issue a Sunday license in a town only if authorized to do so by the voters of the town.
Off-Sale No off-sale may be made:
On Sunday, except between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.
Before 8 a.m. or after 10 p.m. on Monday through Saturday
On Thanksgiving Day
After 8 p.m. on Christmas Eve through Christmas Day.
A municipality may further limit the hours of sale of intoxicating liquor on sale.
No licensee may sell intoxicating liquor after 1 a.m. unless the licensee has obtained a permit allowing for such sales.
What other types of licenses are there?
Combination Licenses (340A.406): cities of the fourth class or a statutory city of 10,000 or fewer population may issue an off-sale and on-sale intoxicating liquor license to the same licensee or in lieu of issuing separate licenses to the same licensee, may issue a combination on-sale and off-sale license.
Municipal Licenses (340A.601): A city having a population of not more than 10,000 may own and operate a municipal liquor store which may sell intoxicating liquor, 3.2 beer, tobacco, ice, soft drinks and food for consumption on the premises.
Temporary Licenses:
3.2 beer: A club or charitable, religious or non-profit organization may be issued a temporary 3.2 beer license subject to the terms set by the issuing county or city. (340A.403, Subdivision 2)
On-sale spirits, wine and beer: A club or charitable, religious or other non-profit organization in existence for at least three years may be issued a temporary license for the on-sale of intoxicating liquor in connection with a social event within the city/county sponsored by the licensee. The license may not be for more than four consecutive days. The license may provide that the licensee may contract for intoxicating liquor, catering services with the holder of a full year on-sale intoxicating liquor license holder. The licenses are subject to the terms, including a license fee, imposed by the issuing city/county. (340A.404, Subdivision 10)
Small Brewer: The governing body of a municipality may issue to a brewer who manufactures fewer than 3,500 barrels of malt liquor in a year a temporary license for the on-sale of intoxicating liquor in connection with a social event within the municipality sponsored by the brewer. The terms and conditions specified for temporary licenses under paragraph (a) shall apply to a license issued under this paragraph, except that the requirements of section 340A.409, subdivisions 1 to 3a, shall apply to the license (340A.404 subdivision 10).
Farm Winery: The governing body of a municipality may issue to a farm winery licensed under section 340A.315 a temporary license for the on-sale at a county fair located within the municipality of intoxicating liquor produced by the farm winery. The licenses are subject to the terms, including a license fee, imposed by the issuing municipality and all laws and ordinances governing the sale of intoxicating liquor not inconsistent with this section. Licenses under this subdivision are not valid unless first approved by the commissioner of public safety (340A.404 subdivision 10a).
Off-sale licenses - wine auctions: A city may issue a temporary license for the off-sale of wine at an auction, authorizing the sale of only vintage wine of a brand and vintage that is not commonly being offered for sale by any wholesaler in Minnesota. The license may authorize the off-sale of wine for not more than three consecutive days provided not more than 600 cases are sold at auction. The licenses are subject to the terms imposed by the issuing city. (340A.405, Subdivision 4).
Caterer's Permit: The commissioner may issue a caterer's permit to a restaurant that holds an on-sale intoxicating liquor license issued by any municipality. The holder of a caterer's permit may sell intoxicating liquor as an incidental part of a food service that serves prepared meals at a place other than the premises for which the holder's on-sale intoxicating liquor license is issued. The permit holder shall notify either the police chief or the county sheriff, of where the event will take place.
Wine Festival: A municipality with the approval of the commissioner may issue a temporary license to a bona fide association of owners and operators of wineries sponsoring an annual festival to showcase wines produced by members of the association. The commissioner may only approve one temporary license in a calendar year for each qualified association under this subdivision. The license issued under this subdivision authorizes the sale of table, sparkling, or fortified wines produced by the wineries at on-sale by the glass, provided that no more than two glasses per customer may be sold, and off-sale by the bottle, provided that no more than six bottles in total per customer may be sold. The license also authorizes the dispensing of free samples of the wines offered for sale within designated premises of the festival. A license issued under this subdivision is subject to all laws and ordinances governing the sale, possession, and consumption of table, sparkling, or fortified wines. For purposes of this subdivision, a "bona fide association of owners and operators of wineries" means an association of more than ten wineries that has been in existence for more than two years at the time of application for the temporary license.
What can I sell in my liquor store?
Under the provisions of Minnesota Statute 340A.412 subdivision 14 an exclusive liquor store may sell the following items:
alcoholic beverages;
tobacco products;
ice;
beverages, either liquid or powder, specifically designated for mixing with intoxicating liquor;
soft drinks;
liqueur-filled candies;
food products that contain more than one-half of one percent alcohol by volume;
cork extraction devices;
books and videos on the use of alcoholic beverages;
magazines and other publications published primarily for information and education on alcoholic beverages;
multiple-use bags designed to carry purchased items;
devices designed to ensure safe storage and monitoring of alcohol in the home, to prevent access by underage drinkers;
home brewing equipment; and
clothing marked with the specific name, brand, or identifying logo of the exclusive liquor store, and bearing no other name, brand, or identifying logo.
An exclusive liquor store that has an on-sale or combination on-sale and off-sale license may sell food for consumption on the premises when authorized by the municipality issuing the license.
An exclusive liquor store may offer live or recorded entertainment.
What is a wine license?
Wine licenses are governed under the authority of Minnesota Statutes 340A.404 subdivision 5.
A municipality may issue an on-sale wine license to a restaurant that has at least 25 seats. This permits the sale of wine up to 24 percent alcohol.
A municipality may by ordinance authorize a holder of an on-sale wine license, who is also licensed to sell 3.2 malt beverages at on-sale to sell strong beer at on-sale without an additional license.
FAQ does not cover all information, please read Minnesota State Statues and Rules, or contact our office. | General FAQ
How do I fill out my buyer’s card?
How do I look up my license number (identification number)? It’s not listed on my license.
You can look up your license information via our website. Under the “Select a popular function” drop down, choose “Search Liquor License Database”. Type in the first word of your licensee name, or business name, and click the search button. Your identification number will be listed to the left of your licensee name.
Wine and beer can be manufactured in the home and for family use, without a license. It is a felony offense to manufacture distilled spirits by use of a still in a person’s home.
Can I bring my home brewed beer or wine to an organized affair, exhibit, competition or tasting (340a.301 subd. 9)?
Yes you can bring your home brewed beer or wine to one of the above types of events. Any tasting of the homemade product by the public is done so at their own risk. A notice must be given in writing or signage disclosing that the product offered is homemade and not subject to any government regulation, or safety and cleanliness requirements. The notice must also include the name and address of the person who processed the product.
No person under 18 years of age may serve or sell intoxicating liquor in a retail intoxicating liquor establishment.
Selling Alcohol to People under 21-Years-Old
Entering Licensed Premises It is unlawful for a person under 21 to enter an establishment licensed to sell alcohol for the purpose of purchasing or being served alcoholic beverages. However, no city ordinance may prohibit a person 18-20-years old from entering an establishment to:
Perform work for the establishment, including the serving of alcoholic beverages.
Eat.
Attend social functions in areas of the establishment where liquor is not sold.
Unlawful Serving of People Under 21
It is unlawful for a retail licensee to permit anyone under the age of 21 to consume alcohol on the premise.
| yes |
Zymology | Can you make beer at home without a license? | yes_statement | it is possible to make "beer" at "home" without a "license".. brewing "beer" at "home" can be done without a "license". | https://homebrewacademy.com/state-federal-homebrewing-laws/ | State & Federal Homebrewing Laws | Homebrew Academy | State & Federal Homebrewing Laws
The 18th amendment was enacted in 1919, and made the sale, production & transportation of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United states for 14 years.
Until in 1933, the 21st amendment was established to repeal prohibition. You would assume that with prohibition repealed, Americans could once again exercise their right to brew their own beer, right?
Unfortunately, It would take another 46 years for the federal government to finally address this oversight and legalize Americans right to homebrew beer again.
We’ve come along way…
Beer lovers and brewers had to fight for nearly a century to regain their right to brew after prohibition.
Even though Homebrewing was made legal by the United States government in 1979, states still reserved the right to regulate the production of beer & spirits in whatever way they saw fit, leaving the the last state to finally make HomeBrewing legal as recently as July of 2013!
With each state able to adopt it’s own set of standards, we have been left with a varied landscape of all different levels of regulation and control of the production, transportation and consumption of homebrewed beverages.
With more conservative states prone to adopt strict regulations on the % ABV beer that you are able to produce and even limiting the ability for homebrewers to transport their beer or consume it outside of the residence it was brewed.
Get Involved!
These types of overtly conservative laws make it difficult, if not impossible for any meaningful homebrewering community to survive in states where such archaic laws still exist.
In a society where beer and spirits have become synonymous with social gatherings and celebrations of all kinds – It’s a shame that homebrewers are being isolated from competitions, tastings and the social interaction and community that these types of events encourage.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Ala. Code §28-4-3 The laws against possession, transportation or delivery of prohibited liquors shall not apply to the possession of wine or cordial made from grapes or other fruit when the grapes or other fruit are grown by the person making the same for his own domestic use upon his own premises in this state and when such person keeps such wine or cordial for his own domestic use on his own premises in any quantity not exceeding five gallons for one family in 12 months.
2013 Act 204 (a) Notwithstanding any provisions to the contrary, a person who has not been convicted of a felony in Alabama or any other state or federal jurisdiction, and who is not prohibited by §28-1-5 , Code of Alabama 1975, from purchasing, consuming, possessing, or transporting alcoholic beverages due to age may produce at his or her legal residence beer, mead, cider, and table wine, as those terms are defined in §28-3-1 , Code of Alabama 1975, for personal use, in the amounts specified in this act, without payment of taxes or fees and without obtaining a license. The aggregate amount of the beer, mead, cider, and table wine permitted to be produced under this act, with respect to any legal residence, shall not exceed 15 gallons for each quarter of a calendar year. Further, there shall not be in any legal residence at any one time more than an aggregate amount of 15 gallons of beer, mead, cider, and table wine which has been produced under the authority of this act.
(b) Beer, mead, cider, or table wine produced under this act may not be sold or offered for sale.
(c) Beer, mead, cider, or table wine produced under this act may not be removed from the legal residence where it was produced, except in quantities no larger than 10 gallons, aggregate, for any one event, and to be transported for personal use at organized events of homebrew competitions and judgings licensed by the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board as a special events retail license under §28-3A-20, Code of Alabama 1975, provided that the license will not allow the purchase or sale of any alcoholic beverages when that license is used for this purpose. Organized events involving beer, mead, cider, or table wine produced for personal use may not be held on the premises of entities otherwise licensed under Title 28, Code of Alabama 1975.
(d) Nothing in this act permits the production of distilled liquors, for personal use or otherwise, or the use of distilled liquors or products in the production of beer, mead, cider, or table wine provided in this section.
(e) It shall be unlawful for any person less than 21 years of age to attempt to purchase, consume, possess, or transport beer, mead, cider, or table wine produced for personal use.
(f) It shall be unlawful for any person less than 21 years of age to attempt to purchase, possess, or transport any apparatus or equipment used to produce beer, mead, cider, or table wine. It shall be unlawful for any person, partnership, corporation, or other legal entity to sell, furnish, give away, or provide to any person less than 21 years of age any apparatus or equipment used to produce beer, mead, cider, or table wine.
(g) Nothing in this section permits the production of beer, mead, cider, or table wine in a dry municipality, as defined in Chapter 3 of Title 28, Code of Alabama 1975. Further, with the exception of wet municipalities, as defined in Chapter 3 of Title 28, Code of Alabama 1975, nothing in this section permits the production of beer, mead, cider, or table wine in a dry county as defined in Chapter 3 of Title 28, Code of Alabama 1975.
(h) The definitions contained in §28-3-1 of the Code of Alabama 1975, shall apply to this act.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Alaska Stat. §04.21.015 (a) Except as provided in (b) of this section, the provisions of this title do not apply to the private manufacture of alcoholic beverages.
(b) This section does not apply to AS 04.16.050 , 04.16.051, 04.16.080; AS 04.21.010 , 04.21.020; alcoholic beverages manufactured in a quantity that exceeds the limit imposed on private manufacture under federal law; or an area that has adopted a local option law under AS 04.11.491.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. §4-226 The provisions of this title do not apply to: 3. Ethyl alcohol intended for use or used for the following purposes: (b) Use by those authorized to procure spirituous liquor or ethyl alcohol tax-free, as provided by the acts of Congress and regulations promulgated thereunder.
Arkansas
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Ark. Stat. Ann. §3-5-205 (f) (1) However, any person in this state may manufacture home-brewed beer or home-manufactured wine: (A) Upon his or her own premises free from the license fees and taxes provided in this subchapter; (B) For consumption by the manufacturer and his or her family and guests, but not for sale; and (C) In quantities per calendar year not to exceed: (i) 200 gallons if there are two or more adults in the household; or (ii) 100 gallons if there is only one adult in the household.
(2) While the manufacture of beer or wine is declared to be a privilege, the home manufacture of beer or wine in quantities not to exceed 200 gallons per calendar year shall be exempted from §§3-4-101, 3-4-602, 3-5-205(a)-(e), 3-5-206, and 3-5-211.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Cal. Business and Professions Code §23356.2 (a) No license or permit shall be required for the manufacture of beer for personal or family use, and not for sale, by a person over 21 years of age. The aggregate amount of beer with respect to any household shall not exceed (1) 200 gallons per calendar year if there are two or more adults in the household or (2) 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one adult in the household.
(b) No license or permit shall be required for the manufacture of wine for personal or family use, and not for sale, by a person over 21 years of age. The aggregate amount of wine with respect to any household shall not exceed (1) 200 gallons per calendar year if there are two or more adults in the household or (2) 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one adult in the household.
(c) Any beer manufactured pursuant to this section may be removed from the premises where manufactured for use in competition at organized affairs, exhibitions, or competitions, including homemakers’ contests, tastings, or judgings.
(d) Any wine made pursuant to this section may be removed from the premises where made for personal or family use, including use at organized affairs, exhibitions, or competitions, such as homemakers’ contests, tastings, or judgings. Wine used under this section shall not be sold or offered for sale.
