SYSE: Episode 5
Sachen, die du erleben solltest or deneyimlemen gereken şeyler
Welcome to the fifth episode of Stuff You Should Experience.
If you’re wondering what’s with the subtitle it’s German and Turkish for SYSE, respectively. You can guess why. We’re visiting those parts of the world today. These two bands that I am introducing are surprisingly awesome.
I think I’m more of an instrumental person now. Lyrics don’t mesmerize me as much as a good organ player can. That’s just probably the next step of my music taste getting evolved. What I’m saying is, I get a better dopamine hit when I listen to instrumentals. That’s all.
I always wanted to be in the school marching band, since that was the only band in school I could be a part of. I never got in. Juniors hi-jacked the entire band. But that’s the past now. Did you ever wonder what would happen if your school marching band ever decided to turn into a techno marching band? It sounds a bit absurd, right? I mean who will ever want to dance to a marching band? Well, I have an answer. It’s Meute. It’s an eleven-piece techno marching band from Germany. Yes, ELEVEN PIECE!
We are tuning in to two of their songs. One from their 2018 solo album You & Me and another from their 2017 album Tumult, Rej.
For the YouTube link, click here.
For the YouTube link, click here.
Rej is my personal fav. The music is very unpredictable. It has a certain sense of thrill in it. I won’t spoil it for you by giving any more details.
It was enough of a shocker to know that Turkey has some rock bands, but digesting the fact that it even has good psychedelic rock bands was a bit hard. My ignorance got the better of me. Today we are listening to Altın Gün. Now, you won’t understand any lyrics from their song for good reason (if you know Turkish, good for you), but do listen to it. The music nonetheless will awestruck your auditory nerve and I can promise some dopamine hit if not much.
We are tuning in to a song from their 2018 album On, Goca Dünya, and one single release from 2019, Süpürgesi Yoncadan ( I can’t pronounce that either).
For the YouTube link, click here
For the YouTube link, click here.
What did I read this week?
One of my friends once told me an interesting ailment from his past (sorry if you’re reading this). It was about the Gut. The intestines. For a long time, I never thought guts were that big of a deal. Well, no one even remembers reading much about it even in science textbooks, right? There was hardly anything about it, let alone anything interesting. There’s a lot to know about guts and quite a bit of it is still unknown. It’s a whole new universe!
Following up on that thought, I’d added Giulia Enders’ Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ on my shelf but never really managed to read it. Pandemic seemed like a good time to. So. Here’s a brief excerpt from the book
We humans are very proud of our particularly complex brains. Thinking about constitutional law, philosophy, physics, or religion is an impressive feat and can prompt extremely sophisticated movements. It is awe-inspiring that our brains are capable of all this. But at some point, that awe wears off, and we hold our brains responsible for everything we experience in life—we think up experiences of well-being, happiness, or satisfaction inside our own heads. When we are insecure, anxious, or depressed, we worry that the computer in our heads might be broken. Philosophizing and physics research are matters of the mind and always will be—but there is more to our self than that. And it is from the gut that we learn this lesson—the organ that is responsible for little brown heaps and unbidden sounds and smells of all sorts. This is the organ that is currently forcing researchers to rethink. Scientists are cautiously beginning to question the view that the brain is the sole and absolute ruler over the body. The gut not only possesses an unimaginable number of nerves, those nerves are also unimaginably different from those of the rest of the body. The gut commands an entire fleet of signaling substances, nerve-insulation materials, and ways of connecting. There is only one other organ in the body that can compete with the gut for diversity—the brain. The gut’s network of nerves is called the “gut-brain” because it is just as large and chemically complex as the gray matter in our heads. Were the gut solely responsible for transporting food and producing the occasional burp, such a sophisticated nervous system would be an odd waste of energy. Nobody would create such a neural network just to enable us to break wind. There must be more to it than that.
There are some really interesting experiments discussed in the book. Just by shooting some certain bacterias in a mice’s gut, his will to fight for life (swim in that case) was revived. We all individually have a very different gut ecosystem. That’s right, it’s customized! So, I think the Brain has a strong contender who has challenged its hegemony haha. I would highly recommend reading it.
What am I thinking about?
Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” Could there be some valuable lessons of history? I’ll elaborate on it next weekend.
Have a really nice Saturday… :)
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