The Energy of Life: The Science of What Makes Our Minds and Bodies Work - Hardcover

Brown, Guy C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684862573 ISBN 13: 9780684862576

Publisher: Free Press, 2000

Synopsis

Explains how energy moves through the human body, its relationship to other cells, and the importance of maintaining a healthy diet and regular exercise.

About this title

About the Author

Guy Brown, Ph.D., is one of the world's leading experts on the emerging science of human bioenergetics. Winner of the inaugural Wellcome Trust Prize for popular science writing, he is a Royal Society Research Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at The University of Cambridge. He lives in Cambridge, England.

Reviews

On any given day, you may exhibit--or need, or want--"energy": the get-up-and-go that allows you to apply for a job, run down the street or just read this page. Your body also requires, and gets (by processing food and oxygen), "energy" in the sense that physicists use the word--what your brain needs in the form of glucose, and what microscopic bodies called mitochondria package as a chemical called ATP. Brown, a biochemist at Cambridge University, has written an accessible book about both kinds of energy and the links between them. He explains how energy circulates in the body at the molecular level and how it controls what goes on in organs and organisms. ATP, mitochondria and calcium ions go to work whenever you move a muscle. You and your cat and her fleas all have a "metabolic rate," the speed with which an organism uses energy: multiply metabolic rate by life span for an assortment of animals, and you'll discover that "the total amount of energy used in an average lifetime is roughly equal" among species--though human beings are an exception, living longer than we "should." The brain has its own systems by which energy and information circulate every minute and every day. After elucidating those systems' roles in sex and sleep, Brown concludes with a slightly platitudinous chapter on emotional energy and fatigue, recommending regular exercise and "attainable" mental goals. Some readers may object to Brown's rapid pace and detect a few oversimplifications; most, though, will welcome this knowledgeable introduction to "body energy and mind energy what it is, how we get it, and how we lose it again." (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Would you like to feel more energetic? Brown, a biochemistry professor at the University of Cambridge and winner of the 1997 Wellcome Trust Science Prize, reveals the secret after a discursive and occasionally repetitive survey of the thermodynamics, anatomy, and physiology of body and mind energy. Readers who turn immediately to the final chapter ("How To Get More Energy") may be sorely disappointed by what seems like little more than a collection of platitudes. Brown offers old-fashioned and unsurprising suggestions, such as exercise both the body and the brain, eat a nutritious diet, get enough sleep, maintain a positive attitude, and don't depend on quick fixes like sugary snacks or nicotine to work as energy boosters over the long term. As he makes plain in the rest of the book, however, this is sound advice, and there are good, scientifically supported reasons for following it. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
-Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: Energy Itself

I taught the science of body energy, or bioenergetics, at Cambridge University for many years before I realized that I did not understand what energy was. Tutorials (or supervisions, as they are called in Cambridge) are meant to be cozy but fiercely intellectual chats between a teacher and one or two students over tea and scones. However, teachers (called fellows in Cambridge) often rattle on without knowing what the hell they are talking about. And one fine day I discovered that was true of me and energy. Part of the problem with energy is that it is rather an abstract idea, so one answer to the question, "What is energy?" is, "A concept in the scientist's head." A more subtle problem is how the concept of energy has evolved historically, so that many layers of meaning, which are not always consistent, have been superimposed on the words and symbols. So take heart; if you do not at first understand the meaning of energy, it will not necessarily disqualify you from doing scientific research or teaching bioenergetics at Cambridge. In science as in life, you do not necessarily have to understand a concept in order to be able to use it. According to current scientific ideas, energy is not an invisible force field coursing through the body, moving arms and legs here and cooking up great thoughts in the brain, like some benign ghost dashing around pulling the levers of the body and mind. The modern idea of energy is rather like that of money. Money is a capacity to buy things. It comes in many forms -- coins, notes, checks, bank accounts, bonds, gold -- and it can be used to buy many sorts of things, such as hats, houses, and haircuts. Money allows the exchange of these things at a fixed rate; for example, I can exchange a fixed quantity of coins for one haircut. Now "energy" is a capacity for movement or change in a physical or biological system. It comes in many forms, such as chemical energy, electrical energy, or mechanical energy, and it can be used to "purchase" many forms of change, such as movement, chemical change, or heating. Energy quantifies the exchange between these things at a fixed rate; for example, a certain amount of heating requires the expenditure of a certain amount of chemical energy.

