Endurance - A year in space, A lifetime Discovery - Scott Kelly #Review

The veteran of four space flights and the record holder for spending 365 consecutive days in space, Scott Kelly has experienced things very few have. Not only this, his style of narration mixed with humour, awe and scare is perspiring to digest.

That he considers a stage for an Astronaut as humiliating is a frank disclosure I have never heard of when enema was said to be done to remove the entire stuff of the rectum.  This has to be done as the rocket 'take-off' to 'induction' in the orbit is very risky and requires a crawling time-consuming event. Thus Alan shepherd, he writes, was the first ever Astronaut to leave the Earth in wet pants - as he sat in the rocket to be launched which underwent several delays, to avoid abort, and that lead to excessive time being spent inside the capsule for long. The rocket, the author defines is a barely controlled bomb, on which astronauts sit with a header that communicates with the ground control for manouver.

As all the American shuttles have been grounded, they rely upon the Russian system of launch that is Soyuz. For this Kelly writes that there is a lot of training both in the US and Russia. The Russians are considered as staunch followers of traditions. One such mention is about the compulsory peeing on the back Tyre of the vehicle in which the space-men are taken from the final quarter to the launch site. It was done so because Yuri Gagarin returned successfully after a launch and he did this act before his launch - for women astronauts a container is given to collect and pour.

Up there, 400 km above Earth, things are not easy for him. In micro-gravity one would often feel like always standing upside down because blood never 'seems' coming down. Everything flies until it was fixed to some place (Velcro here is very significantly used). Food and water droplets took all positions. Kelly praises the body's attitude towards this gravity when bone began losing its mass as 'it felt' that it was no longer needed to muster mass. Whenever the 'Carbon-dioxide' absorber slowed down in need of re-filling of the equipment, eyes were found blurred (nystagmus). However eye-blurring was not the same in the case with female astronauts. That is the reason why a female astronaut has been selected to be first to Mars by 2020!

Tread mill that is used in aiding digestion and metabolism was found to be risky. A slightest misuse, it might probably shoot off leading to many a dwindle inside the ISS, fears Kelly.

His happier moment was when President Obama tweeted a few statements in his praise. Buzz Aldrin joined the tweet telling the President that while Kelly was just 249 miles above the Earth, he went to about 23900 miles to reach Moon.  This was a troll Kelly felt later in the ISS. However, he came up with a data that might have been a fitting reply to Buzz - that he had traveled more than 200 million miles when he reached 520 days in space!  The urge to foresee a return troll in a rhetoric flavour for Buzz is the hallmark of Scott Kelly.

This stunning memoir is a must-read, and that's coming from someone who rarely reads nonfiction! Endurance is split between chapters detailing his year on the International Space Station and a broader view of his life journey up to the launch of that mission.  The road to become astronaut is the toughest anyone can think (with a twin Mark Kelly also being a competitor and a pointer towards his frequent quarreling parents which later subsided). At an interview before his selection as astronaut he was asked if he would prefer 'stealing' over 'kicking a dog'. He chose 'stealing' to which a psychoanalyst graded that he was trying to tell what the analyst 'wanted to hear'. His gathering of nerves during a flight landing over a ship at the sea, flying helicopters near the crash site of Columbia (At the disaster site he even found a 'Canon' Printer which was without a single scratch), a surgery for stone removal were some of the challenging events in his life. 

There's enough technical detail in Endurance to satisfy space and tech nerds, but it's described in lay terms that will make every reader glued to the book until finished. This is a thriller.

Phantoms in the Brain - V S Ramachandran #Review

V.S. Ramachandran, Neuroscientist is internationally renowned for opening answers to the puzzling questions of human nature that few scientists have ever dared. His creative insights about the brain is matched by the acute simplicity of in-situ experiments - such as use of low-tech tools like cotton swabs, glasses of water and dime-store mirrors and cardboard.

A phantom is an un-real feeling that exists in the humans after the loss of organs like hand, its fingers or legs. People feel that it is there whereas, actually it does not exist. In 'Phantoms in the Brain - probing the mysteries of the Brain", Dr. Ramachandran recounts how his  work with patients who have bizarre neurological disorders has shed new light on the deep architecture of the brain, and these findings tell us about who we are, how we construct our body image (with conciousness having roots in one's culture), why we laugh or become depressed, why we may believe in God, how we make decisions, deceive ourselves and dream, perhaps even why we're so clever at philosophy, music and art. Some of his most notable cases include:

#A woman paralyzed on the left side of her body who believes she is lifting a tray of drinks with both hands offers a unique opportunity to test Freud's theory of denial.

#A man who has lost his forearm feels an excruciating pain in the palm of his hands with nails-biting it, gets a lease of life with simple box and mirror experiment. All in just a week and this after the patient has had visited several neurosurgeons and given-up.

#A man who insists he is talking with God challenges us to ask: Could we be "wired" for religious experience?

#A woman who hallucinates cartoon characters illustrates how, in a sense, we are all hallucinating, all the time.

#Another women who sees her stomach swelling feels that she is pregnant and which continues for nine-months. She even goes to hospital for delivery (with swollen stomach and no baby). This doc arranges a big baby-size toy and sedates the woman during 'delivery' only to disclose to her later that the baby died after delivery. Reconciled, she even returns home with 'birthmarks' over the stomach!

#A piece of your brain the size of a grain of sand would contain one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons and one billion synapses, all "talking to" each other.

# Pain is an opinion on the organism's state of health rather than a mere reflective response to an injury. There is no direct hotline from pain receptors to "pain centers" in the brain.

#The mechanisms of perception are mainly involved in extracting statistical correlations from the world to create a model that is temporarily useful.

#One could argue that the term consciousness doesn't mean anything unless you recognize the emotional significance and semantic associations of what you are looking at.

#Every medical student is taught that patients with epileptic seizures originating in this part of the brain [temporal lobes] can have intense, spiritual experiences during the seizures and sometimes become preoccupied with religion and moral issues even during the seizure-free or interictal periods.

The author often discusses some experiments that he and his collaborators did to shed light on puzzles going along with the condition, sometimes leading to insights that could help the patient or at least provide a basis for the development of treatments. He also adds his own speculations and hunches, which is quite interesting. He is so precise with these write-ups that he outlines where the actual knowledge ends and the speculation starts.

The book is now more than a decade old and I felt I should have read it long back. Nevertheless, I would  hope for a some more survey and edited newer version. (The co-author Sandra Blakeslee is credited in the acknowledgements for “making the book accessible for a wider readership.” The book is written in the first person narrative.)