(e) Except as provided herein, nothing in this section authorizes any activity in violation of §§23300, 23355, or 23399.1.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Colo. Rev. Stat. §12-47-106 (2) (a) Any provision of this article or article 46 of this title to the contrary notwithstanding, when permitted by federal law and rules and regulations promulgated pursuant thereto, a head of a family may produce for family use and not for sale such amount of fermented malt beverage or malt or vinous liquor as is exempt from the federal excise tax on such alcohol beverage when produced by a head of a family for family use and not for sale. (b) The production of fermented malt beverages or malt or vinous liquors under the circumstances set forth in this subsection (2) shall be in strict conformity with federal law and rules and regulations issued pursuant thereto. (c) Fermented malt beverages or malt or vinous liquors produced pursuant to the provisions of this subsection (2) shall be exempt from any tax imposed by this article, and the producer shall not be required to obtain any license provided by this article or article 46 of this title. (d) Malt liquors produced pursuant to this subsection (2) may be transported and delivered by the producer to any licensed premise where consumption of malt liquors by persons over the age of 21 is authorized for use at organized affairs, exhibitions, or competitions, such as home brew contests, tastings, or judgings. Consumption shall be limited solely to the participants in and judges of such events. Malt liquors used for the purposes described in this paragraph (d) shall be served in portions not exceeding six ounces and shall not be sold, offered for sale, or made available for consumption by the general public.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 50 gallons per adult per year, or up to 100 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence. Connecticut is an exception, limiting production to 50 & 100 gallons respectively.
Relevant Statues
Conn. Gen. Stat. §30-62b Any person, other than a minor, may, without payment of tax, produce wine for personal or family use only. Such wine may be transported in sealed containers for use at organized affairs, including exhibitions, tastings, contests or competitions, but shall not be sold or offered for sale.
Conn. Gen. Stat. §30-77 (b) The provisions of this section shall not prohibit a person, other than a minor, from producing beer for personal or family use only, in the following amounts: (1) 100 gallons or less in one calendar year if there are two persons who have attained the age of 21 residing in the household; and (2) 50 gallons or less in one calendar year if there is only one person who has attained the age of 21 residing in the household. Such beer may be transported in sealed containers for use at organized affairs including beer exhibitions, contests or competitions. Such beer shall not be sold or offered for sale.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Del. Code Ann. tit. 4, §707 (a) No license or special permit shall be required for the manufacture within homes, or other premises used in connection therewith, of beer in quantities of 200 gallons or less during any calendar year, or wine in quantities of 200 gallons or less during any calendar year, for the personal consumption only of the homeowner(s), their families or their guests; provided however, that such beer or wine shall not be offered for sale.
(b) Such beer or wine, when manufactured and used as set forth above, shall not be subject to any taxes imposed by the Liquor Control Act.
(c) Beer and wine manufactured pursuant to this section may be removed from the home and transported for personal or family use, and in addition may be transported for the purposes of participating in club-sponsored events and tasting competitions.
(d) Notwithstanding any other provision in this chapter or title, concentrated alcoholic beverages are not “home-manufactured beer or wine” for purposes of this section, and all commissioner regulations and tax requirements concerning home-manufactured beer or wine shall not apply to concentrated alcoholic beverages.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Fla. Stat. §562.165 (1) Notwithstanding any provisions to the contrary, a person who is not prohibited by §562.111 from possessing alcoholic beverages may produce beer for personal or family use, and not for sale, in the amounts provided in this section without payment of taxes or fees or without a license. The aggregate amount of such beer permitted to be produced with respect to any household shall be as follows: (a) Not in excess of 200 gallons per calendar year if there are two or more such persons in such household. (b) Not in excess of 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one such person in such household.
(2) Notwithstanding any provisions to the contrary, a person who is not prohibited by §562.111 from possessing alcoholic beverages may produce wine for personal or family use, and not for sale, in the amounts provided in this section without payment of taxes or fees or without a license. The aggregate amount of such wine permitted to be produced with respect to any household shall be as follows: (a) Not in excess of 200 gallons per calendar year if there are two or more such persons in such household. (b) Not in excess of 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one such person in such household.
(3) Any personal or family production of beer or wine in excess of the amount permitted in this section or any sale of such alcoholic beverages constitutes a violation of the Beverage Law.
(4) Wine and beer made under the provisions of this section may be removed from the premises where made for personal or family use, including use at organized affairs, exhibitions, or competitions, such as homemakers’ contests, tastings, or judgings. Wine or beer used under this subsection shall not be sold or offered for sale.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Ga. Code §3-5-4 (a) (1) Malt beverages may be produced by a person in his or her private residence subject to the limitations provided in this Code section. (2) The total quantity of malt beverages that may be produced in any private residence shall be as follows: (A) Not more than 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one person of legal drinking age living in such residence; or (B) Not more than 200 gallons per calendar year if there are two or more persons of legal drinking age living in such residence; provided, however, that no more than 50 gallons shall be produced in a 90 day period.
(b) Except as provided for in subsection (d) of this Code section, malt beverages produced in compliance with this Code section may only be consumed at the residence where produced and only by persons of legal drinking age.
(c) Malt beverages produced under the provisions of this Code section may be removed from the residence where produced for transportation and delivery by the producer for use at home-brew special events in a quantity not to exceed 25 gallons, provided that such malt beverages are securely sealed in one or more containers and clearly labeled with the following information: (1) The name of the producer; (2) The address of the residence at which it was produced; (3) The name and address of the home-brew special event to which it is being transported; and (4) The permit number under which the home-brew special event is being held. If transported in a motor vehicle, the securely sealed containers shall be placed in a locked glove compartment, a locked trunk, or the area behind the last upright seat of a motor vehicle that is not equipped with a trunk.
(d) (1) Notwithstanding any other provision of this title to the contrary, in all counties and municipalities in which the sale of malt beverages is lawful, the local governing authority may issue a home-brew special event permit for the holding of home-brew special events, including contests, tastings, and judgings at locations not otherwise licensed under this title. The local governing authority shall specify by ordinance or resolution the events that shall qualify as home-brew special events. A home-brew special event permit shall cost $50 and shall be valid for not more than six events per calendar year. (2) Consumption of malt beverages at home-brew special events shall be limited solely to malt beverages produced pursuant to this Code section, and such malt beverages shall only be consumed by the participants in and judges of the home-brew special events. (3) Any local governing authority that issues home-brew special event permits shall adopt ordinances or resolutions governing home-brew special events.
(e) Malt beverages produced pursuant to this Code section shall not be sold, offered for sale, or made available for consumption by the general public.
Ga. Code §3-6-3 (a) A head of a household may produce 200 gallons of wine in any one calendar year to be consumed within his own household without any requirement to be licensed for such purpose. Wine so produced shall not be subject to any excise tax imposed by this chapter.
(b) For purposes of this Code section, a single individual who is not a dependent of another person for purposes of Georgia income taxation shall be considered a head of a household.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence. Hawaii explicitly states that there is a 100 gallon per year limit on beer in their statues….it is unclear if this extends to the usual 200 gallons per year if their is more than 1 adult of drinking age in the family.
Relevant Statues
Hawaii Rev. Stat. §281-3 It shall be unlawful for any person not having a valid license to manufacture or sell any liquor except as otherwise provided in this chapter; provided that the head of any family may produce for family use and not for sale an amount of wine not exceeding 200 gallons a year, and an amount of beer not exceeding 100 gallons a year.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Idaho Code §23-501 Any person shall have the privilege of manufacturing wine or brewing beer from native grown products for the personal use of himself, family, and guests.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Ill. Rev. Stat. ch. 235, §5/2-1 No person shall manufacture, bottle, blend, sell, barter, transport, transfer into this state from a point outside this state, deliver, furnish or possess any alcoholic liquor for beverage purposes, unless such person has been issued a license by the Commission or except as permitted by §6-29 of this Act or except as otherwise specifically provided in this Act; provided, however, nothing herein contained shall prevent the possession and transportation of alcoholic liquor by the possessor for the personal use of the possessor, his family and guests, nor prevent the making of wine, cider or other alcoholic liquor by a person from fruits, vegetables or grains, or the products thereof, by simple fermentation and without distillation, if it is made solely for the use of the maker, his family and his guests.
Ill. Rev. Stat. ch. 235, §5/6-36 and 2013 Public Act 98-0055 (a) No license or permit is required under this Act for the making of homemade brewed beverages or for the possession, transportation, or storage of homemade brewed beverages by any person 21 years of age or older, if all of the following apply: (1) the person who makes the homemade brewed beverages receives no compensation; (2) the homemade brewed beverages is not sold or offered for sale; and (3) the total quantity of homemade brewed beverages made, in a calendar year, by the person does not exceed 100 gallons if the household has only one person 21 years of age or older or 200 gallons if the household has two or more persons 21 years of age or older.
(b) A person who makes, possesses, transports, or stores homemade brewed beverages in compliance with the limitations specified in subsection (a) is not a brewer, craft brewer, wholesaler, retailer, or a manufacturer of beer for the purposes of this Act.
(c) Homemade brewed beverages made in compliance with the limitations specified in subsection (a) may be consumed by the person who made it and his or her family, neighbors, and friends at any private residence or other private location where the possession and consumption of alcohol is permissible under this Act, local ordinances, and other applicable law, provided that the homemade brewed beverages are not made available for consumption by the general public.
(d) Homemade brewed beverages made in compliance with the limitations specified in subsection (a) may be used for purposes of a public exhibition, demonstration, tasting, or sampling with sampling sizes as authorized by §6-31, if the event is held at a private residence or at a location other than a retail licensed premises. If the public event is not held at a private residence, the event organizer shall obtain a homebrewer special event permit for each location, and is subject to the provisions in subsection (a) of § 6-21. Homemade brewed beverages used for purposes described in this subsection (d), including the submission or consumption of the homemade brewed beverages, are not considered sold or offered for sale under this Act. A public exhibition, demonstration, tasting, or sampling with sampling sizes as authorized by §6-31 held by a licensee on a location other than a retail licensed premises may require an admission charge to the event, but no separate or additional fee may be charged for the consumption of a person’s homemade brewed beverages at the public exhibition, demonstration, tasting, or sampling with sampling sizes as authorized by §6-31. Event admission charges that are collected may be partially used to provide prizes to makers of homemade brewed beverages, but the admission charges may not be divided in any fashion among the makers of the homemade brewed beverages who participate in the event. Homemade brewed beverages used for purposes described in this subsection (d) are not considered sold or offered for sale under this Act if a maker of homemade brewed beverages receives free event admission or discounted event admission in return for the maker’s donation of the homemade brewed beverages to an event specified in this subsection (d) that collects event admission charges; free admission or discounted admission to the event is not considered compensation under this Act. No admission fee and no charge for the consumption of a person’s homemade brewed beverage may be collected if the public exhibition, demonstration, tasting, sampling with sampling sizes as authorized by §6-31 is held at a private residence.
(e) A person who is not a licensee under this Act may at a private residence, and a person who is a licensee under this Act may on the licensed premises, conduct, sponsor, or host a contest, competition, or other event for the exhibition, demonstration, judging, tasting, or sampling of homemade brewed beverages made in compliance with the limitations specified in subsection (a), if the person does not sell the homemade brewed beverages and, unless the person is the brewer of the homemade brewed beverages, does not acquire any ownership interest in the homemade brewed beverages. If the contest, competition, exhibition, demonstration, or judging is not held at a private residence, the consumption of the homemade brewed beverages is limited to qualified judges and stewards as defined by a national or international beer judging program, who are identified by the event organizer in advance of the contest, competition, exhibition, demonstration, or judging. Homemade brewed beverages used for the purposes described in this subsection (e), including the submission or consumption of the homemade brewed beverages, are not considered sold or offered for sale under this Act and any prize awarded at a contest or competition or as a result of an exhibition, demonstration, or judging is not considered compensation under this Act. An exhibition, demonstration, judging, contest, or competition held by a licensee on a licensed premises may require an admission charge to the event, but no separate or additional fee may be charged for the consumption of a person’s homemade brewed beverage at the exhibition, demonstration, judging, contest, or competition. A portion of event admission charges that are collected may be used to provide prizes to makers of homemade brewed beverages, but the admission charges may not be divided in any fashion among the makers of the homemade brewed beverages who participate in the event. Homemade brewed beverages used for purposes described in this subsection (e) are not considered sold or offered for sale under this Act if a maker of homemade brewed beverages receives free event admission or discounted event admission in return for the maker’s donation of the homemade brewed beverages to an event specified in this subsection (e) that collects event admission charges; free admission or discounted admission to the event is not considered compensation under this Act. No admission fee and no charge for the consumption of a person’s homemade brewed beverage may be charged if the exhibition, demonstration, judging, contest, or competition is held at a private residence. The fact that a person is acting in a manner authorized by this Section is not, by itself, sufficient to constitute a public nuisance under §10-7 of this Act. If the contest, competition, or other event is held on licensed premises, the licensee may allow the homemade brewed beverages to be stored on the premises if the homemade brewed beverages are clearly identified, kept separate from any alcohol beverages owned by the licensee. If the contest, competition, or other event is held on licensed premises, other provisions of this Act not inconsistent with this section apply.
(f) A commercial enterprise engaged primarily in selling supplies and equipment to the public for use by homebrewers may manufacture homemade brewed beverages for the purpose of tasting the homemade brewed beverages at the location of the commercial enterprise, provided that the homemade brewed beverages are not sold or offered for sale. Homemade brewed beverages provided at a commercial enterprise for tasting under this subsection (f) shall be in compliance with §§6-16, 6-21, and 6-31 of this Act. A commercial enterprise engaged solely in selling supplies and equipment for use by homebrewers shall not be required to secure a license under this Act, however, such commercial enterprise shall secure liquor liability insurance coverage in an amount at least equal to the maximum liability amounts set forth in subsection (a) of §6-21 of this Act.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Ind. Code §7.1-1-2-3 (a) The provisions of this title shall not prohibit the following: (4) The manufacture of wine or beer that is not offered for sale and is used only for the following purposes: (A) Personal or family use. (B) Use in the residence of the person who manufactures the wine or beer. (C) Use at organized affairs or exhibitions. (D) Technical or sensory evaluations. (E) Wine or beer educational seminars. (F) Wine or beer competitions, including contests, tastings, or judgings.