There is, however, one important difference between money and energy: money and monetary value are not exactly conserved. You may pay $200,000 for a house one year and sell it for $210,000 or $190,000 the next year without having done anything to the house, and the missing $10,000 does not suddenly appear or disappear from somewhere else in the economy. And you can burn a $10 bill, and the money simply disappears in smoke. Neither money nor monetary value is absolutely conserved; there is no equivalent in economics to the first law in thermodynamics. If there were, economics would be a lot easier, but we might also be a lot poorer. On the other hand, energy is strictly conserved; the first law of thermodynamics states that during any change of any sort, the total amount of energy in the universe stays the same. If you use 100 units of energy to raise a rock 100 feet in the air, when you come back a year later and lower the rock to the ground, 100 units of energy will be released. It may not be released in ways that you would want -- the energy may be released as heat, sound, or work, depending on how the rock is lowered -- but when you add up the energy released, the total will still be 100 units.

Money or monetary value is rather abstract since it can reside in very different things, such as coins or a bank account. Similarly, energy is rather abstract since it can reside in many different types of things, but is not those things; rather, energy is their capacity to produce movement or change. The energy is not something in addition to the things themselves; it is as if an accountant were looking at the situation and assessing the capacity for movement or change. If a rock is balanced at the edge of a chasm, someone might come along and work out that if the rock were to be tipped into the chasm, so much energy would be released as movement, noise, heat, on something else. Before the rock is moved, the energy does not reside in the rock or the chasm, any more than monetary value resides in coins or haircuts, because energy or monetary value is not a tenuous form of matter, but rather a way of quantifying the potential for change. Energy quantifies the capacity for movement or physical change in a situation.

Energy is like money in another way. Money does not determine how or when the money is to be spent; that is determined by the people spending it. Similarly, a rock balanced over a chasm may have a lot of energy, but this does not determine if or when the rock may fall. Rather, it determines whether the rock can fall. The presence of a million dollars does not determine how or when it will be spent, but it does mean that x number of houses, or y amount of strawberries, or z number of haircuts could be bought. Similarly, the presence of 1 million units of energy does not determine how or when the energy will be used, but it does mean that x amount of heat, or y amount of movement, or z amount of electricity could be produced.

The American physicist Richard Feynman warns us of the abstract nature of energy in his famous 1960s Lectures on Physics:

It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. However, there are formulas for calculating some numerical quantity....It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us mechanisms or reasons for the various formulas.

So energy is not a thing or a substance. We can calculate it, and use the numbers to predict things, but we have no idea what it is in itself. It seems to be just an abstract accounting concept like money, which quantifies the amount of movement that could be produced by a particular system. How boring! On the other hand, according to the rather abstract standards of physics, energy is perhaps the most fundamental property of the world. Energy is the one thing that remains constant (is conserved) through all change. Everything can be created from or dissolved into energy, including matter itself, as demonstrated by the explosion of an atom bomb and Albert Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2. According to this rather abstract scheme of things, then, energy is the ultimate substance and fabric of the world, from which all else evolves and into which all else ultimately dissolves.

But energy itself does not produce movement or change. So what does? According to Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), all movement or change is brought about by a force. In our everyday lives, we experience only two types of force: gravitational force and contact forces. The gravitational force pulls things toward the center of the earth and causes all heavenly (and not so heavenly) bodies to attract each other. Contact forces occur when we push or pull something -- when I lift a chair, when a car hits a lamppost, or when a volcano explodes. The gravitational force occurs because every bit of matter is attracted to every other bit, causing them to accelerate toward each other. All the contact forces are actually different manifestations of one immensely powerful force: the electric force. The electric force is the force of attraction or repulsion between all charged bits of matter. The gravitational force and the electric force account for virtually all movement and change in our universe. There are two other forces known: the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, but their range of action is so small that they can be observed only by breaking open the nucleus inside an atom. Thus, these nuclear forc

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684862573
• ISBN 13: 9780684862576
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 267