OtBoaT Ray Peat Day 1 Transcript-Personal Background, Influences, and View of Reality and Organisms

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Thread with original Video and Audio: Ray Peat Interview - Dr. Ray Peat, Day One: Full Interview from On the Back of a Tiger

B&J=Brad and Jeremy (interviewers)
RP=Ray Peat (interviewee)
Some of the spelling, especially names might be wrong; Albert Szent Gyorgi, Mae won Ho, W.F. Koch, etc. If you come across any feel free to post with a link.
Please refer to the original interview for any thing
The formatting is weird because I copied it from u-tub's transscript, but I added timestamps to most of it and added the names of the speaker
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B&J:where were you born?

RP: uh santee california 1936 outside of san diego and then my parents had homesteaded a piece of desert over near indio palm springs area and uh so as a baby i went right from being born near san diego over to the desert and lived on the desert homestead until i was three then went to the the town and uh came to oregon right after the war started partly because of the of the war my father wanted to get a job in the defense industry and uh worked at i think it was douglas aircraft for about almost a year and learned that they had nothing for him to do as a draftsman that the the deal was that they got 10 percent from the government as profit beyond everything they could spend and so they hired crowds of people and bought what useless instruments and machines that simply sat there and so he realized that he was a participating in you know war profiteering and so we moved to oregon and uh sort of dropped out all during the war the oregon culture at that time was uh kind of like old time anarchists had been populating a lot of the western oregon and then southerners moved in during the dust bowl years so it was a very conservative town with background of radical libertarianism

B&J: so just uh start by telling us your name and general background so that can include your fields of study occupations but just a brief rundown of
all of that


RP: my name's raymond peat i first decided to become a teacher and went to a teacher's education college southern oregon college and intended to maybe um become a literature teacher and
so i went to the university to
get a master's degree and
at that time it was i got my bachelor's
degree in
1956 and
i thought the university would be
a place of relative enlightenment
compared to the small town
and i found that politics
have pretty much ruled at the university
of oregon at that time in 1956
and so i tried one department
after the other went from an english
major
to um i tried philosophy
for a while and i spent
six months as a psychology major
and i tried a few months as an art
history major
and finally decided that
politics governed
all of them art history was the the
freest of political
influence but i wasn't that
interested in it so i i found that i
could write a thesis
on a subject that if it didn't
incorporated different departmental
areas
i could get a degree based on that
thesis
and so i had as an undergraduate
become interested in william blake and
since he had an interesting
philosophical orientation
as well as being a poet and a painter
that became the the way to
i integrate what i had been studying
into a master's degree
and just by chance i was
interested in uh going from
uh my my study of blake and
psychology philosophy uh into
uh applying it to the idea of
linguistic biology bio-linguistics
and how the brain makes language and
i found that there was a program in that
would
permit a phd
degree to be interdepartmental
with philosophy and linguistics
as the main areas so i started
uh this program of ohio state
and uh
there were not many professors
sympathetic with
with the sort of integrated
interdepartmental
approach that i was interested in but
there was a
swedenborg in college about
45 miles from the university
where i found that they needed a biology
teacher
and that was really how i
got more involved in
teaching biology and developing
my interests so i was
studying linguistics and philosophy
at ohio state and teaching
courses that were the title was
um physics for biology majors
and as the the new president
of the universe of the uh it was called
urbana university but it was a very
small
formerly a church seminary college
the new president was was revising it by
developing a really interesting
curriculum
and he said he didn't want
physics taught the way he had
experienced it
and uh not to teach the
the standard mechanics as the
introduction
to uh forces and and fields and so on
he said he wanted his students to be
able to
understand physical science
topics that they read in newspapers and
magazines
and he wanted it to prepare them
for majoring in biology
so with that instruction as
as what the course should be i decided
that
the computers were a new cultural
phenomenon at that time so
i i decided that understanding how
information theory works in the brain
and in computers would be
a good application of physics for
biology majors
and that the interaction
of energy and matter
which is one of the core ideas in
physics that this would
make it possible to understand the the
question of the biological effects
of atomic bombs and
radioactive fallout so
those were two uh important
ways of organizing the course
and as it turned out
the the trustees
weren't pleased when the students got
interested
in questioning
the government position on
this the safety of of radioactive
fallout
from atomic bomb testing and so that job
only lasted for a year and uh
that immediately led to the idea of
starting a college that would
be independent of these
extraneous influences of of the trustees
and and their commitments and uh
so i put some advertisements
for example in the saturday review
magazine and a
professor who was had been offered
the job to replace me as a biology
teacher
uh leo koch
it happened that his
lecture his tryout to be a new biology
teacher
his topic was the dangers of radiation
and so he was dropped and
he and i together he went around
giving lectures helping to recruit
students
to start a college that would be owned
and controlled by the teachers
and the students jointly and
so that that kept me busy for
uh six or eight years uh
and on my own i kept uh following up
these
uh various lines of uh
biological uh
study until in 1968
i decided to go back to graduate school
that that i would done
the the culture had changed somewhat and
uh I felt that i could
uh stay in in one department
and simply ignore the political
uh impositions that uh each department
had so i i went back to uh
working a phd in biology at the
university of oregon


B&J- Okay so going back a little further in
time
how did you first get interested in the
life sciences what sparked this
interest

RP:um
i um as a very little kid
my parents had made the decision that
they weren't going to
indoctrinate me with anything with real
religion or politics
and they would simply answer my
questions
and just apparently out of my own
inclinations i i was interested in
how the natural world worked
and and how my my self
worked uh in in uh
such things as as perceiving uh
and uh those
simple uh childish uh
urges to to figure things out without
getting any answers uh preformed
uh uh it it turned out that uh
organisms and and why organisms and
people
had died uh became
a continuing concern and and
the resources at that time were
uh for example
the the family encyclopedias
and and some of the books of my
grandparents and parents
uh old turn-of-the-century
literature philosophy
medical books and so on these were
available and so i started reading and
i found lots of interesting
things had been done in biology and
physics
i ran across jc bose in
in one of the little encyclopedias uh
an indian uh physicist who
who actually invented uh
wireless communication and uh
he devised instruments to
show the the reactions of uh
living material to very small
uh stimuli and
showed similarities between inorganic
substances and organic substances
and since i hadn't been given
any um any indoctrination as a little
kid
this j.c bose's approach to
explaining substance and living material
seemed very natural to me and that
started me
on a line of uh looking for information
in encyclopedias
magazines anything that was available
and i around the same time
found good descriptions of of some of
the early
neil lamarckian studies uh
a professor i think was university of
wisconsin named michael geyer
did some experiments showing that
for example he would grind up eyes
and inject it into pregnant rabbits and
some of the babies would be born with
damaged
eyeballs some of them blind and
when he bred these offspring
with the damaged eyes he found that the
uh
the trait could be inherited a damage
or blindness would be passed on from the
treatment
and so i seeing
a lot of that evidence that was in the
encyclopedias and
and standard publications i realized
that
the biology that was showing up in the
textbooks and schools
was a very doctrinaire and
anti-scientific position that
so so it led me to
to wonder where this uh natural
selection
neo-darwinian genetic uh
absolute uh inheritance of of a fixed
trait

came from and uh
so that that involved uh
studying the the culture and and
philosophy influencing uh science
and and so in uh
simply trying to understand the world
practically
it involved running into people who were
selling something with their
constructed facts
and

B&J:so you talked a bit about earlier
uh problems within the
teaching environment at universities but
when did you start
to realizing how um that what you were
being taught
the science you were being taught was
incorrect

RP: um
at my very first experience with going
to
we had moved as to
grant's pass or a small
country school outside of transpass and
uh the the um my first reaction
to the uh second grade uh
teachers i was already skeptical
i had seen stuff in books at home
that uh made me uh doubt what i was
being taught
and then uh in the country school
uh where i went uh to um third
to fifth grade uh there were
at first eight grades and then sixth
grades in a one-room schoolhouse
and so i could uh hear what
was being taught to all of the different
grades
and uh that was a very pleasant
schooling experience
the teacher had a very
open attitude wasn't imposing anything
uh had some of us learn
oil painting and
then going back to the city schools
again i had a very
oppressed feeling and
for example in the 7th grade
1948
they had a student mock election
and i i think my brother was the only
one in the school
to vote for strom thurman just because
he wanted to be annoying and
i voted for um henry wallace
and uh in in my social
uh science class i uh um
was arguing for why henry wallace
would be a good candidate because he
wasn't for war
and i wanted to keep the economy going
and uh so one of the uh
one of my classmates as the teacher uh
since they're talking about having
capital punishment
for communists or are they going to kill
raymond
the teacher said no i don't think they
will he's a nice little boy
but basically i i considered

most most of the high school teachers to
be
either prisoners of the system
there were there were several really
nice teachers who
who have communicated
tolerance and such and then there were
the the
disgruntled hitlerites and and the
standard uh middle-class
uh fascist-minded people it was
so i was eager to uh try out college
and uh at southern oregon college
uh after i'd been there
uh for i guess two or three terms
i was having a bad reaction to
several of my my classes and heard about
arthur christman a jewish
literature teacher who
he had had an offer to teach at harvard
but
have preferred the relaxed
atmosphere of of ashland uh
and the uh the very small
college atmosphere and
he was sort of an eye-opening
experience to uh
he took a philosophical
cultural approach to everything he
taught
and and so i after taking his
uh world literature survey i signed up
for
uh some of his philosophy classes
and a comparative religion class
and he was the college was so small he
was able to teach
many different subjects and uh
the um even though he
was the main focus of my undergraduate
education
people had told me that there would be
other people like him
at the big university and and
so i was eager to to start there
graduated when i was 19 and
getting to the university of oregon
i found that it was a much more of a
narrow-minded tuned into the political
situation not not the backwater
tolerance of of the little teacher
education school
and uh so then i i
essentially uh dropped out of the whole
thing
uh dropping out of four different
departments
and uh looking for for a uh
some some outlet which uh
for a time it seemed to be this
interdepartmental
program at ohio state
um the the outcome of my phd program
at ohio state uh was that
i intended to to go work
somewhere else while i finished my my
dissertation because i
had finished the course requirement
and i kept working on the
bio-linguistics approach as i
i did the blake college project and
about the time i was thinking of going
back to ohio state
almost the whole humanities faculty
resigned in protest to the
president of universities
uh expulsion of the student
for having gus hall
speak at his house and
i forget how many it was but all of my
professors
and practically the whole
liberal arts university went off to the
universities on the east and west coast
so that that was the end of my ohio
state
thesis project
and both as a a student and a professor


B&J:can you go into a little more detail
what some of the consequences were
for you when you started to question the
system so you mentioned
briefly about the one firing


RP:um but just also talk
about that as a as a student if there
was any kind of ostracization or
oh well um the um
even though I
had had several experiences
as a teacher
for example teaching high school in the
san diego
area
i found that the newly hired teachers
in the um
one one of the area high schools that
had just been created
all of the teachers were lively and we
enjoyed talking
in the teachers room and at the
other high schools that had been
established
over the years the teachers all seem to
be
in a depressed semi-hypnotic
state just
unwilling or unable to get
interested in anything in their
their office free time
in the teacher's room they would
just want to to gripe about conditions
and so on but in the new
uh new school where the teachers hadn't
been
around the system for very long everyone
was likely
and after three or four months
i saw the the new teachers who had been
lively
starting to become depressed and dull
by the end of that year as they were
pretty much
like the the teachers in the other
schools
and i
i realized that it was very hard
to continue functioning
uh in in in the system
doing what the system told you to and
when blake college in mexico ended
i i went to teach at university of
montana
for a year and
[Music]
having designed my own courses
not only at urbana in
in biology and physics but at lake
college
the idea of inventing
courses uh to suit the needs of each
student
and that guided the way i i designed the
linguistics
courses at montana and i found that
i could meet the definition of the of
the course
according to the college catalog and
what the content should include
but i could still do it in a way that
didn't deaden either me or the students
for example there were textbooks that
were chosen by the department
and so i would go through the textbook
class by class and show
what i thought was wrong with the
approach in the textbook
so that i i didn't repeat anything
that was being taught in the
in the text other than as something to
offer perspectives on uh so that
the students could choose
between my perspective as a critic
and the standard opinion of
of the textbook writer and
when it was uh successful we could
generate new perspectives
through the interactions and i found
that
it could potentially be a
very very functional educationally to
work in a
you know an established university
if you didn't have
people guiding you and
and firing you when you did the wrong
thing but
that that was when i decided to go back
to
eugene and the university of oregon to
work on the phd
and by that time i realized that
i just wanted to have access to their
facilities the instruments and
use use their library and resources to
do the research that i want and that i
could
conform enough to meet the requirements
of all of the course
individual idiosyncrasies of the
professors
and uh only a couple of the professors
uh really really disliked me but uh
the the the only really a bad outcome
they would give me a c
in a lab because
that was a subjective evaluation whether
i was doing
my lab work properly and incidentally my
my experiments in lab always turned out
interesting and odd and
it tended to upset the professors
and the um if i would say
look what's happening in this situation
the professor would prefer to walk away
and not comment
but but
academically uh i
i picked up people as thesis advisors
that were
very very confident interesting
people one
one professor that wasn't on my
committee uh was sort of a
a sounding word uh uh
he would put up uh things
on his bulletin board that he had seen
in the paper that
that were counter to the
the dogma and
when i would run into something that was
contrary to the dogma
he was someone that was willing to talk
about it
uh but uh
mostly mostly it was
a matter of avoiding the dogmatists

