WORMHOLES
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Hugest Black Hole Ever Discovered
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October 2007 Archives
The Psychic Sasquatch
Archived From October 21, 2007 (2) Comments
Occasionally, I day-trip from the borders of legitimate science and into the boundless holiday that is the esoteric. I don't know exactly why I take such pleasure in pseudo-science; perhaps it is to keep my work safe from those who might portend I am out of my league with the real stuff.
The lush, seemingly benign woods of the Pacific Northwest abound with myths, quasi-tragic histories, tucked-away lichen, hallucinogenic mushrooms, endangered animals, and wild men. They also set an unwitting and shadowy stage, perhaps appropriately, for one of the great dramas of the esoteric: Bigfoot.
With the appearance of a shaky 24 feet of filmstrip in 1967, Bigfoot stepped into the limelight, out from centuries of Native American myth, unsubstantiated yarns, and mysterious footprints. Ever since this footage -- the so-called "Patterson-Gimlin Film" -- the Bigfoot has fiercely entertained, spooked, and howled through popular consciousness, becoming as potent an icon of the region as the spotted owl -- or grunge music, for that matter.
There are those, however, who take the beast very seriously. They claim that until the Patterson-Gimlin film is satisfactorily debunked, or the hundreds of other sightings they have under their belts reasonably explained, then they're going to keep conducting the earnest field work that is the backbone of organizations such as the BFRO (Bigfoot Research Organization). To these people, the mainstream conception of the Sasquatch as being folklore or farce is a source of great and indignant offense, and it is their modus operandi to prove all the rest of us wrong with diligent scientific research of their golden calf of a cryptid, the Bigfoot.
To those who believe in him, the Bigfoot is a completely real, albeit elusive creature of unknown survival economy, native to the woods of Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, and Western Canada. He is six and a half to eight feet tall, covered in reddish-brown or black hair, with large, human-like feet and a significantly foul odor.
But this is not the beast I am interested in.
No, there exists a stranger, even more profoundly conspiracist conception of the Bigfoot: the psychic Sasquatch, a paranormal, inter-dimensional creature. As you might imagine, this causes a huge rift within the already fractured Bigfoot (BF) community. Those who support the thesis of a paranormal Bigfoot are profoundly marginalized, barred from discourse, and generally scorned in much the same way that the non-Bigfoot community -- i.e. the scientific mainstream, popular consciousness, you know, normal people -- scoffs at the very existence of a hairy woodland ape.
This begs the question, of course: can we imagine that an as-yet-unknown normality is scoffing at us? Above all, it's simply a question of perspective, of the tools and methodologies available to you. Can the normal be more normal? The crazy, crazier?
Before we delve too deeply into the philosophical nuances raised by this divided community, we should perhaps discuss the psychic Sasquatch. There are several models, of course, but they all share some central precepts: the Bigfoot is of greater-than-human intelligence and endowed with an acute psychic ability. He is elusive, not because of his scarcity or well-documented ability to hide away in the woods: he is elusive because he has the capacity to dematerialize, to pass through wormholes from this dimension to any other, parallel dimension. Furthermore, and perhaps most outrageously, he is in cahoots with friendly extraterrestrials, or UFOs. The UFOs serve as scouts, protecting the interdimensional Bigfoot from leering human eyes.
Furthermore, according to the telepathic field work conducted by one of the theory's most vocal proponents, Jack "Kewaunee" Lapseritis, the Bigfoot race was brought to Earth ("seeded") by their friends, the Star People, long before we ever came around. It's beyond amazing: to explain the belief in something as dubious and marginal as the Bigfoot, Lapseritis and his colleagues port in something even more highly-contested and generally laughed-off: UFOs.
The evidence for these claims? Telepathic communications, alleged hundreds of joint Bigfoot-UFO sightings going back over a hundred years, and, surprisingly, theoretical physics. According to paranormal Bigfoot researcher Jon-Erik Beckjord, perhaps the most colorful character in the history of the Internet, the work of respected physicists like Dr. Michio Kachu and Albert Einstein can be used quite convincingly to explain the Bigfoot's tendency to slip from one dimension to another, with or without the help of his extra-terrestrial buddies.
