Hidden Threads: The Spaces in Between
To truly understand the natural world, we must include the negative spaces we have so often overlooked
By Zachary Shore
This article is the third in a three-part series that examines the surprising, often overlooked phenomena that help explain how the natural world works. The series brings together an array of recent discoveries across the animal and plant kingdoms, showing how deeply, and unexpectedly, life is intertwined. The first piece in the series can be found here, and the second is here.
The idea that a hidden system within the body, possibly constituting an organ itself, could have existed without detection for millennia is shocking. Humans have engaged in dissection since ancient times. Since the invention of the microscope in the early 1600s, scientists have been scrutinizing specimens intently. We thought we had a fairly thorough inventory of the body’s parts. Or that’s how it seemed, until just nine years ago.
In 2015, two doctors, David Carr-Locke and Petros Benias, were examining a patient’s bile duct using a new tool called confocal laser endomicroscopy. While reviewing their results, they noticed some unfamiliar spaces that did not resemble anything in an anatomy textbook. They shared their findings with Dr. Neil Theise, a professor of pathology at New York University, who confirmed that they were indeed looking at something new.
Dubbed the “interstitium,” this series of dense tissues and fluid-filled cavities, made primarily of collagen, seems to extend throughout the body. Although research is still in the early stages, the system appears to be so vast that it might qualify as our largest organ, if indeed it’s an organ at all. Interstitium means literally the space in between. It defied discovery for exactly the reason to which the anatomist Thomas Myers had alluded nearly 25 years ago. Myers wrote that our whole understanding of human anatomy emerged from the butcher’s tools, later the scalpel and now the laser. He argued that our tools necessarily led to an emphasis on cutting, dividing and ramifying of the body.
At least in the case of the interstitium, Myers seems prescient. We missed it because our tools led us to believe that they could reveal all there was to find. But the interstitium is comprised of sacks of fluid, which cannot be seen once the body is sliced and diced and laid out on slides for viewing under the microscope. Cutting and treating with chemicals causes the cavities to collapse and the fluids they contain to drain away. The connective channel we are calling the interstitium can only be seen “in vivo,” inside a living person. In other words, it could only be found by looking at the body in a new and different way. That is exactly what Ida Rolf, Thomas Myers and Gil Hedley—the anatomists I discussed in part two of this series—all had to do as well; they had to consider the body in ways different from the standard view offered by modern Western medicine. They had to look where others had not.
A Challenge to Modern Medicine
Because the interstitium transports material, it could have implications for the treatment of certain cancers and the way they spread. It also suggests that the ties that bind us run wide and deep. This is a lesson that doctors in particular need to internalize. Their patients’ health depends on it, as Dr. Cynthia Li learned at a visceral level.
After Li gave birth to her first child, she began experiencing a wide range of strange symptoms: extreme lethargy, hypersensitivity to sounds and visual stimuli and pains throughout her body that seldom ceased. Though diagnosed with hypothyroidism, she found that no standard treatments offered any relief. She felt especially frustrated because she was a practicing physician, an internist who had never known severe, chronic illness herself. Being trained in Western medical practices, Li almost instinctively looked askance at alternative methods, especially ones that simply sounded “woo-woo.” But after several years of being mostly bedridden, unable to work and struggling to raise two children while maintaining her marriage, Li finally opened herself to trying anything within reason, from acupuncture to osteopathy and much more. To her amazement, several modalities helped her to finally “get off the couch,” as she put it in her memoir about this experience. Today, she has her own practice of integrative medicine, a field that combines Western medical techniques with nontraditional, alternative methods.
One of the early steps in Li’s healing process came when she explored the Japanese concept of “ma,” meaning the in-between spaces. Think of the emptiness between the branches in a Japanese floral arrangement, or the silence between the notes of a musical score. Ma incorporates the negative spaces in art, music, architecture and more, seeing them as essential to design. In Li’s case, fixating on those moments when she was not in pain, which were ample but were being drowned out by the intensely painful times, enabled a change in her approach to illness. This led her to consider some of the spaces that her Western training had underemphasized, such as gut health, environmental toxins and emotional state.
Now when Li examines patients, never for just 15 minutes but often for an hour-long session, she integrates all that she has learned from alternative practices with her traditional medical school training in order to see her patient as a whole being, not merely as an assemblage of parts with distinct, localized dysfunctions. Li is part of a small but ardent group of doctors seeking genuine alternatives to the standard Western medical model, which they view as inadequate to supporting true health. What makes integrative medicine both so challenging and so vital is that it is all about examining the complex connections between the body, the mind, the community and the environment. Its practitioners believe those connections are crucial to address.
The benefits of conventional Western medical practices have been extraordinary. No sensible person could deny the countless effective treatments they have produced. That said, the techniques of Western medicine are largely limited to the scalpel and the pill. We concentrate largely on treatments; far less on cures. Perhaps it’s time to expand our repertoire of tools in search of holistic solutions to health. In the process, we may need to look for connections in places we seldom expect.
