Free I Thought You Were Dead by Pete Nelson Page B

University in Australia using brain-scanning technology to observe activation in the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex or pain center, human subjects confronting loneliness or heartache resulting from being excluded from a social group or network experienced pain as real as if their skin were being burned. In other words, the need to belong to a group or to be connected to someone else is fundamental to our survival, so that it is the very pain of heartache that keeps us coming back for more, to make the pain go away.
    At the same time, the endorphins released when we’re in love, affecting the pleasure centers in the brain, are known to lower our IQs and inhibit long-term objective memory. Thus we are hardwired to fuck up again and again. Species known to aggregate in social groupings, canids or ungulates, for example, show similar releases of pleasure-giving hormones — endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin, and the like — when aggregated, and similar activities in the anterior cingulate cortex during periods of isolation orseparation. Members of the canid species, including dogs and wolves, are second in this regard only to humans. Social animals also tend to exhibit greater temerity and are built more for endurance than nonaggregate species. Dogs and wolves, for example, are believed to have the most efficient cardiovascular systems of all mammals. Wolves regularly hunt down prey faster and stronger than they are simply by outlasting them over great distances, often running up steep hills through heavy snows without tiring. Canadian researchers studying sled dogs attached heart monitors to a team of malamutes and discovered that sled dogs running at top speed could sustain heart rates exceeding 300 beats per minute for hours, a rate once believed possible only in shrews. This does not come as news to dog owners, who already know that no animal has a heart quite like a dog’s. Social animals therefore have high tolerances for both pleasure and pain and can abide fluctuations between the two for long periods of time.
    â€” Paul Gustavson,
Nature for Morons

5
Exile in Beersville
    P emmican!” Stella said. “My favorite. Thank you.”
    He’d given her the present he’d brought her. The pickin’s for dogs at the Minnesota-themed gift shop at the airport were beyond slim. Every time he flew home, he brought Stella back a bag of Chippewa pemmican, meat cut in strips and dried Native American–style. He’d brought her Slim Jims once but they hadn’t agreed with her. He’d remembered at the last minute to pick up a gift for Tamsen too, rushing through the airport gift shop with five minutes to spare before his flight boarded. Everything on the shelves screamed “I meant to get you a real gift but actually I forgot until I got to the airport.” He had to choose between a ceramic loon, a bottle of maple syrup (but bringing maple syrup home to New England was like carrying coal to Newcastle), a Kirby Puckett bobble-head doll, or a snow globe with Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox inside. He’d settled on the snow globe as having the highest kitsch value.
    He showed Stella the snow globe, turning it upside down, then righting it.
    â€œThat’s lovely,” she said. “How does it do that?”
    â€œThere’s water inside,” he told her.
    â€œWhy doesn’t the snow melt?”
    â€œIt’s plastic or something,” he said.
    â€œCan I have my pemmican now?”
    â€œLet’s bring it to the Bay State,” he told her. “I’m meeting Tamsen there. You can eat it in the doorway. Just don’t let people see or everybody is going to want some.”
    The Bay State Hotel bar was listed in the American Registry of Seedy Dumps, which gave it five stars for having everything a true derelict might want — dollar beers and two-dollar whiskeys, skanky urinals and wet bathroom floors breeding all kinds of molds and fungi, dim