Frederico Azevedo da Costa Pinto, one of IEA's sabbatical researchers in 2017

As natural as demonstrating joy and sadness is the expression of being sick. Among the vast repertoire of animal manifestations, "sick behavior" - as it is called among specialists - is the demonstration of discouragement, prostration, lack of appetite and the will to do nothing. These are clear signs that animals emit when they do not want social contact because they are sick. "It is the way to give the body time to recover and even preserve the social group from getting sick. But this behavior is being increasingly repressed in modern societies by the way workers' productivity is viewed," says Professor Frederico Azevedo da Costa Pinto, a specialist in experimental pathology and animal behavior, and participant in the IEA Sabbatical Year Program in 2017.

With the research project "Modern Man: An Animal Socially Deprived of the Right to Become Sick," the pathologist will go through the historical evolution of how the behaviors of sick individuals used to be viewed and how this behavior has been perceived in modern societies. In parallel, he will search for data in the related literature on the expression of this behavior among humans, relating them to the behavior of experimental animals.

The historical evaluation will allow to confront changes in the working day with the productivity expectations of the modern worker, he believes.

If in modern societies becoming ill becomes prohibitive, the counterpoint to "camouflage" disease is the increasingly common use of medicines. "Expressing unhealthy behavior would incur absences at work and therefore we are encouraged to take medication, often self-medication, in order to maintain the expected work day. Associated with this is the fact that the most prescribed and consumed classes of drugs in modern societies are precisely the palliative medicines for pains, colds and allergies, for example," he says.

The project will evaluate investments in research and dissemination of drugs aimed at the temporary relief of the malaise of certain diseases. "They are medicines that do not necessarily shorten the course of the disease; nor do they actually improve health conditions," says Costa Pinto.

"Let's not be purists. Taking medicine helps you getting through illness without suffering. But this does not prevent the individual from also staying in comfort at home. In reality, what we are trying to discuss is the fact that the individual takes medication to force themselves to continue working," he says.

In addition, there is the problem of excess and self-medication. In some countries, legislation allows drugs to be offered on gondolas, making access easier. But there are health systems, as in Canada, for example, where there is no excess or self-medication because there is no such facility of access, he compares.

Culture and legislation

Cultural differences also influence how the patient behaves. Even legislation can vary as a reflection of the cultural aspect, says the scientist. "Countries with more consistent social protection allow people to get sick, because the legislation provides for a longer sick leave. Even the longer maternity and paternity leave denote this kind of respect for the worker," he recalls.

On the contrary, countries that tend to work longer and with outsourced work place workers at increasingly absurd pressures, suppressing the individual's right to become ill, he says. "The right to get sick tends to become unacceptable in these societies, because they serve a logic that makes individuals expendable," he says.

But what is the problem in not allowing yourself to express the disease? "One of them, the most obvious one, is to take the disease to the social group, in the case of an individual who camouflages an infectious disease, for example," he says. Another problem in not manifesting the disease is the individual becoming increasingly subject to uncured diseases and that may have recurrences or become chronic. "We are talking about everyday diseases, not serious diseases. I have no doubt that not allowing yourself to fall ill will lead to a worse or incomplete recovery, since palliative medicines offer a momentary response to the symptoms of the disease," he says.

In addition, there are long-term emotional changes that seem to be associated with the fact that the person does not stop when they need to. "Not giving yourself this time can generate disorders, including psychological ones," says the pathologist.

All these cultural and legal aspects denote how much each society cares about the health of their citizens, he believes.

Similarities

We are more like animals than we imagine. Bizarre things that we assumed to be exclusive to humans have been observed among bugs. "For example, unplanned copulation, performed simply for the demonstration of power and hierarchical superiority. Hierarchy is key to understanding the behavior of getting sick. A senior executive and a doorman demonstrate different ways to get sick," he says.

The immune system has a lot to do with hierarchy, says the pathologist. "Some people do not demonstrate unhealthy behavior simply because they are more resilient, or because the hierarchical position in a company prevents it. They may not want to show vulnerability. Others do not express unhealthy behavior because they can not lose their jobs," he says.

Prurigo nodularis, an autoimmune disease of unknown cause

More and more research projects show that things that happen in the nervous system have physical connections. This includes the immune response, which is a protective response to infections. The same response that prepares the body for an immediate response, such as running away from a thug, is also the kind of response that modulates immunity, he compares. "Stress, for example, is an adaptive protective response described 80 years ago that works with this same mechanism," he says.

Subordination and immune response in animals have been studied to also evaluate how a "submissive" animal behaves in face of the disease. A research model, which injects bacteria to simulate disease in a rat pair, showed that the subordinate animal's pressures were different from the dominant's pressures, he says. "In this case, the dominant is allowed to demonstrate disease. The subordinate lends attention to the dominant and demonstrates to be socially submissive all the time, without being concerned with manifesting the unhealthy behavior", compares the scientist.

The most positive effects expected of his research is that it can subsidize public policies, says the researcher. "In a country with social, economic and political problems, it is utopian to think that these aspects of health are even considered. But in practice, I hope at the very least to raise a discussion about where industrial society is pushing the individual. It does not make sense to have an economy growing at the expense of the loss of individual freedom and the health of the individual. In fact, we need to rethink the culture of growth, industrialization, the consumer market, and profit. Growing up is a charge in all social groups and at all levels. But what grows without stopping is a tumor; is cancer," he says.

Images: Leonor Calasans; Michael Katotomichelakis, Dimitrios G Balatsouras, Konstantinos Bassioukas,
Nikolaos Kontogiannis, Konstantinos Simopoulos, Vassilios Danielides.

According to Till Roenneberg, "we are loosing our critical view into how we make science.”

LIVE ON WEB

"It seems like they are trying to eliminate the humanities because there is an idea that apparently this field does not bring much money or many students to the institutions. This is the worst direction we could take. There is a crisis in the way we deal with the humanities and we should change it."

The quote by chronobiologist Till Roenneberg seeded his conference on interdisciplinarity given at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Studies (WIAS) during the 1st Intercontinental Academia (ICA). The dialogue between different kinds of knowledge, or what academia calls interdisciplinarity, will be the topic discussed by Roenneberg on July 19, in the IEA Events Room, from 10 am.

Invited by the IEA to revisit the presentation of the ICA, the scientist from the Institute of Medical Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) will give the conference Why Science needs more than Interdisciplinarity. The event will be broadcast live on the web.

The IEA, an interdisciplinary body par excellence, is revisiting the issue of interdisciplinarity from meetings with renowned experts. German sociologist Peter Weingart, board member and director of the Bielefeld University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), has shown that the achievement of interdisciplinary model will only be effective through an institutional restructuring in teaching and research institutions. Despite being fashionable in academia for over 20 years, interdisciplinarity was still a concept "empty of meaning" until recently, he said during his lecture at the IEA.

In Roenneberg's vision, science needs more than interdisciplinarity. "Modern science uses objective methods and criteria to find the ‘true’ mechanistic causes behind observed associations. While we have made great advances in explaining extended putative causal networks, we are loosing our critical view into how we do this," he says.

For the scientist, not biological dogmas or physical theories, not genes or quarks are at the centre of our scientific endeavours. "Only one thing is the central commonality of every scientific discovery: our own brain, which is basically a story-telling machine," he says.

At this meeting, Roenneberg will remember the necessity that we have to fuse as many different brains as possible to make larger jumps in our scientific insights.