Categorical Confusion
It is facile to declare that everything is connected. Platitudes cannot provide insights. We simply need to acknowledge that we have overlooked, and at times ignored completely, crucial links within complex systems, be they among animals, plants or humans. Only in recent decades are we paying more attention to the ways in which parts within a system communicate. Where there are connections, there is communication: signals, information or material being sent and received. But why, in an information age, have we been so slow to detect and understand connections and communications in the natural world?
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jason Roberts has offered us one possible explanation. In “Every Living Thing,” Roberts masterfully recounts the rivalry between two 18th-century European botanists. Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon each set out to categorize plants, animals and minerals, but by dramatically divergent means. Linnaeus sought to reduce every species into its distinctive component parts. In contrast, Buffon believed that the uniqueness of each individual creature limits our ability to make sweeping declarations about the nature of living things.
Linnaeus, as Roberts depicts him, was a self-promoting Swedish professor whose “Systema Naturae” provided the basis for modern taxonomy. His categorizations, however, often veered into the imaginative, and his convictions sometimes stretched credulity. He insisted that washing one’s hair caused epilepsy, that rubbing aquavit (a Scandinavian spirit) onto a puppy could prevent it from growing and that swallows spent the winter at the bottom of frozen lakes.
Linnaeus’ rival, Buffon, head of France’s national botanic gardens, was an aristocrat who inherited the equivalent of $30 million. He used his wealth in part to establish a private forest of diverse trees, simply to observe the results over decades. As Roberts puts it, Buffon saw the forest not as a collection of trees, but rather as an ecosystem. He understood that different thickets of trees could affect their growth. He noticed how the birds were essential for scattering seeds. He grasped that even the field mice played a role on the earthen floor. He understood the relational aspects of all parts to the whole. In short, he recognized the interconnectedness of the forest. And from that perspective, Buffon developed his ideas of nature as a connected web of life.
During his lifetime, Buffon became the most read author of nonfiction in France. When he died, he was venerated as one of the four greatest lights of his age, the other three being Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire. Linnaeus died a far less vaunted figure. And yet, when the French Revolution came, Buffon’s aristocratic lineage made his ideas unpalatable. His great works fell out of fashion, allowing Linnaeus’ views ultimately to take hold. If Roberts is right, Linnaeus’ long shadow obscured nature’s complex ties from view.
Women, Science and a Holistic View
Could Linnaeus’ shadow truly bear the full blame for our slowness to perceive connections? If it were as simple as an Eastern versus Western worldview—one holistic, the other mechanistic; one seeing entities as whole units, the other peering at subdivided parts—then we could have expected breakthroughs in elephant communications, mycorrhizal networks and so on to have originated with scientists in Asia. But instead, it was Western scientists who made these discoveries. We also cannot blame the lack of technology. Modern science did not require sophisticated equipment for many of these advances. In some cases, new tools helped, as with the interstitium. But other discoveries simply required fresh ways of thinking.
One plausible reason for our slowness in spotting links might have to do with the dearth of young women scientists. Many breakthroughs in connections have come from young women. The female scientists I discussed earlier in this series—Ida Rolf, the anatomist and inventor of Rolfing; Suzanne Simard, coiner of the “mother tree” concept; Erica McCormick, who helped discover that trees draw water from rocks, not just soil; and Caitlin O’Connell, who showed that elephants communicate through vibrations in the earth—all approached their work by asking how their subjects might be connected in less obvious ways.
Recently, a young Ph.D. student at M.I.T., Pratyusha Sharma, and her team of researchers have taken an entirely different approach to decoding whale songs. Where marine biologists had previously seen only 21 types of sperm whale clicking patterns, which scientists call codas, Sharma visualized the data differently. In the process, she found that the codas contained variations not previously recognized. From this perspective, she identified 156 distinct whale songs. Suddenly, there is the possibility that whales have something akin to language.
The truth may, of course, not be as stunning as this. Perhaps the clicking sounds sperm whales make are merely a form of echolocation, as they spend long periods in the dark sea depths. But wherever the evidence ultimately leads, Sharma is one more example of a young woman seeing connections and communications in new ways. If there is any significance to gender and youth in this respect, then it is not only a further argument to encourage young women to enter the sciences; it is also a sign that we should be training young men to grow more conscious of connections.
But there is another possible explanation for why these findings took so long to emerge. We live in a highly visual world. Our attention is overwhelmingly devoted to what we can readily see. We focus on the images directly before us. Yet many alternative ways of thinking require exploration of the negative spaces, the places we seldom look, and engagement with senses we use too little. We had to listen for the sounds of plants. We had to feel the tremors of elephant hooves across the earth. We had to peer beneath the ground and into the body in search of less obvious connections. We had to recognize the spaces inside and in between. The Japanese use the concept of ma mainly in relation to art, but maybe we need more ma in science. If we would shift more of our attention to the spaces in between, maybe it would bring us closer to spotting the less apparent links existing all around us. And if we have missed all these crucial connections until now, shouldn’t we be asking what other ties remain to be found? Perhaps it’s time to close our eyes and wonder.
Zachary Shore is a professor of history at the Naval Postgraduate School, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies and a National Security Visiting Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of “This Is Not Who We Are: America’s Struggle Between Vengeance and Virtue” (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The views expressed are those of the author alone and do not represent those of the Naval Postgraduate School, the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.