(b) The transportation and the possession of alcoholic beverages described in subsection (a)(4) shall not be prohibited but shall be subject to the applicable provisions of this title.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Iowa Code §123.144 and 2013 H.F. 488 2. However, any person of legal age may bottle beer for personal use and if it is not sold or offered in exchange for any type of consideration. In addition, such beer may be removed from the premises where it was bottled for personal use if the beer is not sold or offered in exchange for any type of consideration.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Kan. Stat. Ann. §41-104 No person shall manufacture, bottle, blend, sell, barter, transport, deliver, furnish or possess any alcoholic liquor for beverage purposes, except as specifically provided in this act, the club and drinking establishment act or article 27 of chapter 41 of the Kansas Statutes Annotated, except that nothing contained in this act shall prevent: (a) The possession and transportation of alcoholic liquor for the personal use of the possessor, the possessor’s family and guests except that the provisions of K.S.A. 41-407, and amendments thereto, shall be applicable to all persons; (b) the making of wine, cider or beer by a person from fruits, vegetables or grains, or the product thereof, by simple fermentation and without distillation, if it is made solely for the use of the maker and the maker’s family . . .
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
La. Rev. Stat. Ann. §26:793 A. (5)(a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law to the contrary, the commissioner shall issue a three-day special event permit to any retail dealer qualified for on premise consumption who applies for such permit at no fee authorizing the retail dealer to allow a person to bring homebrew alcoholic beverages on his licensed premises for the purpose of possessing, consuming, and serving such homebrew on his licensed premises in connection with homebrew club meetings, organized affairs, exhibitions, or competitions such as homebrewer’s contests, tastings, or judging in accordance with all of the following criteria: (i) Homebrew shall not be sold or offered for sale. (ii) Homebrew shall be served only to those individuals attending the special event and shall not be served to the patrons of the retail establishment or general public. (iii) All homebrew alcoholic beverages shall be removed from the licensed premises within a reasonable time upon conclusion of the special event. (iv) The retail dealer shall not be required to obtain a special events permit from the Department of Health and Hospitals and shall be exempt from any additional compliance with the state’s Sanitary Code but only with regard to the duration and location of the special event. (b) For purposes of this Paragraph, “homebrew” shall mean the brewing of beer, mead, and other alcoholic beverages through fermentation on a small scale as a hobby for personal consumption, free distribution at residential social gatherings, and amateur brewing competitions or other noncommercial reasons as provided for in Paragraph (1) of this Subsection regarding special event licenses.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Md. Tax-General Code Ann. §5-104 (a) In general. — (1) The alcoholic beverage tax does not apply to an alcoholic beverage that is: (iii) beer or wine that is family-produced and is brought into, possessed, or transported in the state by an individual who is a member of that family if: 1. the individual is at least 21 years of age; and 2. the beer or wine is for personal use or for entry in a licensed national family beer and wine exhibition . . .
Md. Code, Art. 2B, §1-201 (b) Family wine, beer, or cider for home consumption, etc. — (1) A license or permit is not required for the manufacture of family wine, beer, or cider exclusively for home consumption, competition, or use in a licensed national family wine exhibition and not for sale. (2) In St. Mary’s County, cider or native wines may be sold by their maker without a license.
Md. Code, Art. 2B, §2-101 (m) National family beer and wine exhibition permit. — (1) A national family beer and wine exhibition permit may be issued at the discretion of the Office of the Comptroller to a bona fide national family wine association, national family beer association, or national family beer and wine association. (2) The permit holder may conduct a national family beer and wine exhibition and competition. (3) The permit holder may receive for use, exhibition, and tastings at a national family beer and wine exhibit: (i) Tax free family-produced beer and wine; (ii) Tax paid commercially-produced beers and wines from licensed nonresident dealers or manufacturers through licensed Maryland wholesalers or wines through licensed Class 4 wineries; and (iii) Commercially-produced beer and wine from non-Maryland licensed manufacturers or suppliers subject to the tax imposed in §5-102 of the Tax – General Article. (4) A nonresident dealer’s permit is not required of a non-Maryland licensed supplier for shipment of beer and wine to a national family beer and wine exhibition permittee. (5) The permit holder may not sell but may exhibit, judge, and taste beer and wine acquired pursuant to this section at the place designated in the application for a period not exceeding five days. (6) Manufacturers, nonresident dealers, suppliers, and wholesalers or their representatives may act as judges or participate at a national family beer and wine exhibition. (7) The permit may be granted for: (i) An unlicensed premises; (ii) A Class B or Class C alcoholic beverages licensed premises; or (iii) A Baltimore City Class B-D-7 alcoholic beverages licensed premises. (8) The permit authorizes the possession and consumption of beer and wine on the named premises with the permission of the licensee as provided in this section, notwithstanding contrary provisions of § 12-107 of this article. (9) (i) The permit holder shall file a report on forms provided by the Office of the Comptroller of the number of gallons of commercially-produced beer and wine received from nonlicensed suppliers, and pay the tax provided by §5-102 of the Tax – General Article within 30 days following the close of the exhibition. (ii) Instead of a bond, the Office of the Comptroller may require prepayment of a satisfactory sum to cover the anticipated tax.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Mass. Gen. Laws Ann. ch. 138, §3 This chapter shall not apply to the manufacture or storage of alcoholic beverages by a person for his own private use or to sales of cider at wholesale by the original makers thereof, or to sales of cider by farmers, not to be drunk on the premises, in quantities not exceeding in the aggregate the product of apples raised by them in the season of, or next preceding, such sales, or to sales of cider in any quantity by such farmers not to be drunk on the premises if such cider does not contain more than three percent of alcohol by weight at 60 degrees Fahrenheit; nor shall this chapter apply to sales of cider by the original makers thereof other than such makers and farmers selling not to be drunk on the premises as aforesaid, if the cider does not contain more than three percent alcohol as aforesaid, not to be drunk on the premises as aforesaid.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Mich. Comp. Laws §436.1207 This act does not apply to the following: (b) Beer, wine, mead, honey-based beer, or cider of any alcoholic content made on the premises by the owner or lessee of those premises provided those premises are used and occupied by that owner or lessee as a dwelling and the beer, wine, mead, honey-based beer, or cider is made for family use and home consumption. (c) The gift to an individual for noncommercial use or consumption of up to 20 gallons of beer, wine, mead, honey-based beer, or cider produced under the circumstances described in subdivision (b). This subdivision does not allow a person less than 21 years of age to possess, receive as a gift, or give beer, wine, mead, honey-based beer, or cider produced under the circumstances described in subdivision (b).
Mich. Comp. Laws §436.2027 (3) This section does not prohibit any of the following: (d) A micro brewer, brewpub, or on-premises licensee from allowing the sampling and consumption on the licensed premises of beer, wine, mead, honey-based beer, or cider produced by one or more home brewers at a meeting of home brewers, or a club composed primarily of home brewers, under the following circumstances: (i) The sampling or consumption is for the purpose of exhibitions or competitions involving home brewers. (ii) The beer, honey-based beer, or cider is served in portions that do not exceed three ounces. The wine or mead is served in portions that do not exceed two ounces. (iii) The beer, wine, mead, honey-based beer, or cider produced by the home brewer is only consumed by the home brewer, the home brewer’s family, a club member, a judge, or a guest speaker and is not sold to members of the general public. (iv) The participants in the sampling or consumption otherwise comply with applicable state and federal law and applicable regulatory provisions of this act and rules adopted by the commission under this act. (v) The participants in the sampling or consumption are not charged for the sampling or consumption of the beer, wine, mead, honey-based beer, or cider.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Minn. Stat. §340A.301 Subd. 9. Unlicensed manufacture. Nothing in this chapter requires a license for the natural fermentation of fruit juices or brewing of beer in the home for family use.
Minn. Stat. §340A.33 Notwithstanding anything in this chapter, the owner of a brew on premises store shall not be considered a brewer, manufacturer, wholesaler, or retailer of intoxicating liquor if the owner complies with this section and with Code of Federal Regulations, title 27, part 25, subpart L, §§25.205 and 25.206. For purposes of this section, a brew on premises store is a facility that provides the ingredients and equipment for a customer to use to brew malt liquor at the store. Alcoholic beverages may not be sold or otherwise provided to customers of a brew on premises store, unless the owner of the brew on premises store holds the appropriate liquor license. Customers using the brew on premises store must be of the minimum age required to purchase intoxicating liquor. Malt liquor brewed by a customer in the store must not be sold and must be used by the customer solely for personal or family use.
Minn. Stat. §340A.34 A commercial establishment in which individuals make wine on the premises for personal and family use only and not for resale, using ingredients or materials or both supplied by the establishment, is not required to be licensed under this chapter if the establishment is operated in accordance with Code of Federal Regulations, title 27, §24.75. No person under the age of 21 years may participate in the making of wine in such an establishment. Alcoholic beverages may not be sold or otherwise provided to customers of an establishment described in this section unless the establishment holds the appropriate license for such sale or provision.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Miss. Code Ann. §67-3-11 and 2013 Chapter 345 (1) Every person shall have the right to make homemade wine for domestic or household uses only, free of all restraint by this chapter or otherwise, and no such election as provided for in §§67-3-7, 67-3-9 and 67-3-13, shall deprive any person of the right to make homemade wine for domestic or household uses only.
(2) (a) Every person 21 years of age or older shall have the right to make homemade beer for personal, family, domestic or household uses without restraint by this chapter or otherwise if the beer is made in a county or municipality in which the possession of light wine or beer is lawful. (b) The maximum amount of homemade beer that a person may make in a calendar year shall not exceed: (i) 100 gallons if there is only one person over the age of 21 years of age residing in the household; and (ii) 200 gallons if there are two or more persons over the age of 21 years residing in the household. (c) A person who makes homemade beer as authorized in this section may remove the beer from the premises of the household where it is made and transport the beer only for the purpose of participating in a bona fide exhibition, contest or competition where homemade beer is being tasted and judged; however, homemade beer may not be sold or offered for sale under any circumstances.
Miss. Code Ann. §97-31-21 It shall be unlawful for any person, firm or corporation to manufacture, or distill any vinous, malt, spirituous, or intoxicating liquor or drink which if drunk to excess will produce intoxiction. But this statute shall not prohibit citizens of this state from making wine from grapes or berries grown in this state, at their respective homes and using and consuming the same in the home where made, by the family residing therein and dispensing same to guests within said home. . .
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Mo. Rev. Stat. §311.055 and 2013 S.B. 121 1. No person at least 21 years of age shall be required to obtain a license to manufacture intoxicating liquor, as defined in §311.020, for personal or family use. The aggregate amount of intoxicating liquor manufactured per household shall not exceed 200 gallons per calendar year if there are two or more persons over the age of 21 years in such household, or 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one person over the age of 21 years in such household. Any intoxicating liquor manufactured under this section may not be offered for sale.
2. Beer brewed under this section may be removed from the premises where brewed for personal or family use, including use at organized affairs, exhibitions, or competitions, such as home brewer contests, tastings, or judging. The use may occur off licensed retail premises, on any premises under a temporary retail license issued under §§311.218, 311.482, 311.485, 311.486, or 311.487, or on any tax exempt organization’s licensed premises as described in §311.090.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Mont. Code Ann. §16-3-201 (2) This code does not prohibit the manufacture of beer, for personal or family use and not intended for sale, that meets the exemptions of 26 U.S.C. §5053(e) and regulations implementing that section, including the brewing of beer, for personal or family use, on premises other than those of the person brewing the beer.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Neb. Rev. Stat. §53-168.06 No person shall manufacture, bottle, blend, sell, barter, transport, deliver, furnish, or possess any alcoholic liquor for beverage purposes except as specifically provided in the Nebraska Liquor Control Act. Nothing in the act shall prevent (1) the possession of alcoholic liquor legally obtained as provided in the act for the personal use of the possessor and his or her family and guests; (2) the making of wine, cider, or other alcoholic liquor by a person from fruits, vegetables, or grains, or the product thereof, by simple fermentation and without distillation, if made solely for the use of the maker and his or her family and guests . . .
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Nev. Rev. Stat. §597.245 1. A person may operate an instructional wine-making facility if the person: (a) Obtains a license for the facility pursuant to chapter 369 of NRS; (b) Complies with the requirements of this section; and (c) Complies with any other applicable governmental requirements for the operation of such a facility, including, without limitation, compliance with all applicable federal bonding, permitting and other requirements for the production, blending, treatment, storage and bottling of wine.
3. Wine produced on the premises of an instructional wine-making facility must be: (a) Used, consumed or disposed of on the premises of the facility; or (b) Distributed from the facility to a person of legal age who has participated directly in the process of wine making on the premises of the facility for the person’s own household or personal use. That person: (1) May distribute the wine to any other person of legal age as a gift. (2) Shall not remove from the facility: (I) Any wine other than that which the person participated directly in the process of making on the premises of the facility. (II) More than 60 gallons of wine during any period of 12 months.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. §175:5-b and 2013 Chapter 25 I. Except as provided in this section, this title shall not apply to the production of beer or wine other than fortified wine by persons over 21 years of age for personal or family use, when such beer or wine is not offered for sale or sold, when produced in the following aggregate amount per household: (a) Not in excess of 200 gallons per calendar year if there are 2 or more persons producing beer or wine in such household. (b) Not in excess of 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one person producing beer or wine in such household.
II. It shall be unlawful for any person to produce beer or wine for personal or family use in excess of the amounts permitted in paragraph I or to offer for sale or sell such beer or wine.
III. Beer or wine produced under the provisions of paragraph I may be removed from the premises where made for personal or family use for use at organized home brewing meetings, exhibitions, or competitions, such as homebrewer’s contests, tastings, or judgings, and for personal off-premises use. Beer or wine used under this paragraph shall not be sold or offered for sale.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
N.J. Rev. Stat. §33:1-75 b. The director may, subject to rules and regulations, issue special permits authorizing the manufacture of wines in an instructional winemaking facility by a person who is 21 years of age or older, residing within or without this state, in quantities not exceeding 200 gallons per calendar year for the person’s personal or household use or consumption.
c. The director shall, by regulation, establish a reasonable fee to cover the costs incurred in issuing the special permits required by this section.
d. A person manufacturing wines pursuant to this section shall not be liable for any tax imposed under the “Alcoholic beverage tax law,” R.S.54:41-1 et seq.