The conferencist

Till Roenneberg is a professor of chronobiology at the Institute of Medical Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in München, Germany. He explores the impact of light on human circadian rhythms, focusing on aspects such as chronotypes and social jet lag in relation to health benefits. Roenneberg attended both the University College London and LMU, where he began by studying physics. He switched to medicine in order to focus on the science of the human body, but ended up studying biology. As a postdoctoral fellow, he studied again under Jurgen Aschoff, studying annual rhythms in the body, then moved to the United States to study the cellular basis of biological clocks under Woody Hastings at Harvard University. In 1991, he began the tradition of giving the Aschoff’s Ruler prize to a chronobiologist who has advanced the field. He is currently the vice-chair of the Institute for Medical Psychology of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the head of the Centre for Chronobiology, the president-elect of the European Biological Rhythms Society, the president of the World Federation of Societies for Chronobiology, and a member of the Senior Common Room of Brasenose College, University of Oxford. From 2005 to 2010 he was the coordinator of "EUCLOCK" and coordinator of the Daimler-Benz-Foundation network "ClockWORK", and from 2010 to 2012 was the member at large of the Society for Research of Biological Rhythms.

Some of the reflections of the IEA's Research Group Humanities and the Contemporary World will be exhibited during the workshop The Society of Undifferentiation: Identity, Trauma and Mythical Violence, organized by Professor Olgária Matos, from the USP's Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH).

The discussions to be held from February 22 to 24 are part of the activities of the thematic project "Time Acceleration and Post-Democracy: Violence and Communication" (in Portuguese), that will be transdisciplinarly developed during the period 2014-2017 by the research group coordinated by Professor Matos. The events will take place in the former room of the University Council.

Olgária Matos, a professor at FFLCH-USP.

"The society of communication, information and knowledge lives an intensification of nervous stimuli, producing an acceleration of time and some significant breaks with tradition. The changes impact the notion of identity and consistency of its meaning, and also the memory and the past. We do not know yet if the development of science and technology can be conducive to the emancipation of the human being, or will lead to destruction," says the coordinator.

The meeting will gather researchers from various disciplines of the humanities such as philosophy, anthropology, history, psychoanalysis, psychology and others. The conferencist will be Georges Jean Marie Gaillard, a professor of psychology at the Institut de Psychologie of the Université Lumière Lyon 2.

The event will be broadcast live on the web.

Programme:

February 22

2:00 pm - Death Drive and Traumatic Repetition in Institutions.

February 23

2:00 pm - Death Drive and Traumatic Repetition in Institutions.

February 24

10:00 am - Trauma and Management Technologies in Institutions.
2:00 pm - Death Drive and Traumatic Repetition in Institutions.

Roenneberg spoke of the causes and effects of this syndrome at the conference Circadian Behavior and Sleep in the Real World, held on April 21 as part of the program of the Intercontinental Academia (ICA) on the issue of “Time.”

According to the professor, social jet lag can be defined as a discrepancy between internal body rhythms and external environmental rhythms. It is very similar to what happens when a traveler crosses several time zones in succession: the sudden changes lead the body clock (which is adjusted to the time of the place of departure) to conflict with the local clock.

Unlike ordinary jet lag, however, the effects of which are transient, social jet lag is chronic, forcing individuals to fight systematically against their own biological clock in order to cope with the demands of everyday life – and this include ever-longer working hours and greater difficulties to reconcile professional and personal life.

“Everything in our body is controlled and organized by the circadian system. The circadian system, in turn, is not organized by the social clock, but rather by the clock of the Sun, by the clock of light & dark. So there will always be a discrepancy between what society wants us to do and what, under the conditions of modern life, our body wants us to do,” noted Roenneberg.

Some people compensate this discrepancy between biological and social rhythms by extending their period of activity and reducing their period of repose. According to Roenneberg, those who suffer from social jet lag are generally early risers who remain active until late at night to cope with their daily commitments. In the end, however, things don’t add up for them: they sleep less than eight hours a day and are therefore chronically sleep-deprived.

One can measure this “negative sleep balance” by comparing the pattern of their circadian behavior during weekdays, governed by the social clock, and during their free days, governed by their biological clock. “If we measure the difference between both patterns, we will obtain a quantifiable measure of what we call ‘social jet lag’,” said the professor.

