Recently, I have been training with my personal coach as I do twice every week, and it came that we were discussing the topic of symmetry. I enjoy this luxury of having a coach since I am suffering from pains in my foot that I cannot not control anymore. The pain keeps me away from running which really influences my mood negatively ;-)... sorry, I am zoning out! Analyzing my body we found out that over decades I have developed a kind of a patchwork of asymmetry that disturbs economic and efficient movements. Compensatory actions and postures added up. The result is a mess that is extremely difficult to tackle.  Symmetry, so my hypothesis, is an ideal state of a biological organism that facilitates optimal functionality, and is rarely achieved or never, as it would mean complete perfection. Today I found a talk by Marcus du Sautoy about symmetry that just fits into my current deliberations. Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy (born in London, 26 August 1965) is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. His academic work concerns mainly group theory and number theory.

Since one century scientists try to find out about the cause of inflammatory bowel diseases. New techniques make it possible to examine whether there exist specific genetic profiles that cause chronic diseases. For Crohn's disease we know today that genes only make a minor contribution to its development. The trend in nature science, and that really makes me happy to observe, is to recognize that most of the chronic diseases cannot be explained by one cause only. The same applies to Crohn's disease (CD). Genetic studies proved this clearly. I want to raise the topic of CD because biestmilch proved to be a very good therapeutic agent in Crohn's disease. Of course, I ask myself why this is the case, where is the scientific evidence that gives us a reasonable explanation? Now, a group of scientists from the University of the City London, medicine department presents an interesting concept about the multi-causal roots of CD. In all CD patients examined scientists found abnormalities that indicate minor defects in a bunch of genes and not a single one. Probably they will discover many more of this kind. We must know that various genes contribute to the creation for example of signal transduction molecules etc. Defects on the level of molecules are called phenotypic, on the level of genes science speaks about ontogenetic defects. Okay then, various phenotypic failures in CD have been detected recently: a mucosal barrier dysfunction, innate immunodefiency states, and the propagation of a chronic inflammatory state. This vicious circle is perpetuating.

Optical illusions show how you see, by Beau Lotto. To my notion this talk perfectly completes Oliver Sacks observations. I love Lotto's view on the world. He stresses that there is no stimuli-inherent information, information or content respectively is the result of an interactive process, expressing a relation. Perceptions are volatile and subject to change depending on the context, one may call it illusions, I won't. Perceptions do not mirror the real world. Perception/content is determined by context and experience, experience not only limited to our individual life, but to evolution. The senses, Lotto says, are not fragile, and therefore prone to illusions. It is the process of perception that is determined by much more than only a stimuli like light that is processed by our visual organs.

It is a long time ago that I have posted art on business cards from Hugh McLeod. Today it was suitable to do so. Andreas is going to enforce our biestmilch team. On his first day in our office he was definitely confronted with my biestmilch delusion. Good to have somebody on board who may be able to tell me the difference between delusion and entrepreneurship in my special case ;-) ... I don't know and don't feel the difference anymore, and this can be dangerous in many ways.

After my intensive weeks with triathlon I feel it is high time to shift gears and focus on other topics too. My readers who are not involved with this sport may be bored by then, and complain about the monotony. Since weeks I have not been checking my newsreader, today I did... being so tired that I just let myself drift through the headlines, my eyes came to an halt at the name of Oliver Sacks. I listened to his talk and it really hit me. It gives wonderful evidence that seeing is not only a phenomenon induced by the world that surrounds us, but also by the very inside of our body and brain. If your eyes go blind, then you may realize that seeing is a complex process that also produces images without external stimuli. And I think we should be aware of the fact that seeing (hallucinating) is not necessarily connected with insanity. Many a blind person probably sees images and doesn't dare to speak about them because they are afraid of being discriminated as insane. Oliver Sacks is well known as a writer of such best-selling case histories as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, and his memoir of his early work, Awakenings, all of which have breathed new life into the dusty 19th-century tradition of the clinical anecdote. He maintains a small practice in New York City.

... to go to sleep and get up early. It is race morning very soon.

For my friend Isabel