B&J:i also remember you having an anecdote
one professor you had questioned
something very early
in the term and then decided not to
call on you for the rest of the year and
what was that


RP:um
maybe you're thinking of the
comparative physiology where
the professor
had 10 i think it was 10 or 12
lectures the first half of the course
and
they were very peculiar uh
everything seemed to be skewed a little
bit to make it
uh seem different even though it was
standard
uh biological responses but everything
was prevented
presented in a sideways
fashion that that seemed very odd no one
in the class could
figure out what he was doing but it
i think the purpose was to
forced all questioning because it seemed
so odd
then the second half of the term
he had every student
do a presentation i think it was a
20-minute
present 15 or 20 minutes for each
student
and there were just enough students so
that there would be a time slot
for each of us and even though my
my name was in the middle of the
alphabet
he saved me for the very last
hour of the course and
[Music]
during the um the last hour
uh he knew that i was going to talk
about
stuff i had done in the lab uh testing
some of
gilbert ling's ideas and uh
so he saved me for a
diminished time slot about 10
10 or 15 minutes before the end of the
terms
time possibilities and
so i spent about five minutes outlining
uh in just a very roughest way
uh gilbert leighton ling's
essential ideas and contributions and
just as i was about to start uh
describing the
evidence supporting his general view
professor has said we aren't going to
have time
for for the rest of that uh and as i sat
down he said
the ideas are very interesting but there
isn't evidence to support it but he'd
very carefully cut me off before i could
prevent
present the evidence and uh
he knew i was sort of a menace because
i i had
for example when he was explaining
how the glass membrane
on a ph meter works
he said the protons
hydrogen ions diffuse through
the glass and i said
um but sometimes

36:00minutes:

the glass can be very
thick and it still gives the same
results he said it shows that
glass is very permeable to hydrogen
hydrogen ions and i said but
so and so uses
the same instrument but filled with
mercury instead of
hydrochloric acid and
does that mean that mercury ions are
diffusing through the glass and
that that was
really uh hated me

36:34 B&J:as an added inspiration for yourself
getting into science and questioning
aging and the death of the organism um
did was there anything going on in your
own health did you have a
health journey getting?

36:56 RP: well that also when when i was uh going to school in this one room country school was the first time i noticed that um something was different about my eyes as a little kid i could i remember reading science in the distance and having very good eyesight and around the age of eight or nine i noticed that i couldn't recognize a face that was a hundred yards away or 50 yards away and realized that something was fuzzy and and then in the the sixth grade I couldn't see the blackboard to do the arithmetic problems and and so i got my first glasses but there were girls in my sixth grade class who were also nearsighted and that there weren't any boys that started me thinking about what was causing nearsightedness and then as i got acquainted with a couple of these girls i found that they had had migraine
headaches which i had had a couple and uh so i started seeing a connection between female hormones nearsightedness and and migraines and that was just a sort of a nagging question for years and years that I kept wondering about
uh but um
the um the things that really got me
uh interested in the idea of
getting more deeply involved in studying
and maybe
uh doing uh counseling uh
was years later
i had had more and more put together
the ideas of
what i had been eating and what would
bring on a migraine headache
and i realized that
there were ups and downs in my blood
sugar so that if i
would uh do something energetic
uh like uh going on a hike
on a weekend the next morning i would
wake up with the migraine
and so i i was uh
progressively interested in the the
effects of food
and the um the culture at that time
people were talking
in the newspapers and on the radio
talking about the effects of of vitamin
deficiencies
and so on and that was the first time i
i heard the idea that
certain fatty acids might be essential
but at that time in 1948
49 that information was always qualified
with
but that is a uh an
issue to be solved
it isn't uh established that they are an
essential nutrient
and so in in the 50s adele davis's
books were coming out and
i read one or two of her
books in the 50s and i
got got interested in trying different
vitamin supplements


40:55- And i found that when i was feeling
uh sort of gloomy and
oppressed i happened to take a
a vitamin b1 tablet
and within two or three minutes
the sense of gloom and the
depression and darkness lifted
and i realized how how important
a simple single vitamin could be
then years later
in in mexico uh
a friend who had dropped by the school
uh started he said a niece of his was
about a year and a half old
was in the hospital with dysentery
and the next day he came by and said
she's worse
and i think it was on the third day she
said that
she's deteriorating and and they think
she might not
survive but i had read in adele davis
about
the effect of b6 on on the intestine so
i gave him a 10
milligram tablet he took it to the
hospital and
gave it to the baby and almost
immediately her
her diarrhea stopped and she came right
out of it
and um
about the same time i i noticed that my
english language students who had come
for classes
after working all day
some of them just couldn't remember
anything
and i
found a place that wholesaled
a crude kind of wheat germ
and i i made some wheat germ and egg
cakes sort of like big cookies
and i would serve one of those and a cup
of coffee
to my english students before class
and suddenly they were bright and could
remember everything
and then one of the american neighbors
who was a writer
was he had a potato nose at rhinophyma
gnarled blood vessels making his nose
lumpy and knotted
and red across his his nose and cheeks
and he was a heavy drinker but
his main concern was that his vocabulary
was shrinking and when he would talk
he would make a great struggle just to
get
the exact word that he he wanted and
since he was
trying to be a writer that was a
serious concern i told him about the
adele davis's observation that
a vitamin b2 deficiency
makes tissues unable to use
oxygen and being unable to use oxygen
the body invades that tissue with more
blood vessels
to try to deliver enough oxygen
and so i suggested that his uh
red cheeks and the lumpy nose might
be evidence of vitamin b2 deficiency
and so he went it took him several weeks
to remember
that but i kept giving him notes and he
would lose the notes
but finally he got to the doctor with a
note
and the doctor gave him a shot of
vitamin b2
and the next time i saw him on a monday
he spoke fluently
had access to his vocabulary
and there was no redness
just like turning off a switch
all that week
he was fluent and didn't have the red
skin
and each week he would go for a shot
and he was working fine but something
happened when
one weekend he couldn't get to to the
city for a shot
and he was right back with the red face
and absence of vocabulary
and since his his memory
was necessary to remember to go to the
doctor
he uh eventually uh his nose got bigger
and
his memory got worse and i finally died
of
a heart problem and um
having that experience then um a friend
with a little son who um
every night would uh wake up screaming
with a nosebleed and in the afternoon
sometimes he would wake up with a
nosebleed
and having extreme behavior problems
getting violent he was about four
at the time and i i mentioned the
possibility that
he was having that same kind of a
vascular problem affecting his behavior
and as blood vessels so we made him some
a little uh sort of puffed
uh egg scrambled egg
with powdered milk and a dissolved
10 milligram vitamin b2 tablet in each
pill
in each cookie and and
after he ate his first cookie
that nap he slept right through and
didn't have a nosebleed
as far as i know as long as i knew them
he never had another nosebleed
and his behavior improved
so in that
got me interested in the idea that that
single vitamins
you could connect a symptom or a disease
to a particular vitamin vitamin b1 or
b2 or b6 and so on
and so i i got
involved in in that kind of uh
thinking that you have to be perceptive
and informed and not match the treatment
to the
problem and so on but meanwhile
the other thing was going on studying
how organisms and cells
work and seeing that there
are very general
principles that that simplify
everything and that it isn't necessary
to think medically
about matching a nutrient to to a
symptom
that the the proper way to
go about it would be to
find out what what is uh missing
in the organism that makes it unstable
and and work on the most
general things and
natural foods happen to
have each each kind of organism
that we use as a food has
all of the nutrients basically
but in different proportions and if you
simply pick out
the balance of simple foods
you can raise your your general
level of of nutritional intake
without having to worry about which
which thing is
is specifically related to a symptom

49:16 B&J: and besides um
the eyesight and the migraines
very early on was there anything else in your
in your health that helped guide your
research maybe maybe later down the road

49:31 RP:um not about my own health that i
remember

49:36 B&J:um but what about when like the
inspiration to start taking thyroid or
looking into thyroid
supplement and the effect of that

RP:um
yeah the the eyesight and migraine thing
i i realized that why
girls were so much more often
nearsighted
and having migraines was that
females are 5 or 10 times more likely to
be hypothyroid
and so i had i had thought about that
for many years
that the thyroid probably accounts for
the
the females symptoms but
since when i worked in the woods for
example
i would work in the summer to
pay for college expenses and
i i was uh sort of the camp
joke because my my lunch bag
we had cloth bags that we carried our
lunch and some of the guys would
put a sandwich or two and a little
packet on their hip
mine reached below my my knees
and weighed must have been
seven or eight pounds of of lunch i
dragged with
through the woods and that's where i
realized that i had
an extremely high metabolic rate and
one summer on a on a survey crew
where we had to chop down the small
trees
for the line of sight surveying
i found that i had to drink
a quart of water every 30 minutes
and and we would work about 12 hours
steady
and during that whole time from
about five in the morning until six at
night i wouldn't
urinate at all but i would put uh
five four or five gallons of water
through me
and it would all come out as sweat and
uh
calculating how much heat and calories
uh it takes to evaporate that much water
it turns out that i was
during those those times of intense work
i would be burning 10 or 12 000 calories
a day
and i i just couldn't believe that that
could be
uh
possible with with hypothyroidism
and as i i thought about it more
i decided to simply try a supplement and
see what happened
and right after i i took my first
bit of thyroid i
cooled down i didn't have to eat so much
and i became much more relaxed
i had always been a light sleeper so
that if if the house creaked
i would be jolted awake and i realized
that was like a pregnant woman
or a woman with a newborn baby
the hormones make the brain alert
and when i took the thyroid
there were hormonal changes so that i
could sleep
soundly like i had as a
an eight or nine year old
and uh so my reasoning
um

53:13

i think
jerry aikawa the magnesium
researcher i think he
had the the clue to how that works he
showed that
cells can't retain
magnesium if they're low in thyroid
and the mechanism i think is that
atp produced under the influence of
oxygen and and fuel consumption and
and thyroid activation atp
binds magnesium and
in the absence of thyroid you simply
aren't making enough
atp and not binding enough magnesium
and the de-energized
molecule adp binds calcium
and when the cell has a high
calcium content it tends to be in an
excited state
so when you're low in in magnesium
and high in calcium your cells are stuck
in an activated state and i think that
a magnesium deficiency
interacting with the thyroid deficiency
means that your cells are being
overexposed to calcium
internally exciting them making them
waste energy
burning oxygen and fuel
but not being able to relax fully


54:55 B&J:so your fields of research seem
broad as well as your endeavors
i've just never been able to describe
what you do succinctly how would you
describe yourself


55:11 RP: I've always thought of myself as a as a
painter who couldn't
make a profession of portrait painting
because i
i didn't like the way the the clients
made demands on how i represented them
and that science is is
just a part of of the
landscape it isn't
what i do as as an occupation or
profession
it's just something that everyone
really has to deal with because it's a
it's a major
means of indoctrination and control
people say here's the study that
gives this result therefore you have to
do this
and uh it's really a propaganda
and control and manipulation uh
scheme as well as
as a byproduct it has a lot of useful
things and so
i found that i could use
the techniques and do some some useful
things
but i don't
i don't subscribe to the the culture in
general
it's a nice idea

56:41 B&J: do you consider
yourself a scientist no
i i think if a critic of
opinions about reality could be called a
scientist
yeah then but
i i think of myself as mainly a critic
rather than a
participant in the science culture


57:07 B&J:and how do you communicate your ideas or
interface with others?

57:20 RP: um i uh
when i was trying to um
to be a a participant
in in the education culture or the
the philosophy culture uh various
academic lines i would submit papers
and very often
the editors would make irrelevant
comments for example once i
wrote a letter with the article i was
submitting
that was on the college letterhead that
had
uh some hispanic names on it and the
editor
sent back the rejection notice with
racist
comments on it about hispanics
not being genetically qualified
to to work in that field and
two or three similar
very inappropriate remarks for a
for a science editor to make
made me uh increasingly skeptical
and some articles i sent to medical
journals
uh i would get a silly rejection letter
and then three or four months later the
same
journal would publish essentially the
same idea
uh for example
the effects of light deprivation uh
vitamin a deficiency causing leukoplakia
and several contra
contraceptive uh function of of uh
progesterone uh right after i
submitted uh articles uh with
uh some evidence supporting each of
those things
they would be rejected and then an
md would be published shortly after
my rejection on exactly the same idea
and i realized i had known
uh composers who um
would send their their song to irving
berlin
uh to get his approval and they they
find it it came out as serving berlin
song
and uh various uh
things i realized that publication was
uh
uh not what it seems to be
and so then why did you choose
uh a newsletter as
the medium to communicate your
um when i was teaching uh
the the science classes in in urbana or
the linguistics
classes in in montana i would
uh write up my ideas and some of my
criticisms
of of the textbook for example
in a handout a two or three page handout
for every class
so that it would
my idea was the students wouldn't have
to take notes
if i would tell them everything i was
going to talk about in that class
and so then we could talk about things
so they wouldn't be occupied
trying to record what i was saying
and so i got in the habit of uh
for for every class that i did after
that i would
write out a handout and uh
i did a course on the uh
russian approach to brain
research and did
a weekly class and
would give them a handout of several
pages
for each week and i realized that that
had made a book uh the mind and tissue
book
was was just the uh the handouts for
that class
and uh that got me in the habit of
distributing my weekly thoughts
uh people would drop in for a class or
just a discussion
and so i would mimi a graph at first
and then as xeroxes got cheaper i would
xerox
at first i made a lot of carbon copies
of my
i typed up handouts and
as xerox and got cheaper then i would
send more copies to more people and
in the late 70s i realized that
i could not not even
consider getting
snide remarks from editors and
just distribute my articles to
people that were interested

1:02:28 B&J:um i know that some take an approach
of touring around giving lectures
video series things like that is there a
reason why
you don't take a similar approach and
and prefer to
disseminate

1:02:45 RP: oh in i think it was about
91 uh
1990 or 91 i had
a series of lectures scheduled
uh i would try to get them scheduled so
i could
drive from eugene to san diego and
stop along the way and
[Music]
in one of the northern california towns
we gathered at the lecture hall
and the place was locked up and
so we've discovered that
it wasn't going to be possible to use
that place so we went to
one of the person's homes to do the
meeting
and next place along the line
same thing happened and i got to
san diego for i had been giving
every few months i would do a talk at
this grocery store
that had a theater uh joining the store
and when i got there the theater was
locked and
i went in the the health food department
of the grocery store
and the person who had arranged the
lecture had been fired
and i i realized that
the health food industry who
had caught on to what i was going to say
about
unsaturated fat

1:04:20 BJ:the flax oil syndicate
uh so what subjects are you currently
interested in researching in in the
general subject matter of your
newsletters over the years

1:04:37 RP:Currently the most recent thing is
trying to regeneralize
almost everything that is
conventionally established
about cell measurements
the for example the
idea of electricity in the cell
interacts with the idea of ph in the
cell
and the redox potential
the the balance between oxidizing
and reducing these
interact in in theory
there are are ways of explaining
those but they tend to be independent as
if there were separate things
and looking at it from the the gilbert
ling perspective
uh i think everything
has a much simpler explanation
even maybe more generalized than gilbert
ling's
uh in which uh uh

1:05:55-for example the exterior fields
that that relate to people like uh
persinger's
uh work the
living tissue projects
a static like electrical field
around it someone used a piece of skin
in in an isolation compartment
and so that as it's oxidizing
it's projecting a negative field
beyond the surface a couple of inches
and adding cyanide to block
oxidation the fields collapsed
washing the cyanide out the field came
back
showing that the
outside field around the
the um tissue and cell is
reflecting uh the metabolism and
energy intensity inside
but the the business of putting
an electrode into a cell the very first
thing that gilbert ling
noticed in the late 1940s uh
he simply looking at what he was doing
concluded that it it wasn't behaving the
way an elect
and membrane uh potential
should act it was he described it as a
surface difference a phase potential
that he could detect right at the
surface and
i think he described the
potassium chloride charged
microelectrode
three molar solution very concentrated
solution of potassium chloride i think
he was one that described it
as a battery
a source of of electrical energy not a
detector
that it was creating a current as the
cell
sucked the potassium out out of your
electrode
and uh i think
the um the membrane potential is is
probably
one of the uh most important examples of
an artifact
that that uh pre-k officerostrin
a famous electron microscopist at
southern california usc
i think it was he
demonstrated in various preparations
that the way you
prepared the material for the electron
microscope created totally different
membrane structures and
simply

1:08:50-sydney fox for example
in adding
water to hot amino acids uh
creating little particles these appear
to have a membrane
and since you're
creating when you stain
a cell to create a
visible membrane you're
causing a charged molecule
to concentrate in a particular region
and it happens that where the osmic
acid concentrates
is where they suggest that the
acid of the fat fatty acid should be the
phosphate
lipid membrane this phosphate group
should repel
the stain but in fact
that's exactly where they
they're representing that the the
osmium is uh being concentrated but
what where it will concentrate is at a
a zone of positive charge
and whenever you have two
unlike materials in contact one will
attract electrons away and
you'll you'll get a an electrical
a double layer that i think is
is what is being stained
appearing looking like like a membrane
but it's really a
pure artifact of staining
and so i'm i'm
working towards a picture of of the cell
which
sees this metabolic projected
surrounding charge
with the oxidation reduction
process which governs
things like cell division and
cell behavior

1:11:20-you have to be
you have to have an excess of electrons
to for the cell to
break into two parts and multiply
and if if you keep the cell in its
oxidizing state you can
keep it functioning rather than simply
growing
and the
acid-base balance
is directly connected to the
electrical charge of the material
and as you
increase the alkalinity or the abundance
of electrons
you're causing the
gel system of basically proteins
to take up more water so
everything that involves either too much
cell division orB&J:where were you born

RP: uh santee california 1936 outside of san diego and then my parents had homesteaded a piece of desert over near indio palm springs area and uh so as a baby i went right from being born near san diego over to the desert and lived on the desert homestead until i was three then went to the the town and uh came to oregon right after the war started partly because of the of the war my father wanted to get a job in the defense industry and uh worked at i think it was douglas aircraft for about almost a year and learned that they had nothing for him to do as a draftsman that the the deal was that they got 10 percent from the government as profit beyond everything they could spend and so they hired crowds of people and bought what useless instruments and machines that simply sat there and so he realized that he was a participating in you know war profiteering and so we moved to oregon and uh sort of dropped out all during the war the oregon culture at that time was uh kind of like old time anarchists had been populating a lot of the western oregon and then southerners moved in during the dust bowl years so it was a very conservative town with background of radical libertarianism

B&J: so just
uh start by telling us your name and
general background so that can include
your fields of study
occupations but just a brief rundown of
all of that


RP:my name's raymond peat
i first
decided to become a teacher
and went to a teacher's education
college southern oregon college
and intended to
maybe um become a literature teacher and
so i went to the university to
get a master's degree and
at that time it was i got my bachelor's
degree in
1956 and
i thought the university would be
a place of relative enlightenment
compared to the small town
and i found that politics
have pretty much ruled at the university
of oregon at that time in 1956
and so i tried one department
after the other went from an english
major
to um i tried philosophy
for a while and i spent
six months as a psychology major
and i tried a few months as an art
history major
and finally decided that
politics governed
all of them art history was the the
freest of political
influence but i wasn't that
interested in it so i i found that i
could write a thesis
on a subject that if it didn't
incorporated different departmental
areas
i could get a degree based on that
thesis
and so i had as an undergraduate
become interested in william blake and
since he had an interesting
philosophical orientation
as well as being a poet and a painter
that became the the way to
i integrate what i had been studying
into a master's degree
and just by chance i was
interested in uh going from
uh my my study of blake and
psychology philosophy uh into
uh applying it to the idea of
linguistic biology bio-linguistics
and how the brain makes language and
i found that there was a program in that
would
permit a phd
degree to be interdepartmental
with philosophy and linguistics
as the main areas so i started
uh this program of ohio state
and uh
there were not many professors
sympathetic with
with the sort of integrated
interdepartmental
approach that i was interested in but
there was a
swedenborg in college about
45 miles from the university
where i found that they needed a biology
teacher
and that was really how i
got more involved in
teaching biology and developing
my interests so i was
studying linguistics and philosophy
at ohio state and teaching
courses that were the title was
um physics for biology majors
and as the the new president
of the universe of the uh it was called
urbana university but it was a very
small
formerly a church seminary college
the new president was was revising it by
developing a really interesting
curriculum
and he said he didn't want
physics taught the way he had
experienced it
and uh not to teach the
the standard mechanics as the
introduction
to uh forces and and fields and so on
he said he wanted his students to be
able to
understand physical science
topics that they read in newspapers and
magazines
and he wanted it to prepare them
for majoring in biology
so with that instruction as
as what the course should be i decided
that
the computers were a new cultural
phenomenon at that time so
i i decided that understanding how
information theory works in the brain
and in computers would be
a good application of physics for
biology majors
and that the interaction
of energy and matter
which is one of the core ideas in
physics that this would
make it possible to understand the the
question of the biological effects
of atomic bombs and
radioactive fallout so
those were two uh important
ways of organizing the course
and as it turned out
the the trustees
weren't pleased when the students got
interested
in questioning
the government position on
this the safety of of radioactive
fallout
from atomic bomb testing and so that job
only lasted for a year and uh
that immediately led to the idea of
starting a college that would
be independent of these
extraneous influences of of the trustees
and and their commitments and uh
so i put some advertisements
for example in the saturday review
magazine and a
professor who was had been offered
the job to replace me as a biology
teacher
uh leo koch
it happened that his
lecture his tryout to be a new biology
teacher
his topic was the dangers of radiation
and so he was dropped and
he and i together he went around
giving lectures helping to recruit
students
to start a college that would be owned
and controlled by the teachers
and the students jointly and
so that that kept me busy for
uh six or eight years uh
and on my own i kept uh following up
these
uh various lines of uh
biological uh
study until in 1968
i decided to go back to graduate school
that that i would done
the the culture had changed somewhat and
uh I felt that i could
uh stay in in one department
and simply ignore the political
uh impositions that uh each department
had so i i went back to uh
working a phd in biology at the
university of oregon


B&J- Okay so going back a little further in
time
how did you first get interested in the
life sciences what sparked this
interest

RP:um
i um as a very little kid
my parents had made the decision that
they weren't going to
indoctrinate me with anything with real
religion or politics
and they would simply answer my
questions
and just apparently out of my own
inclinations i i was interested in
how the natural world worked
and and how my my self
worked uh in in uh
such things as as perceiving uh
and uh those
simple uh childish uh
urges to to figure things out without
getting any answers uh preformed
uh uh it it turned out that uh
organisms and and why organisms and
people
had died uh became
a continuing concern and and
the resources at that time were
uh for example
the the family encyclopedias
and and some of the books of my
grandparents and parents
uh old turn-of-the-century
literature philosophy
medical books and so on these were
available and so i started reading and
i found lots of interesting
things had been done in biology and
physics
i ran across jc bose in
in one of the little encyclopedias uh
an indian uh physicist who
who actually invented uh
wireless communication and uh
he devised instruments to
show the the reactions of uh
living material to very small
uh stimuli and
showed similarities between inorganic
substances and organic substances
and since i hadn't been given
any um any indoctrination as a little
kid
this j.c bose's approach to
explaining substance and living material
seemed very natural to me and that
started me
on a line of uh looking for information
in encyclopedias
magazines anything that was available
and i around the same time
found good descriptions of of some of
the early
neo- lamarckian studies uh
a professor i think was university of
wisconsin named michael geyer
did some experiments showing that
for example he would grind up eyes
and inject it into pregnant rabbits and
some of the babies would be born with
damaged
eyeballs some of them blind and
when he bred these offspring
with the damaged eyes he found that the
uh
the trait could be inherited a damage
or blindness would be passed on from the
treatment
and so i seeing
a lot of that evidence that was in the
encyclopedias and
and standard publications i realized
that
the biology that was showing up in the
textbooks and schools
was a very doctrinaire and
anti-scientific position that
so so it led me to
to wonder where this uh natural
selection
neo-darwinian genetic uh
absolute uh inheritance of of a fixed
trait

came from and uh
so that that involved uh
studying the the culture and and
philosophy influencing uh science
and and so in uh
simply trying to understand the world
practically
it involved running into people who were
selling something with their
constructed facts
and

B&J:so you talked a bit about earlier
uh problems within the
teaching environment at universities but
when did you start
to realizing how um that what you were
being taught
the science you were being taught was
incorrect