N.J. Rev. Stat. §33:1-75.1 a. A person who is 21 years of age or older may manufacture within a home or other noncommercial premises wines or malt alcoholic beverages in quantities not exceeding 200 gallons per calendar year for the person’s personal or household use or consumption.
b. A special permit shall not be required to manufacture wines or malt alcoholic beverages pursuant to this section.
c. A person manufacturing malt alcoholic beverages pursuant to this section shall not be liable for any tax imposed under the “Alcoholic beverage tax law,” R.S.54:41-1 et seq.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
N.M. Stat. Ann. §60-6A-26.1 A. In any local option district, a person qualified under the provisions of the Liquor Control Act [60-3A-1 NMSA 1978], except as otherwise provided in the Domestic Winery and Small Brewery Act [60-6A-21 to 60-6A-28 NMSA 1978], may apply for and be issued a small brewer’s license.
B. A small brewer’s license authorizes the person to whom it is issued to: (9) allow members of the public, on the licensed premises and under the direct supervision of the licensee, to manufacture beer for personal consumption and not for resale using the licensee’s equipment and ingredients.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
N.C. Gen. Stat. §18B-306 An individual may make, possess, and transport native wines and malt beverages for his own use and for the use of his family and guests. Native wines shall be made principally from honey, grapes, or other fruit or grain grown in this state, or from wine kits containing honey, grapes, or other fruit or grain concentrates, and shall have only that alcoholic content produced by natural fermentation. Malt beverages may be made by use of malt beverage kits containing grain extracts or concentrates. Wine kits and malt beverage kits may be sold in this state. No ABC permit is required to make beverages pursuant to this section.
N.C. Gen. Stat. §18B-1001 When the issuance of the permit is lawful in the jurisdiction in which the premises are located, the Commission may issue the following kinds of permits: (14) Brew on Premises Permit. – A permit may be issued to a business, located in a jurisdiction where the sale of malt beverages is allowed, where individual customers who are 21 years old or older may purchase ingredients and rent the equipment, time, and space to brew malt beverages for personal use in amounts set forth in 27 C.F.R. §25.205. The customer must do all of the following: a. Select a recipe and kettle. b. Weigh out the proper ingredients and add them to the kettle. c. Transfer the wort to the fermenter. d. Add the yeast. e. Place the ingredients in a fermentation room. f. Filter, carbonate, and bottle the malt beverage. A permittee may transfer the ingredients from the fermentation room to the cold room and may assist the customer in all the steps involved in brewing a malt beverage except adding the yeast. A malt beverage produced under this subdivision may not contain more than six percent alcohol by volume.
(17) Winemaking on Premises Permit. – A permit may be issued to a business, located in a jurisdiction where the sale of unfortified wine is allowed, where individual customers who are 21 years old or older may purchase ingredients and rent the equipment, time, and space to make unfortified wine for personal use in amounts set forth in 27 C.F.R. §24.75. Except for wine produced for testing equipment or recipes and samples pursuant to this subdivision, the permit holder shall not engage in the actual production or manufacture of wine. Samples may be consumed on the premises only by a person who has a nonrefundable contract to ferment at the premises, and the samples may not exceed one ounce per sample. All wine produced at a winemaking on premises facility shall be removed from the premises by the customer and may only be used for home consumption and the personal use of the customer.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
N.D. Cent. Code §5-01-04 A person may manufacture alcoholic beverages for personal or family use, and not for sale, without securing a license if the amount manufactured is within quantities allowed by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department. Any person manufacturing alcoholic beverages within this state in quantities greater than those permitted by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department is guilty of a class A misdemeanor and property used for the same is subject to disposition by the court except any person may establish a brewery for the manufacture of malt beverages, a winery, or a distillery or other plant for the distilling, manufacturing, or processing of alcohol within this state if the person has secured a license from the tax commissioner. This license must be issued on a calendar-year basis with a fee of $500. A first-time license fee may be reduced 25 percent for each full quarter of a year elapsed between the first day of the year for which the license is issued and the date on which the application for the license is filed with the tax commissioner. A license may not be issued for any period for a fee less than one-half of the annual license fee. This license shall allow sale to only licensed wholesalers.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Okla. Stat. tit. 37, §163.1 Provided, that nothing herein shall prevent a person from making low-point beer, as defined by §163.2 of this title, by simple fermentation for personal use if the maker of such beverages has first applied for and possesses a valid personal use permit issued by the Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement Commission, as provided in §4 of this act, and the total volume of low-point beer produced in any given calendar year is less than 200 gallons. No beverage made pursuant to a personal use permit shall be sold or offered for sale.
Okla. Stat. tit. 37, §505 A. No person shall manufacture, rectify, sell, possess, store, import into or export from this state, transport, or deliver any alcoholic beverage except as specifically provided in the Oklahoma Alcoholic Beverage Control Act. Provided, that nothing herein shall prevent the possession and transportation of alcoholic beverages for the personal use of the possessor and his or her family and guests, so long as the Oklahoma excise tax has been paid thereon, except for beer. Provided, further, that nothing herein shall prevent a person from making beer, as defined by §506 of this title, cider, or wine, as defined by §506 of this title, by simple fermentation and without distillation for personal use if the maker of such beverages has first applied for and possesses a valid personal use permit issued by the Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement Commission as provided in §4 of this act and the total volume of beer, cider or wine produced in any given calendar year is less than 200 gallons. No beverages made pursuant to a personal use permit shall be sold or offered for sale.
Okla. Stat. tit. 37, §520A The Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement Commission is authorized to issue, upon application of a person who is 21 years of age or older, an annual personal use permit which when granted authorizes the holder thereof to make, store, possess and transport for personal use, low-point beer as defined by §163.2 of this title, beer as defined by §506 of this title, fermented non-distilled ciders, and wine as defined by §506 of this title. The total volume of each authorized beverage made and possessed for personal use in a given calendar year shall be limited to a volume less than 200 gallons. The term “personal use” as used in this section and §§163.1 and 505 of Title 37 of the Oklahoma Statutes means the individual making beverages pursuant to a valid personal use permit issued by the Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement Commission produces such beverages solely for his or her use and consumption, for consumption by his or her family and guests, and for transport to and use at organized affairs, exhibitions or competitions, including, but not limited to, homemaker contests, tastings or judgings. No beverage made pursuant to a personal use permit shall be sold or offered for sale.
Okla. Stat. tit. 37, §554 A. The excise tax levied by Section 553 of this title shall not apply to: 4. Beer, cider and wine made for personal use pursuant to a personal use permit issued as provided in Section 505 of this title
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Or. Rev. Stat. §471.037 (1) As used in this section and ORS 471.268: (a)(A) “Financial consideration,” except as provided in subparagraph (B) of this paragraph, means value that is given or received directly or indirectly through sales, barter, trade, fees, charges, dues, contributions or donations. (B) “Financial consideration” does not mean any of the following: (i) A tax deduction or credit for donating beer, wine or fermented fruit juice to a nonprofit organization. (ii) An event admission charge or club or organization dues, if the amount of the admission charge or dues is independent of the amount of alcoholic beverages to be provided or consumed at the event or through club or organization activities. (iii) A prize awarded at a state or county fair or other organized judging, tasting, exhibition, contest or competition at which consumption of a submitted beer, wine or fermented fruit juice is without charge and only by the entrants, submitters, judges, exhibitors, contestants or competitors. (iv) Homemade beers, wines or fermented fruit juices made by other persons. (v) Beer, wine or fermented fruit juice ingredients. (vi) Wages and salaries paid by an educational organization for teaching brewing, winemaking, fermentation science or fermentation processes. (b) “Homemade” means made for noncommercial purposes. (c) “Noncommercial” means not dependent or conditioned upon the provision or receipt of financial consideration.
(2) Except as provided in subsection (3) of this section, the Liquor Control Act does not apply to the following: (a) The making of homemade beer, wine or fermented fruit juice, if the total of beer, wine and fermented fruit juice produced during a calendar year does not exceed: (A) 100 gallons in a household having one person who is 21 years of age or older; or (B) 200 gallons in a household having two or more persons who are 21 years of age or older. (b) The keeping, storage or transportation of homemade beer, wine or fermented fruit juice. (c) The possession of mash, wort or wash, for the purpose of making homemade beer, wine or fermented fruit juice. (d) Except as provided in ORS 471.268, the noncommercial consumption at any location of homemade beer, wine or fermented fruit juice.
(3) Subsection (2) of this section does not exempt any person from ORS 471.410, 471.430 or 471.432.
Or. Rev. Stat. §471.268 (1) In addition to any other privilege granted to a licensee under this chapter, a licensee may conduct an organized judging, tasting, exhibition, contest or competition of malt beverages and wines produced under ORS 471.403 (2) and (3) or homemade beers, wines and fermented fruit juices, or related events, at the premises described in a full or limited on-premises sales license, off-premises sales license, brewery-public house license, brewery license, winery license or warehouse license of the licensee. However, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission may restrict the portion of the licensed premises that may be used for the judging, tasting, exhibition, contest, competition or related events and may restrict or prohibit sales of alcoholic beverages on the portion of the premises that is being used for conducting the judging, tasting, exhibition, contest, competition or related events.
(2) In addition to any other privilege granted to a licensee under this chapter, a licensee may allow malt beverages and wines produced under ORS 471.403 (2) and (3) or homemade beers, wines and fermented fruit juices to be stored at the premises described in a full or limited on-premises sales license, off-premises sales license, brewery-public house license, brewery license, winery license or warehouse license of the licensee. The malt beverages or wines and the homemade beers, wines or fermented fruit juices must be clearly identified by owner and kept separate from the alcoholic beverage stock of the licensee.
(3) A licensee may not acquire any ownership interest in malt beverages and wines produced under ORS 471.403 (2) and (3) or homemade beers, wines or fermented fruit juices stored under this section. However, this subsection does not prohibit a licensee from using malt beverages and wines produced under ORS 471.403 (2) and (3) or homemade beers, wines or fermented fruit juices in conducting an organized judging, tasting, exhibition, contest or competition of the malt beverages and wines or homemade beers, wines or fermented fruit juices, or related events, if the malt beverages and wines or the homemade beers, wines or fermented fruit juices are stored with the licensee for that purpose.
Or. Rev. Stat. §471.403 (1) Except as provided in this section, a person may not brew, ferment, distill, blend or rectify any alcoholic liquor unless licensed so to do by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission.
(2) The holder of a brewery-public house license or a brewery license may allow patrons to brew malt beverages not to exceed 14 percent alcoholic content by volume if the brewing is conducted under the direct supervision of the licensee or employees of the licensee. Malt beverages produced under this subsection may not be sold by the patron.
(3) The holder of a winery license may allow patrons to make wine if the winemaking is conducted under the direct supervision of the licensee or employees of the licensee. Wine produced under this subsection may not be sold by the patron.
(4) A person may make homemade beer, wine and fermented fruit juice as authorized under ORS 471.037. A person may provide assistance to another in making the homemade beer, wine or fermented fruit juice, if the person does not receive financial consideration as defined in ORS 471.037 for providing the assistance.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Pa. Stat. tit. 47, §4-492 It shall be unlawful– (1) Manufacturing Without License. Except as provided herein, for any person, to manufacture malt or brewed beverages, unless such person holds a valid manufacturer’s license for such purpose issued by the board. Malt or brewed beverages may be produced by any person without a license if such malt or brewed beverages are produced not for sale and total production does not exceed 200 gallons per calendar year. Malt or brewed beverages produced in accordance with this paragraph may be used at organized affairs, exhibitions, competitions, contests, tastings or judging provided it is not sold or offered for sale.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
R.I. Gen. Laws §3-1-3 Nothing contained in this title and chapter shall be construed as to prohibit the manufacture of cider, or the sale of cider; or the manufacture of wine or malt liquors for domestic use.
R.I. Gen. Laws §3-7-7.4 (a) A brew on premises license (BOP) authorizes the holder to provide brewing supplies and facilities to the public for the private manufacture of malt beverages on the licensed premises. The BOP license shall not authorize the sale of malt beverage to the general public on the premises nor the consumption of alcoholic beverages on the premises. The annual fee for the license shall be $1,000 for producing more than 50,000 gallons per year and $100 per year for producing less than 50,000 gallons per year, prorated to the year ending December 1 in every calendar year and paid to the director of the department of business regulation. . . .
(d) Any facility issued a license pursuant to this section shall, in addition to any federal regulations, comply with the following conditions: (4) The same individual is responsible for brewing, handling or transporting the beer produced and must be at least 21 years of age. This individual may produce beer within the prescribed quantity of limitations, shall not transport in excess of 20 gallons of beer produced, and may not sell beer produced. Production of beer for personal use may not be in violation of federal law or regulation or state law or regulation. Beer produced at a brew on premises facility may be removed only for the personal use of the brewer. (ii) The production of beer per household for personal or family use may not exceed: (A) 200 gallons per calendar year if there are two or more adults residing in the household; or (B) 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one adult residing in the household
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
S.C. Code Ann. §61-6-20 As used in the ABC Act, unless the context clearly requires otherwise: (1)(a) “Alcoholic liquors” or “alcoholic beverages” means any spirituous malt, vinous, fermented, brewed (whether lager or rice beer), or other liquors or a compound or mixture of them by whatever name called or known which contains alcohol and is used as a beverage, but does not include: (i) wine when manufactured or made for home consumption and which is not sold by the maker of the wine or by another person . . .
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
S.D. Codified Laws Ann. §35-1-5.4 Any person who produces for personal, family, or similar use 200 gallons or less of malt beverage each year or any person who produces for personal, family, or similar use 200 gallons or less of wine each year is exempt from any license required by this title and is exempt from any tax or fee imposed by this title. The malt beverage or wine produced pursuant to this section may not be sold or offered for sale.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Tenn. Code Ann. §39-17-708 (a) Notwithstanding the provisions of this part, a private individual in the person’s own home may manufacture and possess wine or beer in an amount not in excess of that amount annually permitted as of January 1, 1997, by federal statutes and regulations relative to household manufacture and consumption; provided, that the wine or beer is for personal consumption by members and guests of the household. Such wine or beer may also be transported by the person, member or guest without being in violation of this part; provided, that the amount being transported at any one time shall not exceed five gallons.
(b) It shall be inferred that transportation of more than five gallons is for the purpose of resale or redistribution.
(c) For purposes of this section, “beer” means the undistilled and unfortified product, of any name or description, of the normal alcoholic fermentation of malt or other ingredients except grapes.
