Look after our intelligent control system
I want to sell you a concept. It is free you don’t have to pay me anything but you do have to think seriously about it for five minutes and getting anyone to devote five minutes to thinking is a challenge in these modern times.
There are a number of steps to this thinking, the first one is the difference between conscious and subconscious thinking.
Round 1 the cat test
Let’s start with the cat test.
Our eyes are like a camera so the images are upside down but our subconscious brain flips them so we see them right way up. It also combines the images from both eyes into one image and, this is the smart bit, tells us how far things are away and it does all this in a twentieth of a second.
Try to do this using your conscious brain.
Look at this upside-down picture and tell me is the cat brown or black?
Using your conscious brain on the upside-down picture it could take you a couple of minutes to pick out the cat and tell me the colour. I know it will take you two minutes until you work out that I am just a silly old man who likes to play games and there is no cat.
Subconscious and conscious brains
Our subconscious brain is incredibly fast and efficient in doing what it can do.
Impressed? No, well give me another go.
You are walking up a flight of steps, carrying a cup of coffee and trying to console your best friend on your mobile phone.
Your friend is a bit upset (to put it mildly) her son has just failed his final exams, got drunk borrowed your car and smashed it up and is in hospital with a broken leg.
She needed that car to drive to the Airport to take a flight to make a presentation on why her company should win a contract to build the new Olympic stadium and she is already worried that her husband may be cheating on her with the nubile daughter next door who has just developed a pair of incredibly impressive breasts.
In other words, modern life as normal.
But all this time while you are consoling your friend, not spilling your coffee your foot lands perfectly on every step without you even thinking about it.
If you are still not impressed with how effective your subconscious is I give up.
Our subconscious brain and food
Let us now look at food and our subconscious brain as something that happens, maybe in different ways, across every culture on the planet.
We all have to eat and that will usually start with a savoury meal of carbs and protein. Nothing special about this, but now, depending on your culture you may have a piece of fruit, cake, a rice pudding, some chocolate or even in some cultures a glass of port or other sweet liqueurs.
Why? Because you need a lot of rapid energy to help digest that savoury meal and so your subconscious decides that you need this rapid energy so it sends out hormones so you want whatever it is you like that is sweet and full of instant energy.
OK hopefully I have won round one and convinced you that your subconscious is pretty smart but now we go into round 2 which is much more difficult, trying to explain how our subconscious manages to be so smart.
Round 2 why is our subconscious so smart?
Your subconscious has to learn to control many things in your body, temperature, heart-beat, oxygen, immune system, the list goes on and on but what I am interested in is how it controls our food intake, what and how much we eat. Notice the what, it controls what we want to eat as well as how much.
How does it do this? Like the way we learn everything – trial and feedback.
It starts with the very first suck on Mum’s breast. One good suck (and babies suck everything, it is part of their survival kit they are born with.) Feedback, positive or negative, is noted and recorded in babies brain for future reference.
Next time it feels hungry it goes to look up the record, cries to make a lot of noise, a breast appears from nowhere, it sucks away and feels good.
Mission accomplished.
This is the intelligent control system working away in our subconscious.
Baby learns that it needs to eat a lot of protein so it grows very fast.
That’s third isle down on the left in the red and blue packet with a picture of a baby on it. Sorry just joking but it certainly is learning what sort of food it wants.
Actually, that is not quite right, our subconscious intelligent control system learns what we need then sends out hormones so we want to eat that.
There are many hormones that can send out complex messages, it is much more than a full or empty gauge.
This learning goes on throughout life, babies love food that is both sweet and full of nutrients so they can grow as fast as possible and may end up a bit chubby.
In adolescence, they eat huge quantities of food and are typically skinny, or at least used to be until modern foods came along.
In middle age, we don’t need so much food but it takes us some time to learn that so we get a bit of a bum or tum.
By the time we are old, our bodies have learned we don’t need so much food and end up being skinny again.
The point is that this is a lifelong learning experience.
The computer in our tum
I used to write engineering software and we called this a predictor-corrector scheme, make the best guess you can, screw up, hide your screwup so no one sees, and then make a better guess. We also call it adaptive or self-learning but it is the same process screw up, look at the results of the screw up and have another, hopefully, better go.
That is just the way the world works.
People often go on short-term restrictive diets, that are a waste of time and often make things worse, they need to focus on retraining their control system so they want to eat what they need.
It makes life much more pleasant. Remember the old P. G. Wodehouse saying, ‘Giving up wine, women and song does not make you live longer, it just makes it seem longer.’
Recap
So far, this is the easy bit, we are about to go into the difficult bit so lets have a recap of the key points.