RP: um
at my very first experience with going
to
we had moved as to
grant's pass or a small
country school outside of transpass and
uh the the um my first reaction
to the uh second grade uh
teachers i was already skeptical
i had seen stuff in books at home
that uh made me uh doubt what i was
being taught
and then uh in the country school
uh where i went uh to um third
to fifth grade uh there were
at first eight grades and then sixth
grades in a one-room schoolhouse
and so i could uh hear what
was being taught to all of the different
grades
and uh that was a very pleasant
schooling experience
the teacher had a very
open attitude wasn't imposing anything
uh had some of us learn
oil painting and
then going back to the city schools
again i had a very
oppressed feeling and
for example in the 7th grade
1948
they had a student mock election
and i i think my brother was the only
one in the school
to vote for strom thurman just because
he wanted to be annoying and
i voted for um henry wallace
and uh in in my social
uh science class i uh um
was arguing for why henry wallace
would be a good candidate because he
wasn't for war
and i wanted to keep the economy going
and uh so one of the uh
one of my classmates as the teacher uh
since they're talking about having
capital punishment
for communists or are they going to kill
raymond
the teacher said no i don't think they
will he's a nice little boy
but basically i i considered

most most of the high school teachers to
be
either prisoners of the system
there were there were several really
nice teachers who
who have communicated
tolerance and such and then there were
the the
disgruntled hitlerites and and the
standard uh middle-class
uh fascist-minded people it was
so i was eager to uh try out college
and uh at southern oregon college
uh after i'd been there
uh for i guess two or three terms
i was having a bad reaction to
several of my my classes and heard about
arthur christman a jewish
literature teacher who
he had had an offer to teach at harvard
but
have preferred the relaxed
atmosphere of of ashland uh
and the uh the very small
college atmosphere and
he was sort of an eye-opening
experience to uh
he took a philosophical
cultural approach to everything he
taught
and and so i after taking his
uh world literature survey i signed up
for
uh some of his philosophy classes
and a comparative religion class
and he was the college was so small he
was able to teach
many different subjects and uh
the um even though he
was the main focus of my undergraduate
education
people had told me that there would be
other people like him
at the big university and and
so i was eager to to start there
graduated when i was 19 and
getting to the university of oregon
i found that it was a much more of a
narrow-minded tuned into the political
situation not not the backwater
tolerance of of the little teacher
education school
and uh so then i i
essentially uh dropped out of the whole
thing
uh dropping out of four different
departments
and uh looking for for a uh
some some outlet which uh
for a time it seemed to be this
interdepartmental
program at ohio state
um the the outcome of my phd program
at ohio state uh was that
i intended to to go work
somewhere else while i finished my my
dissertation because i
had finished the course requirement
and i kept working on the
bio-linguistics approach as i
i did the blake college project and
about the time i was thinking of going
back to ohio state
almost the whole humanities faculty
resigned in protest to the
president of universities
uh expulsion of the student
for having gus hall
speak at his house and
i forget how many it was but all of my
professors
and practically the whole
liberal arts university went off to the
universities on the east and west coast
so that that was the end of my ohio
state
thesis project
and both as a a student and a professor


B&J:can you go into a little more detail
what some of the consequences were
for you when you started to question the
system so you mentioned
briefly about the one firing


RP:um but just also talk
about that as a as a student if there
was any kind of ostracization or
oh well um the um
even though I
had had several experiences
as a teacher
for example teaching high school in the
san diego
area
i found that the newly hired teachers
in the um
one one of the area high schools that
had just been created
all of the teachers were lively and we
enjoyed talking
in the teachers room and at the
other high schools that had been
established
over the years the teachers all seem to
be
in a depressed semi-hypnotic
state just
unwilling or unable to get
interested in anything in their
their office free time
in the teacher's room they would
just want to to gripe about conditions
and so on but in the new
uh new school where the teachers hadn't
been
around the system for very long everyone
was likely
and after three or four months
i saw the the new teachers who had been
lively
starting to become depressed and dull
by the end of that year as they were
pretty much
like the the teachers in the other
schools
and i
i realized that it was very hard
to continue functioning
uh in in in the system
doing what the system told you to and
when blake college in mexico ended
i i went to teach at university of
montana
for a year and
[Music]
having designed my own courses
not only at urbana in
in biology and physics but at lake
college
the idea of inventing
courses uh to suit the needs of each
student
and that guided the way i i designed the
linguistics
courses at montana and i found that
i could meet the definition of the of
the course
according to the college catalog and
what the content should include
but i could still do it in a way that
didn't deaden either me or the students
for example there were textbooks that
were chosen by the department
and so i would go through the textbook
class by class and show
what i thought was wrong with the
approach in the textbook
so that i i didn't repeat anything
that was being taught in the
in the text other than as something to
offer perspectives on uh so that
the students could choose
between my perspective as a critic
and the standard opinion of
of the textbook writer and
when it was uh successful we could
generate new perspectives
through the interactions and i found
that
it could potentially be a
very very functional educationally to
work in a
you know an established university
if you didn't have
people guiding you and
and firing you when you did the wrong
thing but
that that was when i decided to go back
to
eugene and the university of oregon to
work on the phd
and by that time i realized that
i just wanted to have access to their
facilities the instruments and
use use their library and resources to
do the research that i want and that i
could
conform enough to meet the requirements
of all of the course
individual idiosyncrasies of the
professors
and uh only a couple of the professors
uh really really disliked me but uh
the the the only really a bad outcome
they would give me a c
in a lab because
that was a subjective evaluation whether
i was doing
my lab work properly and incidentally my
my experiments in lab always turned out
interesting and odd and
it tended to upset the professors
and the um if i would say
look what's happening in this situation
the professor would prefer to walk away
and not comment
but but
academically uh i
i picked up people as thesis advisors
that were
very very confident interesting
people one
one professor that wasn't on my
committee uh was sort of a
a sounding word uh uh
he would put up uh things
on his bulletin board that he had seen
in the paper that
that were counter to the
the dogma and
when i would run into something that was
contrary to the dogma
he was someone that was willing to talk
about it
uh but uh
mostly mostly it was
a matter of avoiding the dogmatists

B&J:i also remember you having an anecdote
one professor you had questioned
something very early
in the term and then decided not to
call on you for the rest of the year and
what was that


RP:um
maybe you're thinking of the
comparative physiology where
the professor
had 10 i think it was 10 or 12
lectures the first half of the course
and
they were very peculiar uh
everything seemed to be skewed a little
bit to make it
uh seem different even though it was
standard
uh biological responses but everything
was prevented
presented in a sideways
fashion that that seemed very odd no one
in the class could
figure out what he was doing but it
i think the purpose was to
forced all questioning because it seemed
so odd
then the second half of the term
he had every student
do a presentation i think it was a
20-minute
present 15 or 20 minutes for each
student
and there were just enough students so
that there would be a time slot
for each of us and even though my
my name was in the middle of the
alphabet
he saved me for the very last
hour of the course and
[Music]
during the um the last hour
uh he knew that i was going to talk
about
stuff i had done in the lab uh testing
some of
gilbert ling's ideas and uh
so he saved me for a
diminished time slot about 10
10 or 15 minutes before the end of the
terms
time possibilities and
so i spent about five minutes outlining
uh in just a very roughest way
uh gilbert leighton ling's
essential ideas and contributions and
just as i was about to start uh
describing the
evidence supporting his general view
professor has said we aren't going to
have time
for for the rest of that uh and as i sat
down he said
the ideas are very interesting but there
isn't evidence to support it but he'd
very carefully cut me off before i could
prevent
present the evidence and uh
he knew i was sort of a menace because
i i had
for example when he was explaining
how the glass membrane
on a ph meter works
he said the protons
hydrogen ions diffuse through
the glass and i said
um but sometimes

36:00minutes:

the glass can be very
thick and it still gives the same
results he said it shows that
glass is very permeable to hydrogen
hydrogen ions and i said but
so and so uses
the same instrument but filled with
mercury instead of
hydrochloric acid and
does that mean that mercury ions are
diffusing through the glass and
that that was
really uh hated me

36:34 B&J:as an added inspiration for yourself
getting into science and questioning
aging and the death of the organism um
did was there anything going on in your
own health did you have a
health journey getting?

36:56 RP: well that also when when i was uh going to school in this one room country school was the first time i noticed that um something was different about my eyes as a little kid i could i remember reading science in the distance and having very good eyesight and around the age of eight or nine i noticed that i couldn't recognize a face that was a hundred yards away or 50 yards away and realized that something was fuzzy and and then in the the sixth grade I couldn't see the blackboard to do the arithmetic problems and and so i got my first glasses but there were girls in my sixth grade class who were also nearsighted and that there weren't any boys that started me thinking about what was causing nearsightedness and then as i got acquainted with a couple of these girls i found that they had had migraine
headaches which i had had a couple and uh so i started seeing a connection between female hormones nearsightedness and and migraines and that was just a sort of a nagging question for years and years that I kept wondering about
uh but um
the um the things that really got me
uh interested in the idea of
getting more deeply involved in studying
and maybe
uh doing uh counseling uh
was years later
i had had more and more put together
the ideas of
what i had been eating and what would
bring on a migraine headache
and i realized that
there were ups and downs in my blood
sugar so that if i
would uh do something energetic
uh like uh going on a hike
on a weekend the next morning i would
wake up with the migraine
and so i i was uh
progressively interested in the the
effects of food
and the um the culture at that time
people were talking
in the newspapers and on the radio
talking about the effects of of vitamin
deficiencies
and so on and that was the first time i
i heard the idea that
certain fatty acids might be essential
but at that time in 1948
49 that information was always qualified
with
but that is a uh an
issue to be solved
it isn't uh established that they are an
essential nutrient
and so in in the 50s adele davis's
books were coming out and
i read one or two of her
books in the 50s and i
got got interested in trying different
vitamin supplements


40:55- And i found that when i was feeling
uh sort of gloomy and
oppressed i happened to take a
a vitamin b1 tablet
and within two or three minutes
the sense of gloom and the
depression and darkness lifted
and i realized how how important
a simple single vitamin could be
then years later
in in mexico uh
a friend who had dropped by the school
uh started he said a niece of his was
about a year and a half old
was in the hospital with dysentery
and the next day he came by and said
she's worse
and i think it was on the third day she
said that
she's deteriorating and and they think
she might not
survive but i had read in adele davis
about
the effect of b6 on on the intestine so
i gave him a 10
milligram tablet he took it to the
hospital and
gave it to the baby and almost
immediately her
her diarrhea stopped and she came right
out of it
and um
about the same time i i noticed that my
english language students who had come
for classes
after working all day
some of them just couldn't remember
anything
and i
found a place that wholesaled
a crude kind of wheat germ
and i i made some wheat germ and egg
cakes sort of like big cookies
and i would serve one of those and a cup
of coffee
to my english students before class
and suddenly they were bright and could
remember everything
and then one of the american neighbors
who was a writer
was he had a potato nose at rhinophyma
gnarled blood vessels making his nose
lumpy and knotted
and red across his his nose and cheeks
and he was a heavy drinker but
his main concern was that his vocabulary
was shrinking and when he would talk
he would make a great struggle just to
get
the exact word that he he wanted and
since he was
trying to be a writer that was a
serious concern i told him about the
adele davis's observation that
a vitamin b2 deficiency
makes tissues unable to use
oxygen and being unable to use oxygen
the body invades that tissue with more
blood vessels
to try to deliver enough oxygen
and so i suggested that his uh
red cheeks and the lumpy nose might
be evidence of vitamin b2 deficiency
and so he went it took him several weeks
to remember
that but i kept giving him notes and he
would lose the notes
but finally he got to the doctor with a
note
and the doctor gave him a shot of
vitamin b2
and the next time i saw him on a monday
he spoke fluently
had access to his vocabulary
and there was no redness
just like turning off a switch
all that week
he was fluent and didn't have the red
skin
and each week he would go for a shot
and he was working fine but something
happened when
one weekend he couldn't get to to the
city for a shot
and he was right back with the red face
and absence of vocabulary
and since his his memory
was necessary to remember to go to the
doctor
he uh eventually uh his nose got bigger
and
his memory got worse and i finally died
of
a heart problem and um
having that experience then um a friend
with a little son who um
every night would uh wake up screaming
with a nosebleed and in the afternoon
sometimes he would wake up with a
nosebleed
and having extreme behavior problems
getting violent he was about four
at the time and i i mentioned the
possibility that
he was having that same kind of a
vascular problem affecting his behavior
and as blood vessels so we made him some
a little uh sort of puffed
uh egg scrambled egg
with powdered milk and a dissolved
10 milligram vitamin b2 tablet in each
pill
in each cookie and and
after he ate his first cookie
that nap he slept right through and
didn't have a nosebleed
as far as i know as long as i knew them
he never had another nosebleed
and his behavior improved
so in that
got me interested in the idea that that
single vitamins
you could connect a symptom or a disease
to a particular vitamin vitamin b1 or
b2 or b6 and so on
and so i i got
involved in in that kind of uh
thinking that you have to be perceptive
and informed and not match the treatment
to the
problem and so on but meanwhile
the other thing was going on studying
how organisms and cells
work and seeing that there
are very general
principles that that simplify
everything and that it isn't necessary
to think medically
about matching a nutrient to to a
symptom
that the the proper way to
go about it would be to
find out what what is uh missing
in the organism that makes it unstable
and and work on the most
general things and
natural foods happen to
have each each kind of organism
that we use as a food has
all of the nutrients basically
but in different proportions and if you
simply pick out
the balance of simple foods
you can raise your your general
level of of nutritional intake
without having to worry about which
which thing is
is specifically related to a symptom