Tenn. Code Ann. §57-3-207 (e) Notwithstanding this section, a private individual in that person’s own home may manufacture wine in an amount not in excess of that amount annually permitted as of March 22, 1973, by federal statute and regulations relative to household manufacture and consumption; provided, that the wine is for personal consumption by members of that person’s household.
Tenn. Code Ann. §57-3-218 (a) A winemaking on premises facility license may be issued as provided in this section for a business, located in a jurisdiction where the establishment of a winery is permitted pursuant to §57-3-207, where individual customers who are 21 years of age or older may purchase ingredients and rent the equipment, time, and space to manufacture wine, as defined in §57-3-101, for personal use in an amount not to exceed the maximum amount that a private individual in that person’s own home may manufacture pursuant to §57-3-207(e). Any applicant for licensure under this section shall submit a verified, written application to the commission on the proper form authorized to be prescribed and furnished in this section, and the application may be granted by the commission, subject to the restrictions of this chapter. Subject to the limitations of subsection (b), any winemaking on premises facility license issued pursuant to this section shall authorize the holder of the license and the holder’s customers to manufacture, but not rectify, wine, and the winemaking on premises facility license shall authorize the holder of the license and the holder’s customers to place the wine in containers or bottles. . .
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Note: Anything over 15% ABV requires a license.
Relevant Statues
Tex. Alcoholic Beverage Code Ann. §109.21 (a) The head of a family or an unmarried adult may produce for the use of his family or himself not more than 200 gallons of wine, ale, malt liquor, or beer, per year. No license or permit is required.
(b) The commission may prohibit the use of any ingredient it finds detrimental to health or susceptible of use to evade this code. Only wine made from the normal alcoholic fermentation of the juices of dandelions or grapes, raisins, or other fruits may be produced under this section. Only ale, malt liquor, or beer made from the normal alcoholic fermentation of malted barley with hops, or their products, and with or without other malted or unmalted cereals, may be produced under this section. The possession of wine, ale, malt liquor, or beer produced under this section is not an offense if the person making it complies with all provisions of this section and the wine, ale, malt liquor, or beer is not distilled, fortified, or otherwise altered to increase its alcohol content.
(c) There is no annual state fee for beverages produced in compliance with this section.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
(2) An individual may without being licensed under this chapter manufacture in the individual’s personal residence a fermented alcoholic beverage if: (a) the individual is 21 years of age or older; (b) the individual manufactures no more than: (i) 100 gallons in a calendar year, if there is one individual that is 21 years of age or older residing in the household; or (ii) 200 gallons in a calendar year, if there are two or more individuals who are 21 years of age or older residing in the household; (c) the fermented alcoholic beverage is manufactured and used for personal or family use and consumption, including use at an organized event where fermented alcoholic beverages are judged as to taste and quality; and (d) the fermented alcoholic beverage is not for: (i) sale or offering for sale; or (ii) consumption on a licensed premise.
(3) An individual may store a fermented alcoholic beverage manufactured as provided in Subsection (2) in the individual’s personal residence.
(4) A fermented alcoholic beverage manufactured in accordance with Subsection (2) may be removed from the premises where it is manufactured: (a) for personal or family use, including use at an organized event where fermented alcoholic beverages are judged as to taste and quality; (b) if the fermented alcoholic beverage is transported in compliance with §41-6a-526; and (c) if the fermented alcoholic beverage is removed only in the following quantities: (i) for personal and family use that is unrelated to an organized event where fermented alcoholic beverages are judged as to taste and quality, the quantity that may be possessed at one time is: (A) one liter of wine for each individual who is 21 years of age or older residing in the household; (B) 72 ounces of heavy beer for each individual who is 21 years of age or older residing in the household; or (C) 72 ounces of beer for each individual who is 21 years of age or older residing in the household; and (ii) for on-premise consumption at an organized event where fermented alcoholic beverages are judged as to taste and quality, the quantity that may be removed for each organized event is: (A) one liter of wine for each wine category in which the individual enters, except that the individual may not remove wine for more than three categories for the same organized event; (B) 72 ounces of heavy beer for each heavy beer category in which the individual enters, except that the individual may not remove heavy beer for more than three categories for the same organized event; or (C) 72 ounces of beer for each beer category in which the individual enters, except that the individual may not remove beer for more than three categories for the same organized event.
(5) A partnership, corporation, or association may not manufacture a fermented alcoholic beverage under this section for personal or family use and consumption without obtaining a license under this chapter, except that an individual who operates a brewery under this chapter as an individual owner or in partnership with others, may remove beer from the brewery for personal or family use in the amounts described in Subsection (2)(b).
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Vt. Stat. Ann. tit. 7, §2 (30) “Home-fermented beverages”: malt or vinous beverages produced at home and not for sale. Vt. Stat. Ann. tit. 7, §65 (a) A person of legal age may, without obtaining a license under this title or paying state taxes or fees, produce malt or vinous beverages, or both, at home provided that the amount of home-fermented beverages produced by that person does not exceed the quantities limitation in 26 U.S.C. §§5053 and 5042.
(b) Home-fermented beverages produced pursuant to this section may be transported to and offered for tasting at an organized event, exhibition, or competition held for home-fermented beverages, provided all the following conditions are met: (1) The sponsor provides written notice of the event to the department no later than 10 days prior to the date of the event. The notice shall include a description of the delineated area in which the tastings will be offered, and in the case of a competition, the names of the judges hired by the sponsor. (2) The public is not charged a fee for the tastings or for admission to the event, exhibition or competition. However, the sponsor may charge a fee to the producers of home-fermented beverages for their participation in the event. (3) Tastings of home-fermented beverages are offered only within the delineated area specified in the notice to the department. (4) No home-fermented beverages may be sold or offered for sale to the public, and all unused home-fermented beverages shall be disposed of by the permit holder. (5) The event will be conducted in compliance with all the requirements of this title. (6), (7) [Deleted.]
(c) A person who sponsors an organized event, exhibition or competition under this section or participates in the event as a producer of home-fermented beverages who violates any provision of this section may be fined not more than $ 1,000.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Va. Code §4.1-200 The licensure requirements of this chapter shall not apply to: 6. Any person who manufactures at his residence or at a gourmet brewing shop for domestic consumption at his residence, but not to be sold, dispensed or given away, except as hereinafter provided, wine or beer or both, in an amount not to exceed the limits permitted by federal law.
Any person who manufactures wine or beer in accordance with this subdivision may remove from his residence an amount not to exceed 50 liters of such wine or 15 gallons of such beer on any one occasion for (i) personal or family use, provided such use does not violate the provisions of this title or Board regulations; (ii) giving to any person to whom wine or beer may be lawfully sold an amount not to exceed (a) one liter of wine per person per year or (b) 72 ounces of beer per person per year, provided such gift is for noncommercial purposes; or (iii) giving to any person to whom beer may lawfully be sold a sample of such wine or beer, not to exceed (a) one ounce of wine by volume or (b) two ounces of beer by volume for on-premises consumption at events organized for judging or exhibiting such wine or beer, including events held on the premises of a retail licensee. Nothing in this paragraph shall be construed to authorize the sale of such wine or beer.
The provision of this subdivision shall not apply to any person who resides on property on which a winery, farm winery, or brewery is located.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Wash. Rev. Code §66.12.010 Nothing in this title, other than RCW 66.28.140, applies to wine or beer manufactured in any home for private consumption, and not for sale. Wash. Rev. Code §66.28.140 (1) An adult member of a household may remove family beer or wine from the home subject to the following conditions: (a) The quantity removed by a producer is limited to a quantity not exceeding twenty gallons; (b) Family beer or wine is not removed for sale; and (c) Family beer or wine is removed from the home for private use, including use at organized affairs, exhibitions, or competitions such as homemaker’s contests, tastings, or judging.
(2) As used in this section, “family beer or wine” means beer or wine manufactured in the home for private consumption, and not for sale.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
W. Va. Code §60-6-2 The provisions of this chapter may not prevent: (1) A person from manufacturing wine at his or her residence for consumption at his or her residence as permitted by section one of this article.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if there are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Wis. Stat. §125.06 No license or permit is required under this chapter for: (3) THEMAKING OF HOMEMADE WINE OR FERMENTED MALT BEVERAGES. (a) The making of homemade wine or fermented malt beverages, and the possession, transportation, or storage of homemade wine or fermented malt beverages, by any person if all of the following apply: 1. The person who makes the wine or fermented malt beverages receives no compensation. 2. The wine or fermented malt beverages are not sold or offered for sale. 3. The total quantity of wine or fermented malt beverages made, in a calendar year, by the person and any other person living in the same household does not exceed 100 gallons if the household has only one person of legal drinking age or 200 gallons if the household has two or more persons of legal drinking age. (b) A person who makes, possesses, transports, or stores homemade wine or fermented malt beverages in compliance with the limitations specified in par. (a) is not a brewer or a manufacturer of wine for purposes of this chapter. (c) Homemade wine or fermented malt beverages made in compliance with the limitations specified in par. (a) may be consumed by the person who made it and his or her family, neighbors, and friends at any private residence or other private location where the possession and consumption of alcohol is permissible under this chapter, local ordinances, and other applicable law. This paragraph does not apply to licensed premises.
(3g) WINE OR FERMENTED MALT BEVERAGES MADE AT SUPPLY STORES. The manufacture of wine or fermented malt beverages by any person at a business primarily engaged in selling supplies and equipment for use by homebrewers or home winemakers, and, notwithstanding §125.09 (1), the tasting at the business of wine or fermented malt beverages so manufactured, if the wine or fermented malt beverages are not sold or offered for sale. Wine or fermented malt beverages provided at a business for tasting under this subsection may only be provided by a person who holds an operator’s license issued under §125.17.
(3m) THE USE OF HOMEMADE WINE OR FERMENTED MALT BEVERAGES FOR COMPETITIONS OR EXHIBITIONS OR SIMILAR PURPOSES. (a) The use of homemade wine or fermented malt beverages made in compliance with the limitations specified in sub. (3) (a) for purposes of exhibition, demonstration, judging, tasting, or sampling or as part of a contest or competition, if the exhibition, demonstration, judging, tasting, sampling, contest, or competition is held at a private residence or on a licensed premises. Homemade wine or fermented malt beverages used for purposes described in this paragraph, including the submission or consumption of such wine or fermented malt beverages, are not considered sold or offered for sale under sub. (3) (a) 2. and any prize awarded at a contest or competition or as a result of an exhibition, demonstration, judging, tasting, or sampling is not considered compensation under sub. (3) (a) 1., but no fee may be charged for consumption of the homemade wine or fermented malt beverages at the exhibition, demonstration, judging, tasting, sampling, contest, or competition. (b) Notwithstanding §§125.14 (5), 125.315, 125.32 (6) (a), 125.34 (2) and (5), and 125.67, a person who is not a licensee under this chapter may at a private residence, and a person who is a licensee under this chapter may on the licensed premises, conduct, sponsor, or host a contest, competition, or other event for the exhibition, demonstration, judging, tasting, or sampling of homemade wine or fermented malt beverages made in compliance with the limitations specified in sub. (3) (a) if the person does not sell the wine or fermented malt beverages and, unless the person is the maker of the wine or fermented malt beverages, does not acquire any ownership interest in the wine or fermented malt beverages. No fee may be charged for consumption of homemade wine or fermented malt beverages at the contest, competition, or other event. If the contest, competition, or other event is held on licensed premises, the licensee may allow the homemade wine or fermented malt beverages to be stored on the premises if the homemade wine or fermented malt beverages are clearly identified and kept separate from any alcohol beverages owned by the licensee. If the contest, competition, or other event is held on licensed premises, the provisions of §§125.32 (7) and 125.68 (9) (e) do not apply with respect to the homemade wine or fermented malt beverages. If the contest, competition, or other event is held on licensed premises, the licensee shall comply with all provisions of this chapter and local ordinances that would apply if the fermented malt beverages or wine were not homemade, except those provisions made specifically inapplicable under this paragraph. Wis. Stat. §125.10 (1) AUTHORIZATION. Any municipality may enact regulations incorporating any part of this chapter and may prescribe additional regulations for the sale of alcohol beverages, not in conflict with this chapter. The municipality may prescribe forfeitures or license suspension or revocation for violations of any such regulations. Regulations providing forfeitures or license suspension or revocation must be adopted by ordinance. Any municipality may, by ordinance, regulate contests, competitions, or other events for the exhibition, demonstration, judging, tasting, or sampling of homemade wine or fermented malt beverages.
**Production per year is generally governed by the United States government at 100 gallons per adult per year, or up to 200 gallons per year if their are 2 adults of drinking age living in the residence.
Relevant Statues
Wyo. Stat. §12-8-102 (a) Any person who manufactures or rectifies any alcoholic beverage without holding a manufacturer’s license or who possesses a still without holding a manufacturer’s license is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of not more than $1,000, imprisonment for not more than one year, or both. Any equipment possessed and used in an illegal manner shall be confiscated by the state and disposed of as directed by the court. Nothing in this subsection shall prohibit any person from manufacturing fermented or malt beverages in limited quantities for his sole personal consumption.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Can I Sell My HomeBrewed Beer?
Yes and No….
You must contact your states alcoholic beverage control commission and apply for a commercial brewery/winery license if you wish to sell any alcoholic beverages.
The applications for such a permit typically detail a number of stringent requirements which must be met to qualify as a full fledged brewery/winery. So while it is legally possible, it’s not really feasible for most homebrewers.
**For more details, please contact your states ABC agency and ask for a brewery/winery permit application.
Is There A Limit To How Much Beer I Can Make?
The federal government has placed a limit of 100 gallons produced annually for “personal use”, and 200 gallons for households with 2 or more adults of drinking age.
Fun Fact! – 100 gallons averages out to about 1,000 bottles of beer per year, or 2.7 beers per day.
Do I Need A Permit to HomeBrew?
No.
As of July, 2013 – It is legal in every state to brew your own beer for personal use. (no permit required) However it should be noted, that individual state laws may still restrict things like the transportation and amount of alcohol that can be contained in home made beer, wine, mead & cider.
Do I Need A Permit to Distill Liqour?
Yes.
You are required to obtain a permit to operate a distillery of any scale, even if it’s for home consumption & personal use. Generally speaking though, in actual practice permits are usually only granted if the distiller is seeking to open a commercial distillery.
What’s the Highest ABV Beer I Can Brew?
While there are no Federal limitations in place, many states will place a restriction on the allowable ABV percentage of beer, typically ranging from 12% – 15% depending on the state.