The afflictions of modernity

The negative sleep balance is at the root of many afflictions of modern society, especially those related to metabolic problems. “The greater the social jet lag, the greater the likelihood of becoming obese, developing diabetes, using drugs, smoking to relieve stress, and drinking alcohol to slumber off when one is not yet ready to sleep,” warned Roenneberg .

The implications of social jet lag also extend to the realm of behaviors. According to the chronobiologist, one of the first qualities that disappear when someone sleeps too little is social competence: “You become a true psychopath if you don’t sleep enough.”

For him, the social jet lag syndrome is associated with the idea that sleep keeps us from becoming more productive: “People tend to sleep one hour less in order to remain active for one hour more. Yet, sleeping does not mean ceasing to be active, but rather preparing the body and the mind for activity.”

He explained that simple math underlies this statement: “If someone sleeps one hour less, depriving himself of 1/8 of his sleep period, he only gains 1/16 in terms of activity. On the other hand, his efficiency is reduced by about 1/20.”

The result, he said, is a vicious cycle – one that has become endemic in the United States. “You lose efficiency, so you have to work more and more; to work more, you have to sleep less; and by sleeping less, you lose efficiency.”

In his assessment, the widespread use of alarm clocks is evidence that overall people sleep less than they should. “What is the fundamental issue underlying the use of an alarm clock? That we have not completed our biological sleep period! Otherwise, we would need no help to wake up,” he warned. “We must change our attitude toward sleep,” he added.

Chronotypes

In addition to propelling social jet lag, the modern lifestyle also contributes to an extreme expression of the so-called chronotypes – the classification of individuals according to the preferences of their body regarding the time they perform daily activities such as sleeping, waking up, working out and exercising the mind.

There are two main chronotypes: the “morning people,” who sleep and rise early, and reserve the night period to sleep; and the “evening people,” who prefer to sleep and wake up late, even if that means dedicating part of the day to sleep.

Roenneberg said that, in terms of their circadian behavior, these two chronotypes are growing farther and farther apart because of how the patterns of exposure to natural light are changing in the modern age.

According to him, throughout the course of evolution, our biological clock was synchronized with a light/dark cycle regulated by exposure to sunlight: “The environment in which we were synchronized during the last thousands of years was one of much light during the day and no light at all at night. The morning and evening chronotypes existed, but the distance between them was not significant.”

However, the dissemination of electric lighting and the habits of modern life have imposed different levels of exposure to solar and artificial light. Indeed, the luminous signals that help synchronize internal body rhythms and external environment rhythms are being minimized.

Roenneberg used the ICA’s own dynamics as an example: in daytime, when people should normally be exposed to the Sun, participants were confined indoors, with little natural light; at night, on the other hand, when the body should be in the dark, they were exposed to a prolonged period of artificial light. “We are darkening the day and illuminating the night. And this light is increasingly turning us into evening people,” he said.

According to him, exposure to artificial light at night would hardly make a farmer become an evening person, because, when working outdoors, under the Sun, he would signal to the biological clock that sunlight, stronger and natural, was the real light. “It is the contrast between light and dark that synchronizes our biological clock, making us sleep from 10 pm to 6 am,” he said.

In Roenneberg’s view, unlike what is commonly thought, being an evening person does not imply any type of pathology. “There is no innate timing of the circadian clock,” he explained, pondering that sleeping and waking up later is “a natural reaction to the environment where one lives, a normal way for the circadian clock to synchronize a body that is not being sufficiently exposed to light.”

The subject will be addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective, centered in philosophy but also considering anthropology, biology, linguistics, psychology and law. According to the coordinator of the meeting, Lorenzo Baravalle, a post-doctoral student in Philosophy at USP and member of the research group, "the main objective is to define questions and to sketch lines of response rather than reaching definitive conclusions."

Some of the issues to be addressed are:

• What are the manifestations of animal subjectivity?
• Does time have the same unifying function of "I" in some animals, that some authors consider central to human subjectivity and individuality?
• Is it possible to speak of an awareness of death in animals?
• Can the concept of "autonomy", taken from political philosophy and law, be used to characterize animal subjectivity?

The debate will bring together some of the researchers who participated in the previous meetings of the cycle. The roundtable on the 29th will be moderated by Baravalle and will feature three panelists. Hernán Neira, a professor of political philosophy at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USC), will speak about the awareness of time by animals. His exhibition will focus on the criticism against the philosophical and biological thought of Jakob von Uexküll, particularly with regard to the distinction between the human temporality, considered objective, and the animal one, seen as subjective. Gustavo Andrés Caponi, a professor at the Department of Philosophy of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), will examine the heterogeneity of the cognitive faculties of human beings and other animals in the context of the ideas of French naturalist Georger-Lous Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Anthropologist Eliane Sebeika Rapchan, professor at the State University of Maringá (UEM), will discuss the existence of an "animal subjectivity" from the results of researches that have explored aspects related to emotions and feelings, conscience, symbolic capacity, among others, in wild and laboratory chimpanzees.

Moderated by Caponi, the roundtable on the 30th will also have three discussants. Stelio Marras, a professor at USP's Institute of Brazilian Studies (IEB), will address the topic of human-animal correspondence. For this, he will address a classical issue of anthropology: "the Bororo are macaws" - a reference to the symbolic thinking of a tribe of Brazilian Indians, the Bororo, who have the macaws as totem and do not make an ontological distinction between themselves and those birds. Baravalle, now as an exhibitor, will reflect on the ability of animals to perceive the uniqueness of the experience - that is, the existence of a 'self' with its own identity - and, from there, he will explore the potential of a theoretical model that enables a better understanding of the phenomenology of animal life. Davide Vecchi, a professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sciences of Complexity (IFICC), Chile, will discuss whether subjectivity is a primitive property of all living beings or conditional upon certain biological capabilities, such as cognition. In the exhibition, he will address two specific cases: the immune system and a colony of bacteria.

CYCLE

Inaugurated in 2013, the cycle Humans and Animals: The Limits of Mankind covers the origins, legitimacy, and ethical-political consequences of differentiation of living beings in humans, animals and sub​​-humans (this last case defined by the prejudiced view of certain groups of individuals of certain ethnicities, body types or gender, considered inferior humans).

The aim is to discuss the most relevant philosophical and epistemological fundamentals to what is meant by human from an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing various perspectives, including those of anthropology, biology, and ethics.

The organization is from IEA’s Philosophy, History, and Sociology of Science and Technology Research Group, the Philosophical Scientiae Studia Association and Fapesp’s Thematic Project ‘Genesis and Meaning of Technoscience: On the Relationship between Science, Technology, and Society’.

The event will be broadcast live on the web.

At the conference, Rapchan will talk about the relationship between humans and other primates focused on ethnographic records. The researcher will discuss the controversial idea of the existence of specific ‘cultures’ among these animals and the consequent formation of a new otherness of non-human nature.

Rapchan studies the relationship between nature and culture and between sociocultural anthropology and life sciences, with emphasis on primatology, biological anthropology, and ethology. Her most recent research deals with the relationship between humans and animals based on the ethnography of the behavior of capuchin monkeys, as well as the possibility of a ‘culture’ among chimpanzees.

Cycle

The cycle covers the origins, legitimacy, and ethical-political consequences of differentiation of living beings in humans, animals and sub​​-humans (this last case defined by the prejudiced view of certain groups of individuals of certain ethnicities, body types or gender, considered inferior humans).

The aim is to discuss the most relevant philosophical and epistemological fundamentals to what is meant by human from an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing various perspectives, including those of anthropology, biology, and ethics.

The cycle comprises five meetings. The last two are scheduled for June and August. The organization is from IEA’s Philosophy, History, and Sociology of Science and Technology Research Group, the Philosophical Scientiae Studia Association and Fapesp’s Thematic Project ‘Genesis and Meaning of Technoscience: On the Relationship between Science, Technology, and Society’.