hummingbird8152015backyard

When my wife set up bird feeders in our backyard we got visits from hummingbirds. When she added  a hummingbird attractor with sugar water, one particular beautiful green variety came around. I found out what remarkable animals these tiny fellows are. As a hospital  clinician have been interested in what can be learnt from animals for a long time as with suspended animation.

A  quick Google search will find lots of features about what animals teach us psychologically. One principal point I’ve made in these blogs, is animals with their limited cognitive capacity, are less neurotic and inclined to worry not at all about past or future. Animals are Zen masters at living in the present. First,  I’m not convinced it is precisely true. Each individual animal houses in their bodies and brains  a flowing narrative of personal experience and communicates with fellow creatures as evidenced on ability to learn from experience. Our little hummingbirds were very shy but gradually learned to come for their sugar water even with delighted humans in proximity.

My main point, since few others seem to be making it, is that as fellow living things, animals have  biological more than psychiatric wisdom, for willing listeners. It comes from the varieties of biological experience. I allude to William James’s the Varieties of Religious Experience. Another of my favorite themes is that if biology is about anything, it’s about variety. (Please see my discussion about Clones as anti-biological). Respecting religious experience in all its varieties as I believe we should, we ought to doubly respect the varieties of life.

I’ll give a couple of examples. There are tons more. I work in the hospital ICU where people are fighting for their life. Shock dramatically increases metabolism due to fever, fluttering hearts and,trying to keep up blood pressures, vital blood flow to body organs which are sick and demanding large amounts of life-giving oxygen and substrate.  The brain is most vulnerable and often shuts down or is damaged. Many of these folks are temporarily sick, post-op or suffering from pneumonia or other infection. It would be great to shut everything down, put our patient into a state of suspended animation in the meantime supplying antibiotics and all other needs. The infection or post operative perturbation being taken care of, we could then rewake the patient up when she is all cured, infection having been taken care of.

It turns out hummingbirds know exactly how to do this and do it every day. When they are flying and feeding the nectar supplying them immediately with sugar laden energy, their muscles consume ten times as much energy as any elite human athlete. Their heart may be humming  at 1250 bpm. By night when they are still their body temperature goes from over 104  to 64 degrees their heart rate can fall to 50. They also eat insects and consume energy stored as fats a great deal more slowly needing variety in their consumption just like humans.  So hummingbirds are Zen masters, all right, at switching between hyper to hypo metabolic states. Just like humans a cortisol like hormone greets them on waking in the morning. I have barely scratched the surface here as regards these little animal’s athletic and metabolic high wire act. What’s hot in the biological and medical field is switches which alter between various states that will prove extremely useful.

The largest animals and all gradations in between particularly mammals, avidly switch between extreme metabolic states. Just from my own little vantage point in the ICU I’ve been interested in bear hibernation. What are the mechanisms involved in altering metabolic states?  Does hummingbird torpor and bear hibernation work the same way? I’d love to know. Animals may use the same or different switches, there being more than one way to skin a cat. It means clinicians and biologists ought to get together. They rarely do. Like a lot of doctors I got interested in medicine out of a love of biology. Biology and Medicine. Never the twain shall meet.

In science fiction, humans are placed in suspended animation for various reasons, the least being pneumonia. My wife jokes that she’d like to hold off aging as it seems we have a long wait for any grandchildren from our torpid millennial kids.  Should we be diagnosed with a fatal disease it would be nice to suspend ourselves until science finds a cure. And for space travel it would be useful to have a Rip van Winkle pill, also for investing in the stock market where assets accumulate over long timeframes.