What was the 18th amendment and its impact on homebrewing?
The 18th amendment, enacted in 1919, made the sale, production, and transportation of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United States for 14 years. This period is known as Prohibition. It significantly impacted homebrewing as it was considered illegal during this time.
When was homebrewing legalized again in the United States?
Homebrewing was legalized again by the federal government in 1979, 46 years after the repeal of Prohibition. However, states still reserved the right to regulate the production of beer and spirits in whatever way they saw fit.
What was the last state to legalize homebrewing?
The last state to legalize homebrewing was in July of 2013. The article does not specify which state this was.
How do states regulate homebrewing?
States can adopt their own set of standards, leading to a varied landscape of regulation and control of the production, transportation, and consumption of homebrewed beverages. More conservative states may adopt strict regulations on the % ABV beer that you are able to produce and even limit the ability for homebrewers to transport their beer or consume it outside of the residence it was brewed.
How can homebrewers get involved in changing conservative laws?
The article encourages homebrewers to get involved in changing overtly conservative laws that make it difficult for a meaningful homebrewing community to survive. While it does not provide specific steps, typically this would involve advocacy, education, and working with lawmakers to change these laws.
Spirits
Company
FTC Disclosure: Homebrew Academy sometimes uses affiliate links to products which allows us to make a little extra beer money from the merchant (not our readers) if someone buys from from that link. Pretty sweet huh? And beer money is a good thing. It helps keep the lights on and the hops growing. Cheers. | Stat. §12-8-102 (a) Any person who manufactures or rectifies any alcoholic beverage without holding a manufacturer’s license or who possesses a still without holding a manufacturer’s license is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of not more than $1,000, imprisonment for not more than one year, or both. Any equipment possessed and used in an illegal manner shall be confiscated by the state and disposed of as directed by the court. Nothing in this subsection shall prohibit any person from manufacturing fermented or malt beverages in limited quantities for his sole personal consumption.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Can I Sell My HomeBrewed Beer?
Yes and No….
You must contact your states alcoholic beverage control commission and apply for a commercial brewery/winery license if you wish to sell any alcoholic beverages.
The applications for such a permit typically detail a number of stringent requirements which must be met to qualify as a full fledged brewery/winery. So while it is legally possible, it’s not really feasible for most homebrewers.
**For more details, please contact your states ABC agency and ask for a brewery/winery permit application.
Is There A Limit To How Much Beer I Can Make?
The federal government has placed a limit of 100 gallons produced annually for “personal use”, and 200 gallons for households with 2 or more adults of drinking age.
Fun Fact! – 100 gallons averages out to about 1,000 bottles of beer per year, or 2.7 beers per day.
Do I Need A Permit to HomeBrew?
No.
As of July, 2013 – It is legal in every state to brew your own beer for personal use. (no permit required) However it should be noted, that individual state laws may still restrict things like the transportation and amount of alcohol that can be contained in home made beer, wine, mead & cider.
Do I Need A Permit to Distill Liqour?
| yes |
Zymology | Can you make beer at home without a license? | yes_statement | it is possible to make "beer" at "home" without a "license".. brewing "beer" at "home" can be done without a "license". | https://www.thirtyonewhiskey.com/how-to-legally-make-your-own-whiskey-at-home/ | How To (Legally) Make Your Own Whiskey At Home – Thirty-One ... | How To (Legally) Make Your Own Whiskey At Home
I’ll admit it — I’ve been watching way too much of the Discovery Channel docudrama Moonshiners during quarantine. There’s something very compelling about the idea of producing a unique bottle of whiskey, one where your own heart and soul was poured into the glass alongside the alcohol. Thanks to the laws here in the United States, though, distilling and bottling your own spirits is difficult at best — and an illegal and impossible task to accomplish at worst. But you can still technically “make” your own whiskey at home, unique to your personal taste and style, without breaking any laws.
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How Whiskey Is Made
There are four components to the whiskey production process (which, I can attest from experience, will be hammered into your brain more solidly than your own address should you ever decide to take the WSET Spirits Certification course).
The first step is processing the raw materials. For a whiskey, this usually means grinding up a bunch of grains and cooking them in a large pot. The goal of this step is to take the starch compounds in the grains and turn them into sugar, something that can more easily be digested and used in the next step of the process.
Sampling some of the grains as they are being cooked at Tuthilltown Distillery in New York
Once you’ve got a big barrel of sugary liquid, the next thing to do is to add yeast and allow the liquid to ferment. This process can take a couple days, and the end result is that the sugar in the mixture is used by the yeast to multiply and grow. The three results of that process are heat, carbon dioxide, and alcohol. The tricky thing here is keeping the yeast happy — too much heat and they die off (which is why commercial distilleries have water jackets around their fermentation tanks: to take away the heat produced as part of this process). But in the end, at some point the yeast finishes their feast and what’s left is a mildly alcoholic beer.
Up until this point, if you want to do this at home you are 100% in the clear from a legal perspective… usually. I am not a lawyer, none of this is legal advice, and you should consult your own counsel if you have any questions. But home brewing is a common pastime here in the States, and I personally enjoy brewing my own ginger beer using champagne yeast and fresh ginger. This next step, though, is where you can run into problems with the law.
The smaller pot still that’s used for testing new ideas at Still Austin in Austin, Texas.
The process of distilling the mildly alcoholic beer into liquor is the regulated step in the process. This step is all about concentrating that mildly alcoholic liquid (usually about 10% alcohol by volume) into something much stronger using a still. Because alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than water, if you heat your beer and condense the vapors coming off of it you can selectively capture the alcohol rich portions which is your “new make” whiskey.
Here in the United States, there is no way to legally distill alcohol for personal home use without a license. See 27 CFR § 19.51:
A person may not produce distilled spirits at home for personal use. Except as otherwise provided by law, distilled spirits may only be produced by a distilled spirits plant registered with TTB under the provisions of 26 U.S.C. 5171. All distilled spirits produced in the United States are subject to the tax imposed by 26 U.S.C. 5001.
For those looking to go the legal route here, it gets complicated and expensive real quick. Still sites require licenses, bonded operators, and incur taxes as soon as the whiskey starts rolling out of the condenser. Record keeping is required for every drop of liquor produced, and federal regulators check and monitor those operations to make sure the right amount of tax is being paid to the government. And due to the complexity of the regulations, the difficulty in obtaining the licenses, and the other considerations (like zoning laws, etc) that go with them, the bar for operating your own still is set so high that almost no one besides well funded distillery operations can even consider giving it a try.
There are some who just simply ignore that whole section of the law, making moonshine (illegal whiskey produced “by the light of the moon” to avoid detection) in the back woods, constantly running from the ATF and selling their product on the black market. We here at 31W do not recommend breaking the law and, obviously, do not condone y’all trying this at home.
So, the legal implications of distilling alcohol pretty much put the brakes on any home distillation practices. But there is one last component to the whiskey making process, and that’s one that you can absolutely do legally in your own home.
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Let’s Talk About Barrel Aging
First, why do we age whiskey in charred barrels?
Whiskey set aside to age in the rickhouses at Tuthilltown Distillery in New York.
Barrel aging is a process that originates from the wine and beer makers of centuries past. Once the liquid is inside the barrel, it actually moves into and out of the wood as the barrel “breathes” in the environment. When the temperature heats up during the day, the barrel expands and allows some of the liquid into the structures of the wood itself. That liquid breaks down some of the elements of the wood, which then releases flavor. And when the barrel contracts with the cold temperatures at night, that liquid is pushed back out of the wood and the flavors mix with the rest of the liquid.
Some of the flavors you eventually get in a whiskey come from the grains that are used, but the majority of the flavors are imparted from the barrels. There are a ton of variables in this part of the process: from the material the barrels are made from, to the climate they are stored in, even down to the aromas wafting through the local environment. Whereas wine gets most of its flavor from the grapes themselves, whiskey gets most of its character after the spirit has already been distilled.
Scottish distilleries typically use plain or only slightly toasted oak barrels for their aging process, which, combined with their milder climate, develops a lighter and sweeter flavor. American bourbon, on the other hand, uses newly made charred barrels in climates with wilder temperature swings for a deeper and richer flavor. In either case, the whiskey sits in the barrel for a few years before being bottled, soaking up all those delicious flavors.
The impact that has on the price of the whiskey is pretty dramatic. Every year that the whiskey isn’t on the store shelves, the distillery is paying to maintain the warehouse, paying people to tend to the barrels, paying insurance, taxes… there’s a lot of money that goes into a lengthy aging process. Which is why well aged spirits are expensive.
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Is Aging Someone Else’s Whiskey Really “Making” Your Own Whiskey?
The dirty secret in many of the whiskey bottles you find on the shelf today is that, for the majority of them, they are mass produced. The whiskey comes from a large commercial distilling operation, who provide it to other brands and companies who bottle it themselves and sell it on to you.
In some cases, that feels like a bait-and-switch operation. Companies like Templeton Rye have actually been sued (successfully) for trying to market a mass produced whiskey as their own locally distilled craft spirit. And especially for larger companies like USDP, where they have a number of smaller brands with purposefully obscured provenance, it makes you question the quality of the spirit inside.
That said, historically speaking, whiskey has always been a product where the original distiller might not be as important as the aging process. Especially in the Scottish whisky tradition, blended scotch whisky was actually the accepted norm for centuries. Individual merchants would buy whiskey from multiple distilleries, blend it together to form a unique flavor profile, and often finish the whiskey themselves in different flavored casks to produce a new and unique product that was more than the sum of its parts. That’s how we got brands like Johnnie Walker, Famous Grouse, and Cutty Sark.
The same thing is happening in the whiskey world today, with mass produced whiskey from places like MGP in Indiana going to smaller distilleries that all put their own twist on the product. Aging the whiskey in unique materials or unique climates, and all of them getting different results.
Aging a pre-distilled whiskey and calling it your own is a time honored tradition, and one that is generally accepted and even celebrated. Personally, where I start drawing the line is when you make claims (or even just give the impression) that you distilled it yourself. If you are honest about the process and what role you played in the spirit’s production, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be proud of calling a whiskey you aged your own.
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How To Age Your Own Whiskey
So clearly, there are a number of ways to age your own whiskey. If you’ve read up to this point, you probably have an idea of the basic components (barrel material, climate, etc) that typically impact whiskey flavors… and especially because you aren’t likely going to be selling this whiskey, there really isn’t any limit to what you can do to it.
That said, there are a couple common paths that you can take, and some choices that will have a bigger impact on the final output.
Whiskey Selection
If you are really looking for your personal touches to add the most flavor and character, then you should probably start with a lightly aged and lighter flavor profile whiskey. Personally, I use Mellow Corn a lot in my home aged whiskey projects primarily because it’s a corn whiskey (like the base for a bourbon) but it hasn’t been aged with nearly the same strength as something like a Maker’s Mark. There are some good base flavors but still a lot of room to improve.
Starting with other options can impact your final product, and depending on what you are going for that could be good or bad. If you have a favorite bourbon that you think just needs a little something special, then grabbing a couple bottles and starting with that isn’t a bad idea.
For those who want to try the “hard mode” of really finishing a raw whiskey, one option is using a white whiskey as your base. Some local distilleries offer a “white” or “moonshine” version of their spirits, which is pretty much just their usual whiskey straight off the still without any aging whatsoever. These whiskies are a great blank canvas for you to really see the impact in terms of the flavors that your aging process brings to the table.
One word of warning though: often times things marketed as “moonshine” (especially mass produced versions) are from lower quality grain alcohol or have some added sugar sweetness. That’s not to scare you off of using them — rather, just to advocate giving it a try first before investing in a bunch of whiskey that might not turn out so good.
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Barrel Aging
One option for aging is to do exactly what the “big boys” do: grab an oak barrel, slam a bunch of whiskey in it, and roll it into the shed until it is ready. There are a couple considerations you should be aware of here, though, and a couple tips I’ve picked up along the way that might help.
First, be very careful about your barrel size. You’re going to be barreling tax paid whiskey, meaning that it will be expensive to fill a 55 gallon barrel. Thankfully, there are a number of places online where you can buy barrels that are only a liter or two in size — which, frankly, should be about perfect for this purpose.
Besides cost savings, another impact that smaller barrels have on the whiskey is that it takes far less time for the whiskey to age. As we discussed, the aging process is all about getting the whiskey and the oak barrel to interact. Smaller barrels means that there’s more surface area for each drop of alcohol to interact with, which speeds up the process. The only real reason why distilleries choose the bigger barrels is because the material cost of the barrel is reduced if you store more whiskey in it, since there are fewer barrels required to store the same volume of whiskey.
Another consideration for the barrel is the location in which you store it. Whiskey requires changes in temperature to really get the most out of the aging process, which is why whiskey warehouses are typically not climate controlled. The temperature shifts are a feature, not a bug. So, when placing your barrel down for aging, consider whether there will be sufficient enough temperature shifts to get the most out of the process. Putting it in a dark corner of the whiskey shelf in your house will have less of an impact on the whiskey than storing it in your backyard shed, for example.
Another caveat here is to also be careful of the smells that are around your whiskey barrel. Storing in your garage is not advisable, for example, because the oils and compounds in your car and the smell of gasoline can be detrimental to the final product. The same thing can be said of the backyard shed if there is a gas powered lawnmower in it.
In short: barrel size and barrel placement are key if you choose this path.
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Bottle Aging
Not everyone has enough space, whiskey, or time, for a barrel aging process. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still age your own whiskey at home.
One process becoming more popular is bottle aging. In this process, instead of putting your whiskey in a barrel, you put the barrel in your whiskey. Stay with me here, I promise this isn’t crazy talk: you place the oak in a bottle along with the whiskey, seal it up, and let it age.
This is something that the folks at Oak & Eden actually do on an industrial scale, and their products come out tasting pretty darn good. While this process isn’t as visually appealing as the barrel aging and won’t have all of the same benefits of your local environment acting on your whiskey, there are some very good reasons why you might want to give this a try.
The first benefit is that this is a very compact process. There’s no need for a lot of space or a huge investment in equipment, it can be as simple as popping the cork on a bottle of whiskey and dropping a stick of wood inside. As seen in my photo above, you can do it in a mason jar if that’s what you have handy.