When scientists talk about the potential for long-distance space travel in our future, or when they discuss the remote possibility of alien life visiting Earth, they often throw around the concept of wormholes. A purely theoretical construct gleefully exploited in science-fiction films, a Schwarzschild wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen bridge, is a hypothetical connection between widely separated regions of space-time. It's complicated: in 1962, John A. Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable, and that it will pinch off instantly as soon as it forms, preventing even light from making it through. However, if we postulate that a Schwarzschild wormhole could be held open by a grip of exotic matter (another theoretical construct), then a traversable wormhole is possible, allowing faster-than-light travel through space-time. Theoretically, then, ships could cross great distances across universes in such a way. I hesitate to say UFOs because it instantly demotes me to a different level, but that's the idea.
So, quoth Beckjord, "If UFOs can do this, why not people, missing ships and planes, and hairy humanoids?" Taking the concept to town, Beckjord proposes that there are thousands, even millions, of wormholes "twisting and crackling all over the Earth, sending and receiving, taking and returning, over and over." In this worldview, wormholes shuffle Bigfoots from one continent to another (which explains the existence of the Yeti, Yowie, Bunyip, Skunk Ape, and the Chinese Yeren), shoot people through time and space, account for the lost sock phenomenon, and have something to do with both orgasms and the Satori, or Zen state.
I'm fascinated by how fervently the torch of "science" is burned by people whose position in relation to the scientific mainstream is way off the map. To people like Beckjord, particularly, science is an absolute, profound practice, one which is abused by those who wield its power most. It's incredible how even the most tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist will always return to the symbolic value of science, insisting that their ideas are scientifically proven, valid, theoretically plausible according to some incredibly advanced branch of physics of which they have no understanding. How did science garner this cultural position as the ultimate justifier of reality?
What if science and the "paranormal" could sit side by side in the pantheon of ideas? After all, that prefix, "para," which has come to designate objects derivative of that denoted by the base word (and hence abnormal or defective: parody, paranoia), originally denoted, too, a notion of side-by-sideness (“at or to one side of, beside, side by side”) that we can still see in words like parallel and paragraph.
Perhaps cryptozoology.com's primer on the Sasquatch put it best: "If we hope for mainstream scientists to keep an open mind, we must lead by example, and not waste time and energy that would be better spent searching for evidence fighting amongst ourselves. "
5:50 PM | Permalink | (2) Comments
Interview: Oliver Sacks
Archived From October 17, 2007 (1) Comments
Dr. Oliver Sacks is a rare bird in the world of medicine: not only is he one the country's top neurologists, but he also has a knack for weaving clinical profiles of his most exceptional patients into lovely, thoughtful books that open up the complex workings of our minds to the peering eyes of layfolk. His charm has much to do with the fact that he's the embodiment of a long-musty archetype of scientist: blustery, with a lisp, brilliant, and eccentric, a member of the American Fern Society, and fascinated with fluorescent minerals.
His latest book, Musicophilia, tackles our intimate mental connection to all things musical, dallying in the experiences of rhythymically-inclined Parkinson's patients and virtuosic amnesiacs, to name a few.
Thanks to the Willamette Week, and as a preface to his Portland lecture next week, I had a chance to chat with Dr. Sacks on the phone -- the result was a sincere, often suprising mish-mash of observations about iPods, pots and pans, and, of course, the fascinatingly complex relationship between our minds and music.
Universe: The New York Times famously called you the "poet laureate of medicine." Are your books science or literature?
Oliver Sacks: For me, an interest in science is inseparable from an interest in the lives of scientists, and the lives of ideas, as well as in storytelling. In medicine, of course, narratives are essential: the patient tells you what's going on, and you try to match this with stories heard from other patients. I love to give personal accounts, to try and enter people's experiences and describe them, and I don't think there should be a space between literature and the sciences. I think that the sciences should be literate, and that their function is not only exposition, but storytelling. Certainly for myself, science has to be combined with stories -- but also stories have to be combined with science. Although I may tell a story of someone who has musical hallucinations, or cannot tell one tune from another, I also want to know what goes on in their brain, and why this is the case. In a way, these are somewhat like detective stories.
Universe: Do you think that your fascination with music has something to do with the fact that it's a sort of bridge between the arts and the sciences?
Oliver Sacks: I think probably that's one of the things which attracts me to music, yes.