49:16 B&J: and besides um
the eyesight and the migraines
very early on was there anything else in your
in your health that helped guide your
research maybe maybe later down the road

49:31 RP:um not about my own health that i
remember

49:36 B&J:um but what about when like the
inspiration to start taking thyroid or
looking into thyroid
supplement and the effect of that

RP:um
yeah the the eyesight and migraine thing
i i realized that why
girls were so much more often
nearsighted
and having migraines was that
females are 5 or 10 times more likely to
be hypothyroid
and so i had i had thought about that
for many years
that the thyroid probably accounts for
the
the females symptoms but
since when i worked in the woods for
example
i would work in the summer to
pay for college expenses and
i i was uh sort of the camp
joke because my my lunch bag
we had cloth bags that we carried our
lunch and some of the guys would
put a sandwich or two and a little
packet on their hip
mine reached below my my knees
and weighed must have been
seven or eight pounds of of lunch i
dragged with
through the woods and that's where i
realized that i had
an extremely high metabolic rate and
one summer on a on a survey crew
where we had to chop down the small
trees
for the line of sight surveying
i found that i had to drink
a quart of water every 30 minutes
and and we would work about 12 hours
steady
and during that whole time from
about five in the morning until six at
night i wouldn't
urinate at all but i would put uh
five four or five gallons of water
through me
and it would all come out as sweat and
uh
calculating how much heat and calories
uh it takes to evaporate that much water
it turns out that i was
during those those times of intense work
i would be burning 10 or 12 000 calories
a day
and i i just couldn't believe that that
could be
uh
possible with with hypothyroidism
and as i i thought about it more
i decided to simply try a supplement and
see what happened
and right after i i took my first
bit of thyroid i
cooled down i didn't have to eat so much
and i became much more relaxed
i had always been a light sleeper so
that if if the house creaked
i would be jolted awake and i realized
that was like a pregnant woman
or a woman with a newborn baby
the hormones make the brain alert
and when i took the thyroid
there were hormonal changes so that i
could sleep
soundly like i had as a
an eight or nine year old
and uh so my reasoning
um

53:13

i think
jerry aikawa the magnesium
researcher i think he
had the the clue to how that works he
showed that
cells can't retain
magnesium if they're low in thyroid
and the mechanism i think is that
atp produced under the influence of
oxygen and and fuel consumption and
and thyroid activation atp
binds magnesium and
in the absence of thyroid you simply
aren't making enough
atp and not binding enough magnesium
and the de-energized
molecule adp binds calcium
and when the cell has a high
calcium content it tends to be in an
excited state
so when you're low in in magnesium
and high in calcium your cells are stuck
in an activated state and i think that
a magnesium deficiency
interacting with the thyroid deficiency
means that your cells are being
overexposed to calcium
internally exciting them making them
waste energy
burning oxygen and fuel
but not being able to relax fully


54:55 B&J:so your fields of research seem
broad as well as your endeavors
i've just never been able to describe
what you do succinctly how would you
describe yourself


55:11 RP: I've always thought of myself as a as a
painter who couldn't
make a profession of portrait painting
because i
i didn't like the way the the clients
made demands on how i represented them
and that science is is
just a part of of the
landscape it isn't
what i do as as an occupation or
profession
it's just something that everyone
really has to deal with because it's a
it's a major
means of indoctrination and control
people say here's the study that
gives this result therefore you have to
do this
and uh it's really a propaganda
and control and manipulation uh
scheme as well as
as a byproduct it has a lot of useful
things and so
i found that i could use
the techniques and do some some useful
things
but i don't
i don't subscribe to the the culture in
general
it's a nice idea

56:41 B&J: do you consider
yourself a scientist no
i i think if a critic of
opinions about reality could be called a
scientist
yeah then but
i i think of myself as mainly a critic
rather than a
participant in the science culture


57:07 B&J:and how do you communicate your ideas or
interface with others?

57:20 RP: um i uh
when i was trying to um
to be a a participant
in in the education culture or the
the philosophy culture uh various
academic lines i would submit papers
and very often
the editors would make irrelevant
comments for example once i
wrote a letter with the article i was
submitting
that was on the college letterhead that
had
uh some hispanic names on it and the
editor
sent back the rejection notice with
racist
comments on it about hispanics
not being genetically qualified
to to work in that field and
two or three similar
very inappropriate remarks for a
for a science editor to make
made me uh increasingly skeptical
and some articles i sent to medical
journals
uh i would get a silly rejection letter
and then three or four months later the
same
journal would publish essentially the
same idea
uh for example
the effects of light deprivation uh
vitamin a deficiency causing leukoplakia
and several contra
contraceptive uh function of of uh
progesterone uh right after i
submitted uh articles uh with
uh some evidence supporting each of
those things
they would be rejected and then an
md would be published shortly after
my rejection on exactly the same idea
and i realized i had known
uh composers who um
would send their their song to irving
berlin
uh to get his approval and they they
find it it came out as serving berlin
song
and uh various uh
things i realized that publication was
uh
uh not what it seems to be
and so then why did you choose
uh a newsletter as
the medium to communicate your
um when i was teaching uh
the the science classes in in urbana or
the linguistics
classes in in montana i would
uh write up my ideas and some of my
criticisms
of of the textbook for example
in a handout a two or three page handout
for every class
so that it would
my idea was the students wouldn't have
to take notes
if i would tell them everything i was
going to talk about in that class
and so then we could talk about things
so they wouldn't be occupied
trying to record what i was saying
and so i got in the habit of uh
for for every class that i did after
that i would
write out a handout and uh
i did a course on the uh
russian approach to brain
research and did
a weekly class and
would give them a handout of several
pages
for each week and i realized that that
had made a book uh the mind and tissue
book
was was just the uh the handouts for
that class
and uh that got me in the habit of
distributing my weekly thoughts
uh people would drop in for a class or
just a discussion
and so i would mimi a graph at first
and then as xeroxes got cheaper i would
xerox
at first i made a lot of carbon copies
of my
i typed up handouts and
as xerox and got cheaper then i would
send more copies to more people and
in the late 70s i realized that
i could not not even
consider getting
snide remarks from editors and
just distribute my articles to
people that were interested

1:02:28 B&J:um i know that some take an approach
of touring around giving lectures
video series things like that is there a
reason why
you don't take a similar approach and
and prefer to
disseminate

1:02:45 RP: oh in i think it was about
91 uh
1990 or 91 i had
a series of lectures scheduled
uh i would try to get them scheduled so
i could
drive from eugene to san diego and
stop along the way and
[Music]
in one of the northern california towns
we gathered at the lecture hall
and the place was locked up and
so we've discovered that
it wasn't going to be possible to use
that place so we went to
one of the person's homes to do the
meeting
and next place along the line
same thing happened and i got to
san diego for i had been giving
every few months i would do a talk at
this grocery store
that had a theater uh joining the store
and when i got there the theater was
locked and
i went in the the health food department
of the grocery store
and the person who had arranged the
lecture had been fired
and i i realized that
the health food industry who
had caught on to what i was going to say
about
unsaturated fat

1:04:20 BJ:the flax oil syndicate
uh so what subjects are you currently
interested in researching in in the
general subject matter of your
newsletters over the years

1:04:37 RP:Currently the most recent thing is
trying to regeneralize
almost everything that is
conventionally established
about cell measurements
the for example the
idea of electricity in the cell
interacts with the idea of ph in the
cell
and the redox potential
the the balance between oxidizing
and reducing these
interact in in theory
there are are ways of explaining
those but they tend to be independent as
if there were separate things
and looking at it from the the gilbert
ling perspective
uh i think everything
has a much simpler explanation
even maybe more generalized than gilbert
ling's
uh in which uh uh

1:05:55-for example the exterior fields
that that relate to people like uh
persinger's
uh work the
living tissue projects
a static like electrical field
around it someone used a piece of skin
in in an isolation compartment
and so that as it's oxidizing
it's projecting a negative field
beyond the surface a couple of inches
and adding cyanide to block
oxidation the fields collapsed
washing the cyanide out the field came
back
showing that the
outside field around the
the um tissue and cell is
reflecting uh the metabolism and
energy intensity inside
but the the business of putting
an electrode into a cell the very first
thing that gilbert ling
noticed in the late 1940s uh
he simply looking at what he was doing
concluded that it it wasn't behaving the
way an elect
and membrane uh potential
should act it was he described it as a
surface difference a phase potential
that he could detect right at the
surface and
i think he described the
potassium chloride charged
microelectrode
three molar solution very concentrated
solution of potassium chloride i think
he was one that described it
as a battery
a source of of electrical energy not a
detector
that it was creating a current as the
cell
sucked the potassium out out of your
electrode
and uh i think
the um the membrane potential is is
probably
one of the uh most important examples of
an artifact
that that uh pre-k officerostrin
a famous electron microscopist at
southern california usc
i think it was he
demonstrated in various preparations
that the way you
prepared the material for the electron
microscope created totally different
membrane structures and
simply

1:08:50-sydney fox for example
in adding
water to hot amino acids uh
creating little particles these appear
to have a membrane
and since you're
creating when you stain
a cell to create a
visible membrane you're
causing a charged molecule
swelling and uh interference
with function simply because the shape
is
is being distorted
all of these interact with our
our externally projected fields
and there are
models that support each other
for example the electorate
i don't know if our microphones uh
now electrode or is there a new
technology the electorate is is a
material that has solidified
in the presence of an electrical
field so that it freezes
with its uh atoms molecules
uh arranged so that you take away the
field and it stays charged
and the electric microphone
is arranged so that
when the sound
vibrates this uh fixed electrical charge
it creates
a an electrical current and
it's the sort of the equivalent
equivalent of a permanent magnet but
it's a permanent
electrical charge and
in the case of living stuff it's a
continuously regenerated electrical
charge
but that field is being projected
from um every cell that's respiring
influencing its environment
and these things have a very long reach
uh probably analogous to the
long distances that gerald pollock
shows in his exclusion zone water
as charged particles are kept
far back from the the surface of the
face
and those
those uh existing phenomena
have simply been left out of
membrane-based biological thinking


1:14:45 B&J-And it seems like along with that
your the subjects that you choose to
address in your newsletters run such a
wide
gamut can you just in a generalized way
um mention what some of those subjects
are over the years over
like the last you know couple decades

1:15:15 RP-oh um i've probably forgotten
a lot of them but
on my website there's one about
william blake and one about
uh the um the nature of knowing
and how that relates to
to education and uh
there's always this uh
trying to make philosophy
a part of the the awareness any any
particular
concrete question i think really
should relate to what you're doing
philosophically and
that i've
tried to uh concretize
the political meanings of that but
it's necessary i think always to be
looking at the historical
influences that have created this
myth of science as
a kind of objectivity
that is is based on
absolute uh reducible
uh kind of infinitely uh
describable uh in other words
they're they're so empty and abstract
that you can
have absolute confidence in
what you can deduce from them but
what that amounts to is that
we have a deductive
science which it's
saying that you reduce it to these uh
absolute units
of genes or atoms or quanta
and from those since they are pure
and not each one is is
absolutely the same everywhere in the
universe
you can make absolute deductions from
those
and these deductions can then
tell you all you need to know about how
the organism works
how it should be treated how it should
be educated
and so on it's a kind of religious
absolutism operating through
reductionist science applying
a philosophical physics to
sort of denature the organism to take
the life out of the organism


1:17:58 B&J-okay so we left off with the newsletter
is there anything else you wanted to say
about your newsletter
um in regards to how you
chose to do that i

1:18:12 RP- i
at times have i've hoped that
i would get more feedback to the
newsletter
but uh with the
the development of of the the computer
culture i get
a lot of reactions uh
not not exactly
almost never anything critical of the
ideas in the newsletter
which i had hoped that people would
sort of stimulate
amplification of certain themes in the
newsletter
by inquiring like in the class
uh someone will say what does that imply
and that leads off into new stuff but
um i had been hoping that the
newsletters would
stimulate that kind of development but
there's very little of it from the
emails i get
but but still people are
presenting new new
information new perspectives uh strange
things
are always happening and and so i'm
constantly learning from
the questions people ask in their emails


1:19:35 B&J-how do those inquiries direct you from
there
the feedback you get does that does that
change your focus

1:19:45 RP-um yeah
the the um
some sometimes the questions will um
reflect something that's going on in the
culture like
something appears in jama and everyone
will
will suddenly have these the symptom
that
was discussed in jama i've been noticing
that
since the 1970s that an article would
come out
as saying that progesterone suppresses
the immune system
and suddenly everyone would say i got a
cold right after i
i took progesterone and
that seems to be a major
entertainment in the culture is is for
symptoms to
radiate out from something that appears
on the internet
now or in a major medical magazine
and um other
sometimes these uh symptoms
it's like a little subculture uh
develops they talk to each other and
sometimes they reveal
really important information like like
the
chronic fatigue uh
what is it myalgia the syndromes
of adrenal fatigue yeah
and uh these
together uh tend to um
direct the attention of of what i'm
writing newsletters about
uh and um
i i think uh some constructive
things are coming gradually out of uh
things that that have started kind of as
as a
fetish that certain doctors promote
something to to sell their services
but gradually enough objective
information comes out of it that is
useful

1:21:55 B&J-do you wish you were getting more
criticism on on your subjects

1:22:03 RP-uh yeah as long as it's uh people who
have actually read
read the things and and find
things that need expansion that they're
in the last uh 25
almost 30 years there have only been
i think three people who wrote
what were supposed to be criticisms
and basically they just said he's wrong
he's wrong he's wrong
and and he's very wrong
but i haven't had any anyone really look
at the either the the data or the
reasoning but
i i think there's that but
i would like to have uh people find
the areas that that need exploration and
and expansion nothing's finished and
it would be very helpful to have people
helping to draw out themes of
development

1:23:20 B&J-so besides your scientific inquiry
what uh what are your other pursuits
other what your other interests um
i've always seen uh my uh
my politics and science
and uh ideas
about uh human nature as being
interconnected uh for example
uh being born in the great depression
before the war
the things people were talking about the
the newspaper uh stories
were about uh military aggression
spanish civil war uh
guernica and mussolini bombing
ethiopia japanese invading shanghai
people getting drafted and obviously
thinking that they were not coming back
uh that whole thing set my
my uh attitude as
people were hungry in the depression
and elsewhere they were getting killed
uh locally uh cops were
uh naming people in in jails and so on
uh the um the culture is still
generating these things at full speed
and science
techniques are just one very small
approach to trying to to correct that
stuff
but uh still political consciousness
is where the real solutions are


1:25:20 B&J-just meant more like um
when you want to take a break from
researching and writing about scientific
topics
how do you do that other activities or

1:25:37 RP-um if when i'm in in eugene
i i just go out in the backyard and
paint something
and i i
always when i would be writing
on any subject i would
feel that i was starting to get
[Music]
over over abstract and over verbal
and so i would sculpt something or
paint something or
even try to write a poem or something to
change the way
i was relating to language and
and just to keep keep myself
from getting into a rat
that was that was one of the reasons i
decided to go to montana to
teach linguistics because i had been
doing mainly philosophical
psychological things in blake college
and i
realized that i should sort of
tighten things up on the basis of
evidence and should do some some actual
science work so my first
uh thought was to teach linguistics
and on my own i
independently do some biological work
then i started reading some of the
current science and realized i could do
it much better than these guys
and so i i went to eugene to
enroll and
use use the instruments that you need to
do contemporary science
but the the process
has always involved
trying to to keep myself from getting
stuck
in a way of looking at reality
so it's constantly going between science
philosophy
and painting or sculpting or something
when i'm in mexico uh
the uh just just going down to the
town square and uh sitting around and
talking to people
it's very refreshing and and
changing to listen to
to people's uh very
very un-american-sounding perspectives
on reality


1:28:34 B&J-it sounds like that's something that you
got into intuitively
but it also makes me think of synaptics
intuitively and what uh you've mentioned
before synaptics
i think that's how oh it just sounds
like sort of the same thinking but

1:28:55 RP-yeah yeah someone uh
i think it was in uh
the early 1960s someone gave me a
wj gordon's book on synthetics
and he in his bibliography he had
read uh all the same people that i had
in in literature and the idea of
metaphor
in thinking and uh
that was i had been teaching
my uh computer uh
as a model of of the brain and how
information is processed
by the organism uh and
i was having my already in 1960 i was
an anti uh digital
a person anti-quantizing um
for coherence of information processing
as well as coherence of reality
and uh so the this um
gordon's uh approach to creative
production was on the basis of metaphor
rather than logic and
this is what what can make science
people so deadening that they
want to have this logical
uh handling of reality
and and avoiding
metaphoric and uh projective
uh looking for for a wholeness
uh the um talking to physicists
uh there
i was uh
in in san diego i i knew several people
in the
uh various branches of defense and
nuclear industry and and
so talking to physicists i would
ask their definition for
some of the subjects that i thought
were constructive ways of using physics
like hysteresis
how does how does substance remember
something so that the way
up is not the same as the way down
going through matter
you change it leave a trail and
so everything you do is sort of
spinning webs of organization in matter
and ideas such as that or as
resonance what does resonance mean uh
when two objects are
participating in the same uh frequency
of an energy system and physicists
would generally unless they were
off on the humanistic site and not
really physicists
the working physicists would simply
quote a textbook
definition that didn't mean anything to
them
or to me and and i realized that
it's very hard to talk across that
paradigm
they simply say there's there's nothing
to
to be uh perceived
when wave is
coming to an electron
when exactly does that absorption happen
does does the electron slowly rise
as the wavefront
passes and is there a moment
but no such imagery
exists in in physics apparently

1:33:06 B&J-it seems like that's one of the major
problems
in the lack of multiple
angles of thinking if you don't
just me from a visual perspective
looking at problems one way
forces you to see the holes in a problem

1:33:25 RP-um yeah the uh
way back um i was uh
attracted to the language of of
heraclitus even though it's
fragmentary and odd and
i think aristotle even though our
culture
has uh stereotyped aristotle as
as some kind of an authoritarian
monster but aristotle
had some of the same themes that
heraclitus did
seeing that things are always changing
and becoming is what's real
the eternal being is
purely fictitious but
the the people who consider
aristotle as as anti-scientific are
really the ones who are
susceptible to plato's
fantasy of uh pure
abstraction and pure truth

1:34:37 B&J-um do you want to talk a little bit
about your
painting how you got into painting and
oh um i yeah my parents uh
my mother had a photography portrait
studio
and my father had studied uh
art in uh kansas city uh
studied portrait painting among it among
other things
and uh they
both happened to be in in san diego in
the 20s
and they were selling uh real estate
to to make a living even though their
their uh goal was to be a photographer
and a painter and uh they met
and it happened that uh right at that
time
the depression came the real estate
market collapsed
and so they decided uh to drop out
go over to the desert and
become painters basically was their
intention and
they they homesteaded a piece of of the
desert
and set up a photography shop in a
sign painting studio and
participated a lot of painters
hanging around the desert doing doing a
desert scenery and uh
i i still have several of the paintings
from these
the early california people carl hop in
and such and so my parents
uh friends were about half of their
friends were
this arty professional painting crowd
and so the uh
the atmosphere around the house
uh was uh gave
as much respect to art as to
science and politics
i think it was my parents
aspirations to be painters that
when i was eight i i started uh
trying uh to understand drawing and
and uh learn how colors
work and that was right about the same
time i started
becoming nearsighted and it made me very
interested at my mother's cameras uh
in understanding optics
and uh the physiology of what was
happening to my vision
and uh the
nature of of light bouncing off
for example the hairs on my arm produced
rainbows
and i realized that it was the the cell
structure
of the hair acting as a diffraction
grating
and uh so in for a high school term
paper
i wrote about uh diffraction and uh
was was starting to study the physics
of it and uh the um
impressionist theory of light and how
the
the light effect on the
retina but then that
in trying to understand
the physiology of light i realized that
the the standard idea that we have uh
cells that respond to certain
color frequencies and that that
supposedly accounts for the colors we
see
but experiments were done
in which for example if you
when you look through red glasses
and take them off after you've adapted
everything looks green you wear green
glasses and everything looks red
but some experimenters made the
the right side of each eye
red and the left side green so that when
you would
move your eyes to one side you would see
one color
the other side another color and
taking those glasses off
the color after image
was exactly the opposite was split down
the middle
looking to the right you'd see the
opposite
color to the left showing that the color
perception is in the brain
not the eye so
the the uh the interest in painting
and uh uh representing
uh reality uh doing portraits was
interesting because
i saw it as
reflecting that person's presence
at at the moment but
doing it as a summation
of the expressions that i could see
during the hour that i would be painting
them
i would see much more than a photograph
at any one instant would see so
there was this brain process
uh added to what the retina is actually
seeing
and the
the people that i i've
have known that that kept their
portraits for a long time
they tended to look more and more like
their portrait
over the year because i had accentuated
things that a young face
was only visible in a moving young face
but at any one moment the elasticity
would make it disappear
so as they got old these
expressions would gradually get more
intense
and so i was seeing painting
as a way of exploring uh
real reality across time
and uh focusing on the moment but
as as as a way to
spend time
and how much time do you spend now
painting
oh um i i suppose about a
a quarter of of my
time lots lots of reading
little bits of writing and and
resting by painting


1:41:55 B&J-so how did you first find the work of
harold hillman
and how did that influence your views
i'm i

1:42:03 RP-i'm not sure whether it was
hillman himself or
people he had influenced by his early
publications but
uh there were several articles in
uh ling's little journal physiological
chemistry and physics
that were showing the sensitivity
of molecules to light
and doing
storing energy in ways that
ordinary bonds shouldn't be able to
store
and one article i think was
it was several years after ling's first
publications
but uh one experimenter
uh measured the atp
hydrolysis in muscle as
the pitch of a phone generator
varied and found that a certain
frequency
like at 240 cycles per second or
something
was causing a rapid hydrolysis of atp
but the uh the standard theory was that
the amount of sound
reaching an atp molecule was
smaller than thermal random noise
so they said that is impossible but
in fact they measured it and
my interpretation of that was that it's
because
the muscle water system
is acting as an antenna and is actually
summating
energy over a huge range compared to the
the molecule itself and its local
heat vibrations so
the antenna effect
is is something that i think hillman was
one of the people responsible for uh
spreading that through the culture
and it was just oh maybe five years ago
or so that
uh i got his books from a
uh a reiki and uh um (cuts off)

1:44:28 B&J-could you
explain a little bit break down
hillman's
work for us
about which the um the the resonance
thing of
about his main thing seems to be
the artifacts oh oh
yeah yeah everything in biology is
artifactual
right uh in in a
nerve nerve muscle physiology lab
uh my professor only uh
two or three times i would stop by my
uh my my table and
and uh ask what i was doing and
one of his visits i had a micro
electrode
in a cell and i said
notice the the oscilloscope
pattern is the same when i
advance the electrode deeper into the
cell
and then it repeats in reverse that same
pattern
as the electrode comes out of the cell
and the membrane if it's a membrane
potential
the inside is supposed to be all the
same voltage
and as soon as he saw of what was
happening
he turned and i don't think he ever
spoke to me again
after that previously
he had said something like
well peter you going to study the mind
or the brain
and he had apparently looked at my
transcript and seen that i had been a
psychology major for a while
but
the um most of the the things i did in
lab
were like that showing
artifacts were everywhere that same
professor
had a grasshopper hooked up so that he
could
demonstrate stimulating the muscle make
making the grasshopper push its light up
he had the students put their finger on
on the grasshopper and then he would
push the button they could feel how
strong it was but when it was my turn
uh he turned his back and didn't i
didn't invite me to
touch the grasshopper but since he was
turned
back to me i decided to touch the foot
anyway
and it held its foot up just for my
touch
and when i broke the touch it dropped
its foot back and i would touch it again
and it would
push it up and so the
it would have ruined his demonstration
if if i'd
he didn't didn't know he just didn't
want to
give give give me a chance to disrupt
things
but there were
lots of similar occasions in in that
same lab because
some of the instrument instrumentation
was
uh sensitive electrical stuff millivolt
recorders and such
and my fields would
disrupt even the machines
my lab partner had to to operate the
millivolt
recorder because with
with my at that time very high metabolic
rate
i apparently had a a big field
that was uh overriding
the instrumentation


1:48:16 B&J-did that did your uh field change once
you started taking thyroid

1:48:23 RP-um yeah i've i've never had those uh
strange experiences uh in that same
period
i visited some of my reikian friends in
san francisco
one of them worked at the exploratorium
and they they took
took me there to just after hours to
show me what
what was what with the the exploratorium
and
at one of the displays it was a cloud
chamber
she turned it on and
was was going to show how how they you
could visualize the cosmic rays uh in
the clouds
and as it clouded up that
aroused my interest so i moved up close
to the cabinet
and the cloud disappeared in a cylinder
shaped like my body as i backed away
the the cloud filled in the space and it
was
like there was a field uh
destroying the condensation
in that area but as soon as i took
thyroid
i've never had any of those
excessive field effects

1:49:50 B&J-would you agree with hillman's
main findings about the cell um
when undergoing processing um the main
structures being
artifacts um yeah i took a
microscopy technique course and
prepared things for electron microscopes
and knowing
show strengths work for example i just
tried
some different fixatives instead of a
short chain fixative
i tried using a long chain dialdehyde
that would attach with with more
flexibility
and fixing
things with with these slightly
different chemicals
and where the the processing
the whole procedure was supposed to
produce a
bilayer at the surface
my cells that sometimes would look like
onions with uh
surface bilayer effects this one after
the other
down through the the cell
and the the um
the the more subtle your
uh
problem uh the more likely
you are to have artifacts
so it's really an
art uh more than a scientific
procedure
and a friend in mexico gave me a very
old
uh hundreds of years old uh
book and
one of his uh books
he he was a a collector with with an
interest in medical
anthropology and uh one of his
newer books i think it was published in
1935 or 40
described how to treat
ulcers with osmic
tetroxide osmic acid it was a medical
treatment and the description
medically was that its purpose was to
create
a false membrane so this was a medical
concept
in 1940 and
at first when people believed there was
a
membrane governing cells at least
that that line of thinking
was so they developed an electron micro
microscope
and prepared it with the techniques that
they used for light microscopes
and there was no membrane at all it was
just
like a a loaf of bread without a crust
and over a period of several years they
evolved stains and it happened that
this chemical that was known medically
to create false membranes turned out to
make a membrane
on all living cells
so just looking at at the culture
history of how the
cell membrane came to be visualized in
the
electron microscope it looks like
beyond art it was a
sort of a deliberate creation of
of a false image

1:53:53 B&J-Hillman would say or what he did say was
he doesn't believe we've learned
anything useful
in terms of the living cell studying
under the electronic scope for spreading
anything under the
electron microscope as being useful

1:54:14-um i i
can't at the moment think of anything
uh it's the same gilbert ling says that
uh
what has the membrane theory contributed
uh really nothing but uh
entertainment for for uh
people who write textbooks

1:54:40 B&J-can you talk about how you discovered
gilbert ling's work
and how that changed things for you um
in my our first quarter
at the university of oregon i had
gone from having been thinking about
biolinguistics and healthy sorry
when i started at the biology department
at the university of oregon
1968 i
had just come back from a trip to
to russia where i talked to yuri holodov
about the effects of
magnetic fields on on cells
and
1:55:24
i had
done that various kinds of experiments
with uh
of studying in the 50s
my brother had been a radio ham
and with his
electronics i i tested
all of our neighbors and found that
the older person is the lower their
conductivity
is and
this i later saw that
even as i was aging in into the 60s
i was coming up into the
age where my resistance should have been
lower but it was still
the lowest of of anyone and i realized
that this
was something about my odd high
metabolic rate
was there was a the higher your
metabolic rate
the lower your resistance or the higher
your conductivity
and i used some very
fancy micro volt meters across
the brain and on the long
axis of the body and such and saw the
same thing that
the conductivity through my head was
very
high but the voltage was also very high
when you have a good conductor you would
expect that to collapse the
the field but since it was being
generated
inside there was a high polarity
on the outside and over the whole body
at the same time that the current flowed
freely
so it was flowing freely but
being separated and polarized and
so i came to nerve biology
with uh these various perspectives
uh that um water was very important
that the electrical fields
uh were at least
uh participating if not governing
and the lectures were
strictly on the membrane
polarity and uh
everything being governed and and ruled
by the
so-called pumps and and pores
in the membrane and simultaneously
within a few months at least there were
some
articles i think in the magazine science
uh
showing electron micrographs of
particles of distilled water
that showed pore structure
and and the freezing process creates a
very intense
electrical field that can shape the
direction of crystallization but
since i had seen these uh miniature
particles of ice showing
pores of the same dimension that were
postulated for the cell i suspected
that that was an artifact if
as far as they could create them
in their imagery i i thought it was the
same as the
purified distilled water and
so i was skeptical the professor would
would assign articles that backed up
what he was saying
in 1935 these studies
have proved that this is how a membrane
works and
so i would go to find that journal
and the the bound journal
i would look in the index and look
at everything else published that year
by that journal
and every time he would assign an
article i would see what else
was being published that year and
i saw that there was
something more sympathetic to my
position
that was being ignored in the current
view
and as i followed these people
across the years through the 40s
then i saw that gilbert ling had
by 1950 sort of brought together
several of these problems and it was
only
maybe a month into the fall term
when i wrote him and
said as far as i can see it
it looks like years ago you've already
solved
all of the problems that are now being
taught
in in this course and
he answered said
your problem is that you don't
understand what science
is as science is
seeking prestige and power and money

2:01:00 B&J-not about the pursuit of truth yeah
um so with lang's work
where did you go from there with it did
did he still have more to follow
or was that at a time when he'd already
been
pushed out

2:01:18 RP- oh um
well i've brought up his his
publications to some of my professors
and uh
the the really the intelligent
professors were
not hostile to him at all and
he was really like a litmus test for
how anti-scientific a professor
was how readily they would
try to dispose of his whole position
the one of the uh both
i think uh harold hillman probably made
a big point of of the uh
lack of high-energy bond in atp
that the the idea that it has
14 kilocalories per bond
is required for for running the pumps
and gilbert ling said even if you assume
that it has this high energy there's not
enough
of it being produced to run the pumps
that they say are necessary
but uh i think podolski
was the first one to disprove the high
energy bond in 1956
and i read i think it was a
two or three years later an article by
one of my
professors sydney bernhard and
i was doing something in his lab
and he
outside of his lectures he
seemed not to be a conversationalist
and he was on my committee but i think
we only has changed
maybe a dozen sentences over the years
but i said i

i saw your publication
uh demonstrating that atp doesn't have a
high energy bond maybe four kilocalories
or something and
but all these people but everyone is is
uh
basing their models of muscle function
and so on
he said 'not everyone is'

but people like that
with with the facts uh
for many years uh
simply saying not everyone is
isn't a dogmatic idiot

2:04:13 B&J-um what about mae juan ho

RP-um she's um
her visualization of optical coherence
i think is is just massively important
and and the the whole idea of how light
works in organisms i think is
just as mysterious
and under explained and underappreciated
as how electricity works in organisms
uh in uh uh lake pot squirrel
in metroid the um
fish they call them uh white fish
but they're actually clear fish when
they're
alive or uncooked
and the people uh selling them
in the square would lay out a pile
of these fish that
about the shape and size of little
perches and
others that were much smaller but
they would lay them on a pile of
magazines
and you could read the magazine through
the body of
of the fish that was maybe as much as an
inch thick
just glassy clarity and
when they're cooked you could see that
they had
heart and liver and bones
everything that should have been visible
as you look
through this apparently a
perfectly transparent jelly appearance
and i i don't think anyone
uh other than something like wave guides
uh going right around the blood vessels
so that a stream of blood going through
an artery
doesn't uh cause anything visible
apparently the the passive light that
you're seeing
is a bypassing everything
opaque or colored uh
and uh i've heard that
there's a lizard in in hawaii that's
transparent
and so the to to understand
that the cornea and the the vitreous
of the eye
something similar but but not nearly as
as confusing and problematic as as the
whole animal that's transparent but
it's essential to understand what light
is doing in the organism
and the um
when the sun shines through your ears
they they look bright red same
you put a flashlight
a button on your hand in the dark you
see
a red coming through and
that shows that our
semi-opaque tissues are
pretty transparent to red meaning that
the blue and green are being absorbed
and still the transparency
is very impressive for red light and
the penetrating light from ordinary
daylight
happens to be absorbed
this relatively low energy red light
is uh resonated
with by the copper atoms
that are for example in the respiratory
pigment cytochrome c
oxidase and
during stress just prolonged metabolism
in the dark
this enzyme loses its activity as the
copper
goes somewhere but it shouldn't be and
passing light through it the
energy of red light is apparently enough
to boost
the copper out of its ineffective trap
and back into where it should be and
experimenters with gamma rays
giving a killing dose of gamma radiation
to a frog if they
shined bright red light on the frog
within the first hour
it wasn't harmed by the radiation and
apparently there's something analogous
to
everyday restoration of of
the living function by
restoring copper to the respiratory
pigment something analogous
seems to inactivate the
radiation damage by putting
electrons or ions back into a functional
rather than a trap where they would
simply cause progressive damage
and you can bleach if you put salt
or glass or or whatever any crystal
into intense gamma or x-rays you can
turn
purple for example but with
a slightly less intense radiation tuned
to that particular color you can bleach
the crystal again and so
i think the uh the red light detoxifying
of gamma rays
is equivalent to bleaching a
radiation tinted uh stone
and uh similar things
have been seen with plant material
that in
in a bright light the electrons
are put into an activated
state so that if you put it in
an esr electron spin resonance machine
or a paramagnetic resonance detector
you can detect free radicals or excited
electrons
and so you you if you come in out of the
sun
for a few hours after being sun exposed
your hair
will in this machine will show excited
electrons
and a piece of plant material will
persist
in the dark with these electrons still
being sensitive and detectable but if
you shine
red light on that bit of material
it quenches the free radicals and uh
stops the
the esr signal
um so i think the the penetrating
light is is a very important
biological function and and the way the
light is handled
uh the the coherence of the
the crystal structure is uh
[Music]
probably involved in in
how sensitive we are to the to the
benefit from it
the salco trump who founded
uh i think was international
biometeorological society something like
that
and a journal one of his early
books was called psychical physics
and he investigated
as a physicist as the
forces involved in dousing
and uh showed that with
an electrical detector he could detect
the
fields produced by a slow
current of water underground
that that these folk
dousers would use a sticker
or wire or something to detect he showed
that you could
measure an actual electrical current
produced by the waters that they were
finding
and so experimentally he
would bury a wire under the ground
and produce a current
similar to what he had measured produced
naturally
and he tested his his trousers and they
could always find the wire
uh i got some of these references
from holodov on my visit to
to moscow he
he had a good bibliography that he gave
me
so i started reading this stuff when i
was in nerf biology
at the same same time

2:13:57 BJ- Mae won ho described the moment when she saw the
effects of the
reviewing the drosophila under the
polarized
light microscopes kind of her a defining
moment for her
scientifically aesthetically um
do you agree with your um
i guess conclusions about why
those organisms seem to emit that
rainbow
or view you can view that rainbow
um pattern she talks about it being a
coherent crystalline structure

2:14:40 RP-yeah
that's why i
started talking about Solco trump
because he
already 1942 or so was talking about
liquid crystal structure of living
material
and the idea of antennas
in the water structure of the cell and
the fields
metabolically projected from one cell to
the other
um i think may one whole
is giving an image that ties all of this
together
the metabolizing cell
produces a field and is able to respond
to fields with its coherent
internal antenna-like structure
but each of these is both a projector
and receiver and so the cells
are coherent electronically
and probably in many other ways
the uh all of the
chemical functions are
involved in in the alkalinity
electrical charge redox processes
generation of fields and and production
of structure
and so she is
is just giving kind of the the finishing
touch showing that yes in fact the
organism is
coherent the way it it seems to be in
in functioning

2:16:16 B&J- great
um then let's move on to
gerald pollock um
it seems like you were already familiar
with i guess many of the precursors to
what
gerald pollock's doing today i think the
most impressive
thing about him besides his ability to
communicate and convince
i think that the most impressive thing
is that he
came up as a conventional muscle
biologist and could actually
respond to problems
and and perceptions and change
and and go off in this extremely
important direction i think it's just
amazing
as a personality possibility
i guess if you could talk a little bit
about
uh structured water in general just the
properties of water
um i ran across it
i think it was uh jd bernal
who had a monthly
article in a political magazine
uh but talking about the universe and
substance
and he he talked about
structured water and i think he was
he mentioned max perutz and
his demonstration of very long-range
ordering in hemoglobin crystals
or some protein crystal and
from that i saw that there were
things like clay chemists uh
seeing necessarily uh
structured organizing uh
effects of water applying forces and and
arranging in an orderly way
flakes of a clay material uh
and affecting the properties of of the
macroscopic thing and
around that time when i was in
high school i had heard stories about
albertson georgie's lecture
demonstrations
of muscle contraction
changing the way light
causes in one case fluorescence of a
molecule
in the muscle and
when the muscle contracts that
fluorescence disappears
uh showing that uh the um
the electron response to light
is governed by the state of the water
uh in in the muscle cell and um
later i i trying to find out more about
those experiments i i saw that he had
demonstrated that
there's an electron donor
acceptor process and that
if you put in a properly tuned
donor and acceptor molecule
the electron moves and will cause the
muscle to contract
but you can put the same chemicals in a
different
combination
in the combination that doesn't uh have
the right tuning
so that the electron doesn't move the
muscle doesn't contract
um so the um
that involved
oxidation and electrical
behavior and that
led to um accidentally
noticing that someone who in the 40s
the underground mimograph
the leaflets who were circulating in the
1940s
were describing william frederick coax
troubles with the government and uh
the government twice uh tried
to convict him of
various medical crimes but um
in both cases he got his patience to
testify that the government was lying
and fabricating evidence and harming
witnesses and so on
so i knew about w f coke and i
i found that there was an amazing
parallel between
albertson georgie's work with free
radical
or electron donor acceptor states
and stuff that w.f koch
had postulated and worked with
beginning 1912 was his first publication
and he left detroit i think around 1926
and then sent georgie
in in the 20s and 30s
was doing supposedly
his own thinking but it
happened to be expanding and
exploring w.f cook's previous
work and uh it led to saint george
getting
the nobel prize and such but um
he never until
very nearly at the end of his life saint
george he never mentioned
wf coke but moses gomberg
the person who uh postulated
uh free radicals uh was
at the university of michigan
and when coke was an undergraduate there
and and so coke was had
inside knowledge of of what a free
radical was
and saw that delusion of
of moses gomberg's uh uh
it was a complex arrangement of
phenolic groups that hysterically
these big groups tended to pull it apart
and leave free electrons
stranded simply because of the
electrical repulsion of the
benzene groups and so the
at high dilution suddenly a clear
solution would become
dark purple and
this impressed cult constructed his
thinking
and and it eventually led to szent
georgie's
thinking but in coke's work
he uh saw that
the carbonyl group
especially if it is resonating with
another double bonded
two carbons this intensified the effect
of the carbonyl group
which is attracting electrons
the oxygen is is making it
slightly acidic and electron attracting
and nitrogens especially if they are
resonating with a double bond they can
be a strong electron donating
basic group and a
coach thinking about the
the properties that govern free radicals
just the right degree of oxidation would
activate the electrons
and too much of the electron donating
nitrogen groups would blot out that
activated effect would neutralize it
and just by very clear
uh imagining he
said uh maybe that's
well it was more complicated than
abstract absolute imagination he
he took out uh the animals parathyroid
glands
and showed that although their calcium
does go down
and they got convulsions he found that
he could stop the convulsions
by giving them uh salt
sodium chloride or potassium chloride or
magnesium
wasn't just a calcium deficiency but
he found that in the absence of the
parathyroid
as they developed convulsions they put
out
guanidine in the urine that very hundred
times
normal amount and that this is a
a clenching type of amino group
and so that started him thinking on the
implications of oxidation reduction
imbalance and that led to his is
developing an activated carbonyl
treatment for allergies cancer
infections basically everything
biological
and uh that was what impressed scent
georgie
and and so georgie's concerned with
the idea of finding just the right
electron acceptor
was exactly what coke had postulated
that you need a
a certain carbonyl activated
group and this was when i started
studying
the effects of estrogen and progesterone
i saw that progesterone had the carbonyl
and estrogen had the phenolic
potentially donate donatable uh
hydrogen and
the um
szent georgie's
idea that it was the
interaction of oxidation
structuring the water and the
bad electrons destructuring the water
that was i think
the vital central line of saint george's
work linus pauling
uh got in the news in 1960
by uh theorizing that
water structuring around a noble gas
can explain anesthesia or hydrophobic
molecules introduced
into the cell will bind water and cause
the structuring
but although pauling
popularized the idea of structured water
it was really
saint georgie gilbert ling and
several other people who had already
been biologizing
the concept it was implicit in sulphur
trump's
idea of the electronic sensitivity
uh the crystalline idea liquid
crystalline
cell model and uh
cent georgie added the refinement that
the cells can go back back and forth
between disorganized water and
and organized water as part of their
functioning
and having
read that sort of background uh
then the reason i submitted that
those articles to uh gilbert ling's
journal was that i saw that
all of the enzymes that were known to
shift under the influence of excess
estrogen
happened to be governed by
water structure if you
cool most end times
their activity simply goes down steadily
with
with the lower temperature as chemicals
are less less energized to
to react but certain enzymes
at a certain temperature have a sudden
collapse
and a complete disappearance of activity
uh the cold inactivated
enzymes and these
are the crucial enzymes
for responding to estrogen
but typically the organism under the
influence of estrogen
lowers its actual temperature
and is the structural temperature
of water it
the idea of structural temperature is
that cold water
is more structured than water that's
almost boiling which
has lost a lot of structure
and so the structural temperature
is increasing at lower temperatures
but estrogen by breaking
the structural breaking down the
structure
can even at a low temperature
make the water seem to be hot
so estrogen can activate
enzymes that are
inactivated even at body temperature 37
degrees
the structuring of water done by
the various energy processes
inactivates this whole class of enzymes
and estrogen can override that
and even as body cools itself
to try to increase the structure of
water
estrogen can keep destructuring
water overriding the cooling so
you you can cool off and
keep functioning to some extent but at a
certain point too much estrogen
not only makes you cold but then can
activate things that shouldn't be
activated and
and that involves cell division
uh water uptake fat production
failure to oxidize glucose into carbon
dioxide
and that contributes to the
destructuring effect
so the the toxic effects of
of too much estrogen i i
saw as analogous to all of the
the dangerous stressors radiation aging
lack of oxygen and and so on um


2:32:20 B&J-Do you think you could give us a a brief
description of what the association
induction hypothesis is
gilbert lang's theory um
the uh

2:32:39 RP-my uh approach to ling
uh came through these uh
pre-ling
people and and problems and and
so when i uh sawling's first
book uh that that
and his confirmation that in fact people
hadn't
found any problem that that hurt his his
theory
that
encouraged me to explore
what what he was doing with his
his approach and how it related to
other people
with an anti-membrane approach to to
cell function
and that
required uh thinking about bungenberg
dejung and his
complex coastervate theory
which was
i think more interesting than oprarin's uh
idea of early colloidal uh
life the
behavior of several components
in a system spontaneously breaking up
into
highly structured systems
uh was giving a physical
chemical basis uh that was more complex
than
an oparin's sort of abstract thing
and
looking at other ways
to see these physical systems
having lifelike properties
much more uh chemical and
and uh involved than jc bose had done
with his physical
sensitivities and so on uh but
um that all of the
ion selective properties for example
that you can see in a in a water
softener
and that are in
contemporary biology they're ascribed to
the
uh membrane and its pumps and pores
but not only a
chemically engineered uh
gel for a resin for softening water
but if you take a a piece of hair
thoroughly dead cells and
wash wash it all of the ions out of it
and then dip it in serum it will
select against a gradient excluding
sodium and concentrating potassium
and so gilbert ling's
detailed analysis of how
how a water softener works is
really all the imagery you need
that it's a
an electrically active polymer
holding stuff with some steadiness
in a gel system that
affects the water around it
and so excludes because of its
structural uh polymeric
and electrical properties simply
like clay or hair or anything
it's simply selective and how it
interacts with its environment
and brungenberg dejung's uh
complex coastervate was uh
doing the same thing
and ling complexified
his arguments to meet the objections of
the
people who simply had
something wrong with their brains and so
he
really just massively
uh swamped all of the arguments
and that accounts for
a lot of what makes it hard to read
is that he's uh doing such a
a detailed job of of trying to
counter irrationality all the way
through biology
the um the idea of the
the electron cloud is is
where uh gilbert ling
and w.f coke and szent georgie
have great overlap but uh
neither szent georgina or gilbert ling
talked about each other
very much i don't think but the
the electron withdrawing lewis acid for
example carbon dioxide
is a lewis acid two carbonyls
and a W.F. Koch
reagent in in some of the
models it included a chain of parallel
carbonyls
and his way of identifying it was that
the free radicals at a very high
dilution
caused his solution to be purple
so there was almost nothing present but
it was purple
and and the government said there's
nothing there it's a fraud
and we can't detect it but they didn't
have electron spin resonance
machines yet this when they came into
existence

2:39:00-they said oh yeah the cells are full of
free radicals
this thing that makes mitochondria
able to respire the ubiquitous quinone
and and the quinones were
part of w f coke's uh reagent
uh so that the government was simply
ignorant and irrational in
saying that it was fraud because they
couldn't...
he demonstrated in court he would mix
his stuff
as as he used it therapeutically and
then give it
gave it to the government to test
they said there's nothing there and that
was,
that was why the jury acquitted him
because the government was
simply incompetent

2:40:00 B&J-um this is totally an aside but is that
same property what make what gives liver
its dark color

RP-that's szent georgie's theory
and
if you grind liver up with water it
fades and and
that was an essential part that in the
brain
you have pigmented stuff and he said
what's it doing
there in the dark it's doing something
metabolically
but i i think the red light is
actually doing something to it too okay

B&J-what would you say biological energy is
and why is understanding it so important

RP-um that's
something that um the way you go about
answering it uh
explains uh who you are
really uh the uh
for thousands of years people had
different ways
of talking about biological energy
uh that it's the um
something that makes potential become
real
and uh is something that
causes change of properties
it's a property of matter and
some of the first physicists called it
the living force
so physical force physical energy
originally was was uh somehow
identified with life process itself
they used life language to explain
uh the energy involved in swinging
balls or converting
motion to the heat and so on
and the
from about Leibniz time on
uh it became uh
abstracted increasingly until they got a
very neat
conservation idea for for energy
uh that this property which
is the living force in something moving
kinetic energy
this is the same stuff which changes
and becomes a heat property
in in something else or in the same
stuff
and this heat property is also the
kinetic
energy which can become chemical
energy and stored and released
by burning and so on and
the potential energy
is even abstracter it's
related to um for example the the
distance between
charges and uh
separation of heavy objects and so on so
but
the um
despite the abstraction of it
the idea that it's a property
of things or of matter
that's okay when you uh start
thinking about
hysteresis the the trace that
uh energy leaves in matter as it
runs through whatever it is
one substance passing through another
one or
near another one uh traces
some kind of a a track that
is more or less uh
detectable as as an interaction
and that idea that
the um the
energy produces a change in the
arrangement of substance
that's i think the most important
idea for thinking about biological
energy

2:45:35-Vernedski who
integrated uh biology with cosmology
and he showed that
organisms through photosynthesis
and uh metabolism are
converting solar energy
light and heat to structure
first they turn carbon dioxide
and and water to sugar and then the
sugar
process is processed through the cells
and uh
eventually you get an organism which has
this energy flowing through it
and the more intense
the flow the more hysteresis
is is writing changes in the structure
and capturing some of the energy
in the form of complexity
and Vernadsky described
the tendency of any system in terms of
the french
person (le Chatelier)describing a disturbed
system that readjusts
to minimize the disturbance le chatelier
and Vernadsky simply applied that to the
cosmos
and showed that solar energy
being absorbed on the earth
complexifies and generates
structure and that the structure
tends to maximize
the flow of energy through itself
and in the case of plants this leads to
very very big sequoia trees and such
in the case of animals you get elephants
and especially the brain there's a
tendency

2:46:42-the brain is part of the
complexifying of the organism so that
you can get more complex
structures of all sorts as well as
a greater complexity of energy
processing right in the brain
so the biggest brain
is projected to to come
in the um future
as the uh energy supply becomes greater
and so he he uh
saw life as being driven
uh rather than as being an accidental
accumulation that uh somehow
at its essence was random and
for him uh the the whole process from
from the bottom up is driven and
tending to a maximum of complexity
the the the idea that uh
it's the flow of energy through the
whole system
that constitutes us
and that uh the
all of our functions and purposes
are energy exchanges
so in our very being we represent
the history of of energy flowing
and everything we do uh
involves a consciousness i think the uh
the essential way to
grasp consciousness is that it's what
happens when you have
a very complex flow of
information through stuff
if you simply heat a rock on one side
energy is flowing through it and it's
creating some coherent processes
but when you get a nervous system
and all of the complex juices
surrounding the nerves and the
electrical fields
interacting then
the flow of energy through a system
essentially what's happening when you
heat a rock
but uh in an infinitely more complex way
and the um
the substance participates
in guiding and intensifying that so
our goals
and functions
are in a way as
uh inclined to um
a certain kind of kind of direction
as the the um
development of large-brained uh
big organisms is simply because it's
being driven
and and as participants
in this energy flow
the optimization of energy flow
or of consciousness involves
certain ways of interacting between
people
and and atmosphere
and light and so on and so the
the nature of our
each little behavior has this context
in which we're trying to uh
a higher energy level
and a in effect a better resonance
between the components of the system
the idea of resonance in substance
is very applicable to the
uh what's going on in our organism

2:51:00-if you have uh methane
in the atmosphere and some oxygen
and you ignite it and
the um the first thing that happens
isn't that you get uh what
carbon dioxide and and water and
the the first thing that that is likely
to happen is you get a lot of suit
and and suit consists of
graphite like systems
in which you get polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons
and those are highly organized
resonant systems resonance stability
guides guides the chemical reactions
so it's more stable to be in this
complex system
and so more favorable energetically
and when our brains
resonate with the environment in a
certain way
they are improved by finding the
the niche in which they can
resonate and find a higher functioning
so it's as if we're relaxing
into a more intense consciousness
and

2:52:30-the high-energy resting state is
what i call the
the individual cell
uh
or state but it also applies to the
the brain itself uh in the
uh the very high energy resting state
we get resonance and so things are more
meaningful
and and so the consciousness is is more
intense
uh more coherent luminous and so on

2:53:10 B&J-excellent yeah yeah
amazing all right it's gonna take a
little while to sink in yeah
we'll cut there thank you
 
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meatbag

meatbag

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Here are studies from Yuri Kholodov (Yu.A. Kholodov), the magnetobiologist who Ray Peat visited in the USSR;
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