All our bodies have a built-in control system which regulates what and how much we want to eat. It is learning from that first suck until we die. While bio-chemistry has gives an in depth understanding of what our bodies need – when it comes to applying this knowledge the most effective way is to focus on training our sub-conscious control system so it tells us what and how much to eat.
Round 3 – The difficult bit with smart bugs
Now comes the difficult bit, hopefully, you have accepted that our subconscious control system is really smart – now I have to convince you that there are really smart bugs which are critical to this subconscious control system.
Have you ever dropped some cake crumbs on the ground and have been too lazy to pick them up? Well, I often feel lazy and am happy to watch the ants come along and remove the crumbs – it is really quite fascinating to watch on a hot sunny afternoon.
Australia in general and my backyard specifically, is ant heaven.
But are they smart? Let me ask you – how many ants have won Nobel prizes? The answer is zero.
An individual ant is not the smartest creature on the globe. They just bobble about in a totally random way with no plan or strategy, none of this dividing an area up into rectangles and sweep searching like the SES do – no just bobble about at random.
But when they find that cake crumb I am too lazy to pick up they leap into intelligent action. One ant will tell another ant, in ant language, which I do not speak. Hey, there are cake crumbs over there and this is the route I used to get there.
Soon there will be thousands of ants busily moving the cake crumbs taking this totally wasteful bobbley route that the first ant took. In no time all the crumbs have been transported back to their home so it works, for them.
Swarm Intelligence
We call this swarm intelligence and before we get feeling superior to the ants I have to say that the biggest uses of swarm intelligence are us humans.
We just love dressing up in Taylor Swift style and going to her concerts by the thousands. We dress that way for a good reason – we can fit in without having to think.
This really works as we don’t have time to solve every problem from scratch.
EUIC
What shall I wear today? The same old T-shirt and shorts I left on the floor last night because I was too lazy to put them away. You may think it is being lazy I call it EUIC as I want to appear trendy with the latest acronym. It is short for Effective Use of Intellectual Capacity.
And it keeps us alive. In and on us are trillions of cells, particularly in our gut. Now you won’t see a particular microbe queuing up to be awarded her PhD but together, with the power of swarm intelligence they do an incredible job in powering our intelligent control system and we would soon be dead without them.
So we need to learn to look after them.
The villain
Every good fairy story needs a beautiful heroine, a brave hero and an evil villain. Sorry, fairy stories came from the era before sexual equality but we now have made up for that with Kyoshi the all-conquering female avatar.
Let us hope that Kamala is Kyoshi in disguise, that will make the world a better place.
It is just a fact of life that there are harmful microbes, or what I call bad bugs as it is quicker to type.
Humans are very good at killing things, even our fellow humans – there is no other creature that kills members of its own species on such a grand scale, not a record we should be proud of.
We are very good at killing microbes, we do it intentionally with things like Covid which is good but we also do it unintentionally by killing beneficial microbes in our food system which is at the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.
So how do we kill the bad bugs without killing the good bugs?
A pretty simple but very important question but with a very simple answer.
Ants and worms
Ants and worms are both ace recyclers.
My garden is full of worms and other beneficial creepy crawlies but rarely do I see any ants in my garden while on my patio I never see any worms but it is inundated with ants.
So why the difference?
On my patio I drop crumbs and tell myself (and my wife) I am studying swarm behaviour even though I know that I am just too lazy to pick them up. It is nice and dry so the ants are more than happy but the worms don’t pop in to say Hi!
In my garden, I am using the Gbiota flood and flush system so it is maintained at the Goldilocks moisture level which is the key to the Gbiota system. The worms love it but the ants do not.
The only difference is the conditions. You don’t have to be a wizkid in microbiology – just know how to control the conditions – the food and moisture levels.
Simply by controlling the conditions the beneficial microbes breed happily away out-competing and out-breeding the harmful microbes.
That is what Gbiota is all about
Create the conditions in the soil to breed beneficial microbes without the harmful ones.
The microbes go into the plants and then into our gut to form so our gut biome is filled with beneficial biota which then forms part of our intelligent control system which sends out hormones which make us want to eat the food that we need.
But we are aiming to create a shift in the food paradigm so people think about food in a different as is described in the various articles.
But the food industry is very skilful in using flavourings to make their food taste good. But the flavour industry uses synthetic flavours which are deliberately targeted to be addictive – they are in business to make money.
It is not possible to compete against that with a week-old cabbage so we focus on food which is eaten shortly after picking when the natural flavours are at a peak and
As a final ps, we do cheat a bit. A week old cabbage is really pretty boring so we grow a variety of plants including herbs, like basil, thyme, oregano, thyme etc which brings a wider variety of microbial species into the system and just makes the food so much more attractive to eat.