Universe: You often write about aphasic patients, people who can no longer speak. I'm interested in the fact the ability to sing words isn't affected. What is the difference -- isn't speech just a kind of rhythmic sing-song?
Oliver Sacks: A great deal of the brain is involved in the perception and memory of music, much more than is involved with language; as people lose language and become aphasic, they're often able to respond to music and to sing, sometimes even to sing lyrics, to retain language if it's embedded in a song. The brain's ability to hold musical patterns is almost indestructible. It's amazing to see someone with Alzheimer's disease, how music can still be there.
Universe: Is all music the same in this regard? Does some music have less staying power?
Oliver Sacks: I think the music which is called to one, the music which has interested one, I think especially the music which one has been exposed to in one's young years, tends to be the mostly strongly embedded in the brain. If one gets musical hallucinations -- which hopefully, one won't, although they're rather common -- these always tend to be of music which was acquired fairly early in life.
Universe: Does music have some sort of evolutionary advantage for us? How could it come about?
Oliver Sacks: Well, people have different opinions there. Darwin was very interested in music and thought that music preceded speech, that it was part of courtship and wooing. Other people, like Steven Pinker, feel that music is incidental. He speaks of it as "musical cheesecake," as if it's a luxury, or a bonus, or trivial. But it's striking that music is central in every culture to known to us, that we find musical instruments going back to 50,000 BC. You find dance, you find song, the religious use of music, the martial use of music, the social use of music, and bonding with music in every culture.
To claim an independent evolutionary origin from music, you would have to look for some aspect of music which isn't present in speech. The aspect which stands out is rhythm, and the particular fact that we respond to rhythm by keeping in time, by moving our heads. One cannot not respond to music: even if you don't make any external movement, the motor parts of the brain respond to rhythm. This appears spontaneously in every child, but you cannot train a chimpanzee, or a bird, or a whale, or an elephant, to keep synchronized time to a rhythm. This is a specifically human attribute which doesn't have an analogue in speech -- I mean, speech doesn't have the regular pulse of music. So one would suspect that the synchronization with rhythm has evolved independently in human beings, and it's been preserved because it is a reliable evolutionary advantage. For example, bonding, doing things together, and synchronizing social groups. One can only hypothesize, but the rhythmic power of music might be a point at which to start. But of course, we have skeletons, but we don't know what was going on with society and music half a million years ago.
Universe: What is your opinion of people who claim to have no interest in music? Do they have some kind of developmental problem?
Oliver Sacks: Well, some of them, and perhaps they have different bases. There are some people who don't appear to recognize musical patterns, who can't clearly tell when one note is higher than another, who can't recognize any tune -- this is fairly rare, in that degree. Other people can recognize music perfectly well, but it doesn't get them emotionally. Obviously, people vary a good deal here, but if someone is not affected that much by music, well, then they can live a perfectly full life with other things.
You know, I have one patient, a very nice, intelligent woman from the Bronx, who has a strange congenital amusia. Even when she was a child -- she came from a rather musical family -- she just could not distinguish one tune from another. She says that she used to be wistful; she would see that other people were greatly affected by music, but for her it was unintelligible, sometimes excruciating. For her, what people call music was like hearing pots and pans thrown around in the kitchen.
Universe: Whoa, are her other senses more developed?
Oliver Sacks: Yeah! Interestingly, this doesn't affect her perception or appreciation of language. She likes going to the theater, she likes poetry, she likes visual art, and she spent a lifetime trying to enjoy music. When her boyfriends, and then her husband, would take her to concerts, she would dutifully obey. Finally, she read an article which described this condition, and she got investigative. She was told that this was actually a neurological condition, and that if her husband asked her to come to a concert, she should say, "You go, but I'm going to go to a film instead." She only wishes she'd been given this advice when she was seven, and not seventy.
Universe: Speaking of music getting us emotionally, why do minor and major chords affect us so differently? Is it a biological thing or a cultural construct?
Oliver Sacks: Well, it certainly seems to us that things in a minor key are rather sad -- the slow movements in Mozart symphonies and Mozart concertias are most often in a minor key, and are sad -- but this is not always the case. If you go back seven or eight centuries, sometimes you find that major keys are used for sadness and minor keys for exuberance. So it's probably a cultural thing. