Rousseau, William Wegman

It's the holiday season and that comes with bright lights and dark nights. In this episode we talk about the very amazing pineal gland, which orients us in time and space, how it's affected by electromagnetic fields, and some of its more mysterious qualities. We also reflect on evergreens, plants, and how they can help us think about planting new seeds in a season of rest and recharging. Make sure you tune in for the green smoothie recipe at the end!


REFERENCES:

Pineal Calcification, Melatonin Production, Aging, Associated Health Consequences and Rejuvenation of the Pineal Gland Molecules 2018

Calcite microcrystals in the pineal gland of the human brain: First physical and chemical studies, Bioelectromagnetics, 2002-10, Vol.23 (7), p.488-495

Longitudinal piezoelectricity in natural calcite materials: Preliminary studies
IEEE transactions on dielectrics and electrical insulation, 2018-06, Vol.25 (3), p.803-807
Pineal melatonin level disruption in humans due to electromagnetic fields and ICNIRP limits

Radiation protection dosimetry, 2013-05, Vol.154 (4), p.405-416

Microcrystals of Calcite in the Pineal Gland of the Human Brain
Ferroelectrics, 2002-01-01, Vol.273 (1), p.345-350
Generation of piezoelectricity from the human body,  Annual International Conference on Emerging Research Areas: Magnetics, Machines and Drives (AICERA/iCMMD), 2014, pp. 1-5

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Transcript

What is up y’all? I’m so hyped on that song. Thank you so much to the incredible Ben Babbit for producing the &*($ out of that jingle. A little jingle jangle. That’ll put a little pep in your step, okay? That’ll make you feel a little holly jolly. 

Hey everyone welcome back to Episode 2 of 1-800-POWERS, I’m your host Lex Brown. Thank you all so so so so much for all the love and the encouraging messages and diving into this podcast with me. It feels so joyful to hear back from you all because you’re my community, and it’s just an awesome life-affirming feeling that community doesn’t have to be defined by location type of person. I think I’ve always felt like I was part of a band of charismatic and intelligent misfits. Not like, on the outskirts, more like the inskirts, in between the circles of the Venn Diagram so welcome back ya big softies… We continue.

So much has happened in the last 3 weeks. Lemme ask you my question about Omicron real quick. Have you ever heard this letter before in your life? The second I saw that word the news I thought: Oh here we go - of course the one they discovered South Africa gets assigned the name sounding like Megatron from Wakanda.

Like why have you never heard this letter before. It sounds badass, but you never heard of it.  It’s underrepresented in the Greek alphabet, it’s definitely the blackest letter they could find. And right away it was scarier because it’s bigger and badder and from blackest Africa, where it’s been able to beef up in the absence of all the vaccines that have been hoarded.

I’m just saying what happened to Zeta Eta Iota and Kappa. What happened to Zeik cus I never heard of them. Where’s Zeik.

But now ol Omicron John rolls out from around the block, and then I’m just supposed to be genuinely packnicked like, March 2020 vintage panicked and it is more contagious. Cus the spikes are ca-razy looking. But it’s just too perfect. I never heard of Iota Coronavirus. Not one iota We’ve seen too many Marvel movies to not feel some type of way about how this travel ban for Southern Africa perfectly dovetails with the most epic intimidating letter you ever heard of.

That being said, please be careful this holiday. It sucks because holidays can already be complicated. And because this time of year when we get so many messages about how we’re supposed to feel, especially with last year, there’s even more of a want to have a lighter holiday but so much has changed, and there’s a lot to be thankful for, but there’s a lot to grieve.

Someone close to my family passed away really unexpectedly. A lot of people have passed in the last 3 weeks. It’s just a somber time of the year. The day after my birthday I had a little cry in the morning. Just because, just because time. And it felt good cry. Those kind of quiet tears that just come out nowhere when you’re alone, they’re just pure And it’s the time to release. It’s  literally the darkest time of the year with the solstice having been on 21st.

Naturally, it’s a powerful transitional moment as the seasons change. Everything this fall was like ok go-go-go-go everyone’s gonna act like the last year wasn’t the craziest fucking year of your life and now everything’s “normal” but it’s like girl we don’t fit in those jeans anymore. Literally. I won’t be surprised if this holiday season a lot of stuff is catching up with us.

Knowing that not everyone celebrates the same holidays and that traditional holidays are really hard for some people, I was thinking: what if we take our cue from plants and treat this season the way earth intended us to with rest and healing and release. Says the person who stayed up till 2 am last night. But we gotta have the intention.

So this is a special Holiday double episode. Part 1: Stay Green Some musings and scientific selections about the seasons, the brain, and all things pinecone. And Part 2, my winter gift to you: Handy Hints and Hacks for Holiday Healing.


In the hustle and bustle of every day life
It’s so easy for us to forget
That the sun does not circle around our heads
It’s us who move instead.
And this time of year in darkest night
When 4 o’clock feels like 10.
Do you know why it is that the light comes and goes?
It’s called astrology my friend.

Now I already feel some of your buttcheeks clenching up at the word Asstrology. Don’t worry, you can unclench, I’m not going to tell you why you’re a typical Capricorn. This is just plain astronomy. But if we’re talking about seasons, babe the moon’s orbital tilt is the reason for the season.

Quick overview for those who haven’t learned or are flat earthers: Our planet Earth, you know the one that everything has happened on, and no one’s really left, is on a tilted axis. We a little bit off. By 23.5º, because of a previous collision with the moon.

Our rotation gives us day and night. The tilt plus our orbit around the sun gives us seasons.

Because the tilt, or angle of declination, doesn’t change as the earth orbits the sun, Summer in the Northern hemisphere is when the axis is most angled toward the sun. Winter in the Northern hemisphere is when the axis most angled away from the sun, And it’s reversed seasons for the Southern Hemisphere. Just like their toilet water spins in the opposite direction as ours.

So many cultures celebrate the solstice and equinoxes. I think what’s easy to forget about some of these traditions is that just because we travel farther in time from their cultural inception doesn’t mean we get any farther physically from the phenomenological factors that are tied to these deeply earthly customs.

Especially in the US, where the national traditions are all culture and language-based rather than nature-based. They’re rooted in documents, or advertising, or money or lip service or lies. It’s about one thing happening, and then calling it something else.

Getting swept up with obligations, memories, and the Covid, it’s easy forget that it’s normal to feel kind of weird right now. On the outside it’s end-of-the-year emails, 2022 budgets, burnout, health concerns, travel plans, relationships, relatives.

But on the inside your body really knows what time it is. Right now, we’re literally as far from the sun as we ever get.Deep in your brain, a tiny gland called the Pineal gland is saying “Hey. I think it’s time to rest.”


The Pineal gland is located right in the middle of your brain wedged between the “mammal brain” – the neocortex and limbic brains which control all our humany stuff -  and the reptilian brain - the part of our brain that keeps us slightly warmer than death. The pineal gland is also wedged right below the corpus callosum which connects right and left hemispheres of the brain.

This small gland, about the size of a grain of rice, gets its name from the Latin pinea, which means pine-cone-like . And it’s the first of the glands to develop in an embryo. Our pineal gland regulates seratonin and melatonin. Serotonin is not just involved with mood and happiness, but also learning, memory, vomiting, all kinds of functions. Melatonin is a hormone that regulates sleep and wake cycles.

One of the most interesting things about it is that it’s filled with photoreceptive cells, but lodged in the center of your brain, where light doesn’t reach. Reptiles, have a similar collection of photoreceptors in between their eyes, usually near the crown of their head, called the parietal eye. While the parietal eye doesn’t have the higher-order associative cells, to really create vision,  it does have a cornea, lens and retina. 

We don’t have this third eye, but the pineal gland is a vestige of that system, and it’s connected to our eyes and the parts of our brain that construct vision. Besides regulating circadian rhythms, and telling us where we are on the ecliptic, there’s been a lot of scientific research on the pineal gland and calcification, which is the process by which the bland crystallizes over time into calcium based compounds.

Right now is where I need you to know, I’m bringing you this information from journals, from primary articles by different authors in different journals, in different years. This information is not coming from instagram memes. This is from lexbrown@fas.harvard.edu Hollis database. And I’ll put all the journal articles, all the primary sources for this info in the show notes. I have to say this because… I think the anti-vaxxers are right about fluoride in toothpaste and tap water..

Because the pineal gland receives so much blood flow, does not have the same barrier to blood that the rest of the brain has, it’s susceptible to minerals which are ingested through the body, in particular fluoride.

Calcification is natural for the pineal gland, but it’s accelerated by fluoride, an ion of fluorine which is the most electronegative element and because of that, the most reactive one. These calcite crystals are also called brain sand and they’ll show up on an MRI. As the pineal gland goes through biomineralization, the crystals take on a hexagon shape a hallmark of piezoelectrical materials. Piezoelectrical materials are those that accumulate an electrical charge when mechanical stress is applied to them.


But wait… there’s more. Bones are also piezoelectric. When mechanical stress is applied, like through weight lifting, the bones produce a current within itself. It’s wild that electricity is so physical.In bones, this current tells your body to activate your osteoblasts, which are cells in the body that build up and strengthen the bone. The more you work out the stronger your bones get, and you create an electric charge. Pretty cool.

Let’s do a checkpoint. Let’s summarazine. You have a tiny light-sensitive gland in the center of your brain, that’s a vestige of a third eye leftover from the reptile days. Cas(ual). This gland turns into a calcium-based crystal over time. That crystallization decreases the gland’s ability to regulate sleep and your natural rhythms. And that crystallization turns it into a substance that can be a transducer of electricity when pressure is applied. Cas.

Many crystals such as quartz, tourmaline, and sugar are also piezoelectric. So when people talk about crystals and rubbing them, and feeling something … it’s not fake. It’s real. I know. I’m actually so surprised. When you apply pressure, it creates electric charge.

Much research has also been done into the effect of electromagnetic fields or EMFs on the little pine cone in your head. EMFs are also naturally occurring: in lightning, in the visible light from the sun’s rays, and the earth’s magnetic field. Deep sea fish, butterflies, birds, ancients humans, pretty much everyone but US uses these magnetic fields to navigate the earth.

EMFs are also emitted from your phone, your hairdryer,your screen, bluetooth, wifi, powerlines, Jada Pinkett Smith in the Matrix 2, 5G. Anywhere electricity is used. While there is a lot of naturally occurring EMF, increased amounts of it from man-made devices disrupt the proper regulation of melatonin in the body. Easy example: blue light from your screens keeps you awake. Because your eyes see blue and it thinks sky! Let’s be awake. Let’s keep scrolling At 2:40 AM.


So on the one hand you’ve got the uncalcified pineal gland, orienting you to the circadian rhythms of the earth, regulating your mood, giving you a vivid dream where Beyonce invites you into her McLaren and you don’t know how to open the door.

On the other hand, you’ve got calcified pineal, disoriented, but potentially able to transduce energy in your brain, and as some studies have recorded be capable of second-harmonic generation, which is when a material can output a signal double the frequency, as what is input into it. A technology used in sensors and microphones. But what does it mean for this gland in the middle of your head that orients your body to time and space to have this transductive potential?

From what I found, today’s scientists don’t have a conclusive answer. I’m sure Elon has something cooking. But what we can take away is that our body does have a 6th sense for time and space for real. And it also has a 7th sense? for electromagnetic fields. And your body creates electromagnetic fields. We can alter and manage both of these things, and how oriented or disoriented or charged or discharged we are by augmenting light levels, responding to natural cues of the earth’s cycle, exercising, acupuncture, reiki, breathing.

It’s like you knew, but did you know?

Is Lex Cage now going to make a link between the pineal gland which tells us it’s solstice time and the pine tree of pagan Christmas? Yes. Does the actual mechanism of the pineal gland have anything to do with pine trees and actual pine cones? Not really except for the casual fact of miraculous life in a spiral galaxy. So what are you gonna do? Let’s steal the Declaration of Independence for Christmas. Even better on January 6th this year let’s storm the capital and fill it with pine cones.

People get wild in the winter. The darkness the cold. I personally love it. Because now we’re over the hump it only gets brighter. In my mind it’s basically spring. I’ve always loved winter after the holidays. It’s just this like, energizing, crisp, cold, bright time when you see the sun shimmer on the snow and everything feels like there’s so much potential and your skin is really clear.

You know who’s also sees potential. The pine cones, patiently waiting for a forest fire to crack them open. And the pine trees. The evergreens. The holly is jolly this time of year. Unlike our pals the deciduous ones who lose their leaves, and have to conserve their energy evergreens are doing their own thing. And there’s a couple things we can learn from them.


What keeps the evergreens green is the waxy cutin that covers their needles, trapping moisture. And the water moves from within the cells to the spaces in between them, lowering the freezing point of the tree. This combined with the low surface area of the needles that typically cover evergreens makes them less susceptible to freezing and able to perform photosynthesis all year round.

If evergreens stay youthful because they have a protective barrier. Is this why black don’t crack too? Once again, it’s about water. And the fountain of youth is a fountain because it’s water. I don’t know if it’s that black don’t crack, or we just have a skin hydration routine drilled into us from a young age, plus melanin. Cus we can see when our skin is dry and it doesn’t look healthy. But for my lighter complected brothers and sisters, y’all don’t always know when your skin is dry.

Many people do. I’m just saying. This holiday season, consider lotion. Especially as the heat is on, and it’s dry. If there’s one thing you can learn from the evergreens it’s that you don’t have to be happy, you don’t want to be looking like the ghost of christmas past with your ghostly ash. You can’t be sad and have your skin all dry at the same time. Take in a little self-care. Rejuvenate. Get a nice cream and keep that largest organ of your body ever-protected from the elements with Lotion.

My whole reasonable obsession with plants is that they make oxygen. It’s almost like there’s something going on between us. You scratch my back I’ll scratch yours. Except it’s not that mutual. Because plants are autotrophs and they synthesize their own food. Whereas we are heterotrophs and we have to consume it either by eating other heterotophs or eating autotrophs.

I love a Frito-Lay brand chemical as much as you do, but over the winter and winter holidays, let’s try to eat foods that are alive. They’re as close to life as we can get! At the end of this episode I’m going to share my favorite green smoothie recipe that just makes you feel so crazy alert and awake in the morning. You can actually feel the energy pulsating through your veins.


Even though we don’t synthesize our own food, we do feed ourselves with our own thoughts, and we grow into the thoughts that we made. Plants are such a great meditative tool because you can see what growth looks like. The patterns are evident in a way that’s more apparent than in our own lives.

If you look around at your world, you can see how everything in it is an extension of a habitual thought or feeling. Sometimes this is amazing when you realize what you’ve grown into. Other times it’s not so pleasant. And part of what’s jarring is that it’s hard to spatially track how we’re growing.

Think about your life as a plant. What would it look like? Do you have room to grow, or are there weeds sucking up the energy. Are you doing too many things? And the undergrowth is taking the energy, keeping you from growing taller and stronger. Pruning is so freaking cool because you actually see the plant grow more when you remove certain parts that are inhibiting the growth

When a plant has dead leaves, it’s a lesson in clearing away the old to make way for the new. Maybe the plant looks more sparse, or a little meek without those dead leaves that were taking up space. But it always looks healthier, and like it’s got a shot to grow.

From plants we’re reminded that growth comes from the inside. Everything comes from the seed. ~from the pinecone~ and that a plant’s specific pattern emerges into space from the inside.


As humans we often approach things like builders rather than growers. HRM. Let me just tack on this thing. I’ll just achieve this thing and superglue it onto this part of my life, and zip-tie on this piece. And this part is only hanging on with chewing gum and if I don’t move at allllllll everything will stay in place. And that’s not really how it works?

The things that last are the things that have emerged out of a continuous process. Starting with the roots, and being connected with other living entities. In order to grow, you need some kind of roots to draw on or a support system. Roots doesn’t have to mean family. It can mean place, it can mean sustainable habit, it can mean ritual, it can mean books. Everything comes from the inside. The way things end up looking or being is not really determined from the outside.

That’s why people say you already are who you want to be. You might not be being it yet, but you are literally the same person as who you want to become. You’re never going to leap into another body. It all happens in here. And somewhere in here you’re only able to recognize what you desire because you have a already have an internal reference point for it that’s giving you the nudge.

We need goals and visions and plans but those are all helped by closely listening to and following the internal instructions rather than the external messaging. Cus there’s so much EMF and your little pineal gland is just trying to steer you in the right way to growth in rhythm with life.

Spending time with plants reminds us of the rhythm of growth. And you realllllllly can’t judge it. And that’s so beautiful.


So if you take a look outside, and see that many of the trees have no leaves. And you’re feeling withdrawn right now, take solace in the solstice.

It’s natural to feel down right now. It means you’re not a sociopath. Plants and nature are a great place of mental, emotional, and physical restoration. PS. I finally started listening to Donda and I’m glad I waited. It’s such a good winter album. It’s so good for releasing that somber winter feeling and working out and building up electric charge.

SUPER GREEN SMOOTHIE RECIPE

4 cups kale
4 limes
½ cup coconut milk
2 cups water
3 sprigs of mint
3 tablespoons agave or honey 
2 small knobs ginger

Squeeze the lime juice. Chop the ginger up and add kale, coconut milk, water, mint, and agave all into the blender. Blend it till it’s juicy and you’re gonna feel like WOW, I never knew what life  in my actual veins felt like before. Is this what plants feel like?

This holiday season, celebrate your plants. Celebrate what you’re planting that has yet to sprout. Celebrate the dead leaves which have fallen. Celebrate the cold earth that asks nothing of you in order for it to create your life.

If you don’t have any plants, what are you waiting for! You need oxygen right? You can get pothos or a money tree. So easy to care for and propagate, they’re practically deathrpoof. They’ll beautify your home, and balance your mood.

Thanks so much for listening, and make sure you listen to Holly Jolly Part 2: Handy Hints and Hacks for Holiday Healing! If you want to send feedback for this episode or ideas for future ones, you can send me email to lex@lexbrown.com or you can DM me at @lex_brown_. If you want to send a voice recording with a question or a story or an observation or some wisdom or a quote, we want to hear. I’d love to put that in the next episode. I hope you have a very holly holiday season, and that you find the moments to be jolly, cry, and rest with friends, family, or just your own fine self.

In this episode we basically covered lotion, eating vegetables, and going to be. In the second part we get into the heavy stuff that comes up this time of year. Loss, regret, doubt, gaslighting guilt, loneliness, addiction. So if you’re in need of a little boost, get the smoothie materials, get a good night’s rest, and get ready to meet me in the next episode for Part 2.