The second big benefit is that the process is quick. According to the folks at Oak & Eden, at six weeks the maximum flavor has been extracted from the wood that you’ve added to the bottle, and there’s nothing more that will change in terms of the flavor profile. So you’ve gone from a mediocre bottle to a custom aged masterpiece in less than two months, compared to potentially years with an oak barrel.
We here at 31W have reviewed a couple of commercially available options, and you can check out those reviews here:
Considerations for Adding Flavors
Another option that you have is the ability to add flavors beyond just the charred oak.
One option is to smoke your barrel (or in-bottle stick) with some local wood before adding the whiskey. This is something that Ranger Creek in San Antonio does with some of their whiskey, adding a mesquite wood smoke to the barrels that then seeps into the whiskey and makes for some amazing flavors.
Another option is to add flavors to the whiskey by maceration. Basically you grab a bunch of fruit and/or spices, put them in a big tea bag, and make a whiskey tea by letting the components steep in the whiskey. You can speed up the process by adding some heat, or just let it naturally leech out into the spirit. This is actually the exact way that some gin is made, as well as spiced rum.
Adding artificial flavors is possible as well — but allowing the real fruits and spices to interact with the whiskey will typically get the best results.
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Final Thoughts
Over the last few decades we’ve seen a shift in the market towards a desire for authenticity. From local craft distilled whiskey to “#nofilter” photos on Instagram, we are all looking for something we know is real and not something put together by computer algorithms or large marketing firms. Real, homemade whiskey is quite possibly the most authentic thing I can think of — and one that really does take some time and personal effort. It’s something where you, as a discerning drinker, have the ability to put your own heart and soul into producing a whiskey you like and sharing it with others. Personally I like to encourage that kind of adventurous spirit wherever I can — especially when it’s not breaking any laws.
Should you decide to try this yourself, please know: you will make mistakes. You will have terrible batches of whiskey that go straight down the drain. But once you make that first glass of truly great whiskey, I guarantee the journey will feel worthwhile.
I’m in the midst of trying this on a bit larger scale. The goal was to take cheap bourbon and age it a bit longer to give it more flavor, but the plan changed a bit along the way. Purchased a 5 gallon charred oak barrel from barrelsonline. Planned on using Military Special bourbon. (I think this is the same as the commercially-available Kentucky Tavern bourbon produced by Barton) – 80 proof; aged 4 years, but very thin flavor. Did some internet research. Recommendation #1 was to try aging at a slightly higher ABV. Ended up mixing 3 parts Military Special with one part Everclear 190 proof resulting in a 106 proof blend. The mix tasted positively wretched. Put the mix in the barrel on 6/9/2022. Rotated the barrel about 45 degrees every week. Tried a small sample every two weeks or so. By the end of June, it tasted like bad bourbon. By the end of July, it was quite acceptable. In the last tasting on 8/13, it was quite good; very reminiscent of Knob Creek 100 proof. Our plan is to water it down to ~86 proof this Sunday using Old Limestone mixing water. Let it mellow for about 10 days and then bottle it in time for week 1 of football season.
Update: this turned out better than planned. Around Christmas, we did blind taste tastings comparing our blend against other bourbons. We compared it to Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, Makers Mark, and Buffalo Trace. It beat all of them. We decided to up the challenge and compare it to higher-end bourbons. This time it finished middle of the pack. It lost to Woodford Reserve, 1792 Small Batch and Angels Envy, but beat Eagle Rare, Bulliet, and Basil Hayden. We’re trying it again this year with slight modifications. We’re planning to up the barrel proof to about 115 and going for 5 months of aging vice 3.
Is it possible to take a couple of bottles of Everclear and water them down to 90 proof and bottle that with the oak sticks from Oak and Eden and wait for the end result? Maybe adding some local flowering plants in a bag, and letting that macerate till the aging of the Oak and Eden sticks is finished and see what the end result is?
Or, is that not a good idea?
Is it a good idea? I mean, at the end, whatever you have will be more flavorful and enjoyable than Everclear on its own, that’s for sure.
The problem with Everclear and other extremely high proof neutral spirits is that most of the flavors and the components from the raw ingredients (amino acids, etc) have been removed, which is where a good portion of the more complex flavor components come from when using oak. You’ll still get improvement, but likely not as much as with a raw corn whiskey or a lightly aged spirit.
You should absolutely give it a try, though! Pretty much any experiment is worth trying at least once.
As to the oak barrels, you need oak lumber of the “white oaks” group not the “red oaks” group. There is a major difference between the two groups as to their ability to hold liquids. The term is “tight cooperage” The white oaks him tiny structures in the pores of the wood that prevents seepage. Red Oaks don’t have these structures and barrels made from them are called “slack cooperage” and were traditionally used to store apples or other products that needed to breathe.
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Thirty-One Whiskey is a website owned and operated by Burke & Blais, LLC. All rights reserved. More information at www.burkeandblais.com | But home brewing is a common pastime here in the States, and I personally enjoy brewing my own ginger beer using champagne yeast and fresh ginger. This next step, though, is where you can run into problems with the law.
The smaller pot still that’s used for testing new ideas at Still Austin in Austin, Texas.
The process of distilling the mildly alcoholic beer into liquor is the regulated step in the process. This step is all about concentrating that mildly alcoholic liquid (usually about 10% alcohol by volume) into something much stronger using a still. Because alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than water, if you heat your beer and condense the vapors coming off of it you can selectively capture the alcohol rich portions which is your “new make” whiskey.
Here in the United States, there is no way to legally distill alcohol for personal home use without a license. See 27 CFR § 19.51:
A person may not produce distilled spirits at home for personal use. Except as otherwise provided by law, distilled spirits may only be produced by a distilled spirits plant registered with TTB under the provisions of 26 U.S.C. 5171. All distilled spirits produced in the United States are subject to the tax imposed by 26 U.S.C. 5001.
For those looking to go the legal route here, it gets complicated and expensive real quick. Still sites require licenses, bonded operators, and incur taxes as soon as the whiskey starts rolling out of the condenser. Record keeping is required for every drop of liquor produced, and federal regulators check and monitor those operations to make sure the right amount of tax is being paid to the government. And due to the complexity of the regulations, the difficulty in obtaining the licenses, and the other considerations (like zoning laws, etc) that go with them, the bar for operating your own still is set so high that almost no one besides well funded distillery operations can even consider giving it a try.
| yes |
Zymology | Can you make beer at home without a license? | yes_statement | it is possible to make "beer" at "home" without a "license".. brewing "beer" at "home" can be done without a "license". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrewing | Homebrewing - Wikipedia | Homebrewing is the brewing of beer or other alcoholic beverages on a small scale for personal, non-commercial purposes. Supplies, such as kits and fermentation tanks, can be purchased locally at specialty stores or online. Beer was brewed domestically for thousands of years before its commercial production, although its legality has varied according to local regulation. Homebrewing is closely related to the hobby of home distillation, the production of alcoholic spirits for personal consumption; however home distillation is generally more tightly regulated.
Women brewers dominated alcohol production on every occupied continent[1][2] until commercialization and industrialization of brewing occurred.[3] The tradition of brewing being in the domain of women stemmed from the fact that brewing was a by-product of gathering,[1] and often considered a part of baking.[2]
The Greeks and Romans cultivated both grape wine and beer, to a lesser extent. Roman women often directed production in larger households while the labor was performed by slaves.
By the Tang dynasty, homebrewing seems to have been a familiar domestic chore in China, albeit the lower classes had to make do with poorly-filtered mash.[4] Laws against making alcohol were enacted and repealed between the Zhou and Mingdynasties.[citation needed]
The 18th century Industrial Revolution brought about such innovations as the thermometer and hydrometer. These tools increased efficiency to the point that mass production of beer was possible for the first time in history[citation needed][clarification needed]. In 1857, French microbiologist Louis Pasteur explained the role of yeast in beer fermentation, allowing brewers to develop strains of yeast with desirable properties such as efficiency converting sugar to alcohol and ability to handle higher alcohol content.
People choose to brew their own beer for a variety of reasons. Many homebrew to avoid a higher cost of buying commercially equivalent beverages.[10] Brewing domestically also affords one the freedom to adjust recipes according to one's own preference, create beverages that are unavailable on the open market or beverages that may contain fewer calories, or less or more alcohol.[11]
Some people join homebrewing clubs and enter homebrew competitions.[12] The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) is an American organization which oversees homebrew competitions, certifies judges, and offers categories for judging. Similar British organizations are The National Guild of Wine and Beer Judges,[13][14]
and the National Association of Wine and Beermakers (Amateur) - (NAWB),[15] who have held an annual show since 1959.[citation needed]
Illegal to distil alcohol (e.g. spirits) without an excise manufacturer licence. Permission is also required from the Australian Taxation Office to own, possess, dispose of, buy, sell, import or manufacture a still of over 5 litres capacity, whether it is being used to produce alcohol or not.[16]
Austria
Legal for personal use only, not for sale.
Legal to distill alcohol with a permission or license.
Canada
Legal in most Canadian provinces. Liquor laws are regulated provincially, while the federal government has laws about taxation and importation of beer, wine and other liquors.[citation needed]
Legal with a license to distill granted by the (provincial) government.
Czech Republic
Legal. 2000 Litres per household per year of beer for personal use, including notification of the customs office. 2000 litres of wine per household per year.
Not permitted although every household can distill fermented fruit only, up to 30 litres per year in a local distillery, for personal use only.[citation needed]
Denmark
Legal. No limit per household per year of beer, given that it is for personal consumption.
Legal up to 30 litres per household per month. Brewers must be 18 years of age or older, and the brewing process must not "degrade the environment". The product must not be sold.[34]
Illegal without a license.[34] License fees are only practical for commercial distilleries.[35]
South Africa
Legal for home brewed beers in unlimited quantities for personal use only, not for sale or barter, without any required permits or licenses. Registration as a "manufacturer not for commercial use" at the South African Revenue Service (SARS) is required to produce wine at home.
Registration and a permit are required to own, operate, or have a still in one's possession. Producing distilled spirits at home is limited "for own use" only and products may not be sold, or used for bartering.[citation needed]
As of 2010 "agricultural distilling" permits are no longer available.[citation needed] Commercial operations require a micro-manufacturing license (for quantities up to 2 million litres of spirits per year), and various other permits are required. For larger quantities, a full manufacturing license and various permits are required.[citation needed]
Legal in unlimited quantity for domestic consumption only. Fermented products for sale must include payment of alcohol duty and registration with HM Revenue and Customs.
Legal with a license to distill granted by the government.
United States
Legal in all states. Individual states remain free to restrict or prohibit the manufacture of beer, mead, hard cider, wine and other fermented alcoholic beverages at home.[39] Until 2013, Alabama and Mississippi were the only states with laws prohibiting the homebrewing of beer. Alabama and Mississippi both legalized home brewing in their respective 2013 legislative sessions.[40][41] Although all state governments have legalized homebrewing, some states retain local options that permit local governments to make homebrewing illegal under municipal law. Alaska is one such state where the local option is currently exercised.[42]
Most states permit homebrewing of 100 US gallons (380 L) of beer per adult (of 21 years or older) per year and up to a maximum of 200 US gallons (760 L) per household annually when there are two or more adults residing in the household.[43] Because alcohol is taxed by the federal government via excise taxes, homebrewers are restricted from selling any beer they brew. This similarly applies in most Western countries. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed into law a bill allowing home beers, which was at the time not permitted without paying the excise taxes as a holdover from the prohibition of alcoholic beverages (repealed in 1933).[39][44] This change also exempted home brewers from posting a "penal bond" (which currently ranges from a minimum of $1000.00 to a maximum of $500,000[45]) which had the prohibitive effect of economically preventing brewers of small quantities from pursuing their hobby.[citation needed]
Regulated at the National level under USC Title 26 subtitle E Ch51. Production of distilled alcohols for consumption carries an excise tax and numerous requirements must be met to legally produce.[46]
Owning or operating a distillation apparatus without filing the proper paperwork and paying the taxes carries federal criminal penalties.[47]
Homebrewing kits come in many different types and from many different manufacturers. A local homebrew store may create some of their own kits by packaging materials together. Most kits come with a full set of instructions for brewing. These instructions, sometimes called recipes, may vary widely in the amount of instruction given. For instance, many all-grain kits assume a familiarity with the brewing process and so may give fewer specific instructions on the general process. Many advanced brewers prefer to design and perfect their own recipes rather than buy kits. Kits may or may not include yeast.
For brewers with equipment and advanced knowledge about the brewing process, all-grain kits include all the ingredients necessary to create homebrew beer. Most kits include grain and hops, some kits may also include yeast that pairs well with the style of beer. A full set of instructions is generally included. What sets these kits apart from others is the inclusion of malted grain which must first undergo a mash to extract the sugars. This combination of liquid and sugars is known as wort (pronounced "wert") and is necessary for fermentation. A full boil of the wort is then required, with one or more hop additions at different times depending on style.[48] A typical brew session using all-grain takes between 4 and 6 hours, not including fermentation.
Some kits contain a concentrated malt extract rather than grain. Malt extract can be either dry or in a syrup form, both used to produce fermented syrup.[49] A few advanced kits may also come with a small amount of milled, malted grain that must be steeped with the wort before boiling. A grain bag is usually included to facilitate this process. These additional grains help add different character to the beer so that a single extract can be used to brew several varieties of beer. A full boil is required, with hop additions at different times depending on style.[50] A typical brew session using extract typically takes 2 hours, not including fermentation.
Sometimes known as beer in a can, no-boil, and hopped wort, these beer kits contain liquid malt extract that has already been boiled with hops to introduce bitterness and flavor. Pre-hopped kits simplify the brewing process by removing the need to add hops at specific times during the boil. Some kits may not require a boil at all, though this may increase the risk of off flavors in the resulting beer due to contamination from bacteria and wild yeasts. While some feel the quality of beer from these kits can be on par with commercial beer or homebrew made from other methods,[51][52] others feel that pre-hopped extract provides hop bitterness with little flavor and bouquet.[8] A typical brew session using pre-hopped ingredients may take less than an hour, not including fermentation.
Brewing in a bag (BIAB) is a simplified all-grain technique developed in Australia.[citation needed] The main pioneer and continuing authority on this method is Patrick Hollingdale. The hallmarks of BIAB are a single brewing vessel, a fine mesh bag to hold the grist (crushed malt/grain) and a single heat source. The bag, usually made of nylon or fashioned out of a voile material lines the brewing pot which contains the total volume of water needed for the entire brewing process. The water is then heated to strike temperature and then the grist is added. The traditional brewing technique of sparging (rinsing the grains) is skipped and after the mashing period is complete (typically 60–90 minutes)[53] the grain bag holding the spent grains is removed (lautering) and the bag is compressed to drain the wort from the grain ball. The all-grain brewing process then proceeds as normal: boiling, cooling, pitching and fermenting. Traditional mashing methods require three vessels and at least two heat sources. Brew in a bag has revolutionised home all-grain brewing as batch sizes of 9 to 45.5 litres (2.4 to 12.0 US gal) of wort into the fermenter are easily employed without any compromising on quality or versatility. A typical brew session using BIAB is typically 3 hours, not including fermentation.
The principles behind the process of homebrewing beer are similar to commercial brewing. A hopped wort is produced and yeast pitched into the wort to stimulate fermentation. The complexity of the process is mostly determined by the approach used to manufacture the wort; by far the simplest method is kit brewing.
A partial mash differs from an extract brew in that the extract remains enzymatically active.[54] Unlike dead malts where some of the starch has been converted to sugar via the action of heat and the natural enzymes have been destroyed, wheat and unmalted extracts need the help of enzymes to convert their starches into sugars.[citation needed]
The next step up from extract brewing is to use a diastatically active malt extract to convert starches from other beer adjuncts such as flaked and torrified barleys, flaked and torrified wheat, wheat flour, and flaked oats into fermented syrup. These extracts are currently only available in the canned form. Unmalted barleys and wheats can add extra "body" to a finished beer.[citation needed]
Advanced homebrewers forgo the use of concentrated extract and instead convert starch into sugars from the grains themselves.[55] The wort is made by making a mash from crushed maltedbarley (or alternative grain adjuncts such as unmalted barley, wheat, oats, corn or rye) and hot water. This requires a vessel known as a mash tun, which is often insulated. The process is often referred to as all grain brewing.[56]
In one procedure popular with homebrewers called the "Infusion Mash", milled grains are combined in the tun and hot water is added. Before being combined with the grains, the water is heated to a temperature that is hotter than the desired temperature for enzymatic activity. The reason the water is heated is to compensate for the fact that the grain are cooler than the desired temperature.[57]
The grains are infused with yet hotter water to rinse more sugars from the mash in a process known as sparging. There are two types of sparging. Fly sparging and batch sparging. Fly sparging involves rinsing the grain bed by adding small amounts of hot water to the top while draining equal amounts from the bottom. Batch sparging involves adding all or most of your sparge water at one time to the grain bed and slowly draining it from the bottom. The sparging process will also stop any further enzymatic activity if much hotter water is used; conversely the mash may be heated to around 80 °C (176 °F) to end such activity prior to placing it in the lauter-tun, and to prevent cooler grain from lowering the sparge water temperature to a lower than desirable figure.[8]
Whether the homebrewer chooses to mash their own grains or chooses to purchase malt extracts, the homebrewer will then need to boil the liquid and add hops. The length of time the wort boils with the hops varies depending on the style of beer, but is usually 60–90 minutes.
Hops are added at different times during the boil, depending on the desired result. Hops added at the beginning of the boil contribute bitterness, hops added in the last thirty minutes contribute flavor. Hops added in the last few minutes or even after the end of the boil contribute both flavor and hop aroma. These hop additions are generally referred to as bittering, flavor, and aroma additions respectively.
Finings such as Irish moss, a form of seaweed, and others can be added in the final 15–30 minutes of the boil to help prevent haze in the resulting beer.
The primary reason to cool the wort is to get the wort to the proper temperature for healthy yeast propagation. Other benefits of rapidly cooling of the wort include "locking in" hop flavor and aroma, aiding in the production of "cold break" where haze-producing proteins coagulate ultimately resulting in a clearer beer, slowing the production of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), and hindering the growth of wort contamination by pitching yeast as soon as possible.
Many homebrewers use an inexpensive wort chiller called an "immersion chiller." These resemble the "worms" used in distilleries consisting of a coiled length of copper or stainless steel tubing (typically 50 feet in length) with an inlet and outlet connection. The inlet is attached to a source of cool water such as a sink faucet. The immersion chiller is inserted into the hot wort then cool water pumped is through the coil where a heat exchange occurs thus lowering the temperature of the wort.
Many homebrewers also use a "counterflow chiller." This device consists of a tube of copper or stainless steel tubing nested inside a larger diameter length of tube. It resembles an immersion chiller but works more like plate chiller in that hot wort is circulated through the inner tube and cool water is passed through the outer tube counter to the direction of the hot wort, thereby cooling the wort quickly.
Some homebrewers use the 'no-chill' approach. It is a water-conserving technique, depending on the ambient temperature being lower to cool the hot wort. After the boil the hot wort is racked into a fitting fermenter. After placing the cap or the lid, the fermenter is tumbled slightly to let the hot wort sanitise all internal surfaces. It then will be left alone (often overnight) until it has reached pitching temperatures, what may take up to the best part of a day. Contamination should not be an issue since near-boiling wort is a very effective sanitiser.
Once the wort has cooled to a temperature that is friendly to yeast, the yeast is "pitched" into the wort and allowed to ferment. It is at this point that 'wort" becomes "beer." Primary fermentation in homebrewing takes place in large glass or plastic carboys or food-grade plastic buckets, nearly always sealed.[58] When sealed, the fermenter is stoppered with a fermentation lock which allows the carbon dioxide gas produced to vent, while preventing other gasses and particles from entering. Recent innovations in nanotechnology have enabled a fermentation lock called the Sterilock to also prevent bacteria, wild yeasts and other potential harmful fungi reaching the fermenter although in some beer styles known as Sour Beer, bacteria or wild yeasts are desirable to obtain the sour characteristics. During this time, temperatures should be kept at optimum temperature for the particular yeast strain being used. For ale this temperature is usually 18–24 °C (64–75 °F);
[59][60][61] for lager it is usually much colder, around 10 °C (50 °F).[59][60][61] A vigorous fermentation then takes place, usually starting within twelve hours and continuing over the next few days. During this stage, the fermentable sugars (maltose, glucose, and sucrose) are consumed by the yeast, while ethanol and carbon dioxide are produced as byproducts by the yeast. A layer of sediment, the lees or "trub", appears at the bottom of the fermenter, composed of heavy fats, proteins and inactive yeast. This yeast is sometimes reused in subsequent batches.[62] Often, the brew is moved to a second fermenting vessel after primary fermentation called a secondary fermenter. This secondary fermentation process is often utilized by more advanced home brewers to enhance flavor. While not required, it is generally practiced by home brewers who wish to age or clarify their beer by removing it from the sediment left behind by primary fermentation, often through the addition of isinglass, colloidal silicon dioxide, or spakolloid.[59] In addition to using two different fermenting containers, some home brewers may choose to only use one container in which primary and secondary fermentation take place. This container is usually referred to as a uni-tank.[63] Uni-tanks are usually conical in shape, and can be made from plastic, glass, or stainless steel.[64] A popular plastic conical for homebrewing is FastFerment, while a popular stainless steel conical fermenter for homebrewers is The Blichmann Fermenator.[65]
Upon conclusion of fermentation, the beer is carbonated before it is consumed. This is typically done in one of two ways; force carbonation in a keg using compressed carbon dioxide, or bottle carbonation with priming sugar.[59] Any bottle that is able to withstand the pressure of carbonation can be used, such as used beer bottles, flip-top bottles with rubber stoppers such as Grolsch, or even plastic bottles such as soda bottles, provided they are properly sanitised. Priming briefly reactivates the yeast that remains in the bottle, carbonating the brew.[66] Homebrewed beers and lagers are typically unfiltered[67] (filtering improves visual appearance of the product, but complicates carbonation). Bottled beer becomes clear quicker than kegged beer, since the yeast does not have as far to descend.[68]
In homebrewing, adding priming sugar, malt extract, or carbonation tablets at bottling time to beer that has had its fermentable sugar content totally consumed is the safest approach to carbonation. Exceeding recommended levels of priming sugar for a given recipe can result in exploding bottles (aka "bottle bombs"), as is using inappropriate bottles or improper capping methods. Beer may also be force-carbonated using a keg and special bottling equipment so that the carbonation level can be carefully controlled. Carbonation is often achieved with approximately 4 ounces (110 g) of corn sugar boiled in 2 cups (500 mL) of water then cooled and added to a typical 5-US-gallon (19 L) batch before bottling.[69]
Homebrewers often use kegs for aging, filtering, and storing beer. These are seldom the standard kegs used by major brewers to transport draught beer to wholesalers, but instead are reconditioned Cornelius kegs (colloquially known as "cornies") that were originally manufactured to store soda; these vessels are much easier to fill, clean and maintain than standard beer kegs.[70]
These kegs are stainless steel cylinders that hold approximately 5 US gallons (19 L) of liquid. The keg is filled with liquid via a removable hatch on the top, which is then closed and sealed. Carbon dioxide is added to pressurize the keg via an inlet port on the top and is facilitated by gently rocking the brew back and forth. Liquid is dispensed via an outlet port attached to a tube that extends to the bottom of the keg. Pin-lock and ball-lock fittings (or posts) are the two types of couplings used on the inlet and outlet ports. Coke distributors used pin-lock fittings, while Pepsi distributors used ball-lock fittings. Ball-lock are most used. The pin-lock style is often referred to as a "Coke" keg or style and the ball-lock is often referred to as a "Pepsi" keg or style, though the fittings themselves are removable, serviceable, and contain interchangeable parts.[70]
Homebrewers sometimes use 15.5-US-gallon (59 L) commercial kegs (known as 1/2 kegs) for boiling vessels in creating wort. The kegs are drilled for a drain at the bottom, and the top cut open to create a large stainless steel cooking kettle. Many times, the piece of metal cut out of the top is re-used to create a false bottom for straining wort during the mashing process, as well as to strain the boiled wort when adding hops without using a mesh grain bag.[71]
Alternatively, kegs specifically designed for home brewing are available. The capacity may be matched to commercial extract brewing kits; typically 12 and 23 litres. Smaller 2.5-US-gallon (9.5 L) kegs are also made for ease of transporting to a function.[71]
Kegs may have residual pressure, and this must be vented to avoid having the valve explode and injure or kill a person as the valve shoots out.[citation needed] Conventional 15.5-US-gallon (59 L) kegs have circle spring clips that can be removed to release the tap valve. Some kegs such as those used by Miller have threaded valves that are threaded into the keg, and after venting, can be opened by turning the valve counterclockwise using a piece of 1+3⁄4-inch-wide (44 mm) metal inserted between the valve ears and turned with an adjustable wrench, or pipe wrench.[citation needed] A "wonderbar" type of pry bar just happens to fit.[citation needed] After the valve is loose it is still retained by a safety catch that must be pried inward. A simple valve seal depressing tool and a screwdriver with a 1⁄8 inch (3.2 mm) diameter shaft must be used to release the safety catch. See "How to remove a Miller threaded keg valve (not retained by a spiral ring)". The safety catch prevents the valve from releasing under pressure.[citation needed]
It is not recommended that kegs be sanitised with bleach. To avoid unpleasant residuals, kegs are sanitised with an iodine- or oxygen-based sanitiser.[72] Sanitisers like Star-San and B-Brite are commonly used.[73] The ball lock valves may be unscrewed using wrenches to allow further cleaning or replacement of O-rings or poppet valves.
Homebrewing can reduce the environmental impact of fermented beverages by using less packaging and transportation than commercially brewed beverages, and by the use of refillable jugs, reusable bottles or other reusable containers.[74][75]
Brewers now have access to a variety of software tools, whether free/open source or commercial, which allow them to formulate and adjust recipes. There are also web based recipe creation and sharing sites with extensive recipe databases contributed by users that can be viewed or downloaded for printing or importation into software using BeerXML. More traditional Internet forums continue to provide brewers with sources of advice and information from their peers all over the world.
Homebrewers can submit their beer for evaluation into competitions. These competitions provide blind feed back to brewers so they can get objective feedback, make adjustments to improve their brewing, and be recognized for outstanding homebrew.[76] Competitions can be organized by homebrew clubs, state fairs, or businesses. The AHA, BJCP, and HomebrewCompetitions.com all keep a list of currently scheduled competitions. Homebrewcompetitions.com is a free resource for homebrewers and homebrew competition organizers.[77][78]
The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) trains and certifies beer judges through classes and tasting and written tests.[76] BJCP judges evaluate the beer on 5 criteria: Aroma, Appearance, Flavor, Mouthfeel, and Overall Impression.[79] The beer is also compared to a style provided by the brewer and described in the BJCP Style Guidelines.[80][81][82]
The Polish Homebrewer's Association (PSPD) has developed their own guidelines for beer competition judging and trains judges for competitions in Poland.[83] A list of competitions is available on their website.[84] | Registration as a "manufacturer not for commercial use" at the South African Revenue Service (SARS) is required to produce wine at home.
Registration and a permit are required to own, operate, or have a still in one's possession. Producing distilled spirits at home is limited "for own use" only and products may not be sold, or used for bartering.[citation needed]
As of 2010 "agricultural distilling" permits are no longer available.[citation needed] Commercial operations require a micro-manufacturing license (for quantities up to 2 million litres of spirits per year), and various other permits are required. For larger quantities, a full manufacturing license and various permits are required.[citation needed]
Legal in unlimited quantity for domestic consumption only. Fermented products for sale must include payment of alcohol duty and registration with HM Revenue and Customs.
Legal with a license to distill granted by the government.
United States
Legal in all states. Individual states remain free to restrict or prohibit the manufacture of beer, mead, hard cider, wine and other fermented alcoholic beverages at home.[39] Until 2013, Alabama and Mississippi were the only states with laws prohibiting the homebrewing of beer. Alabama and Mississippi both legalized home brewing in their respective 2013 legislative sessions.[40][41] Although all state governments have legalized homebrewing, some states retain local options that permit local governments to make homebrewing illegal under municipal law. Alaska is one such state where the local option is currently exercised.[42]
Most states permit homebrewing of 100 US gallons (380 L) of beer per adult (of 21 years or older) per year and up to a maximum of 200 US gallons (760 L) per household annually when there are two or more adults residing in the household.[43] Because alcohol is taxed by the federal government via excise taxes, homebrewers are restricted from selling any beer they brew. | yes |
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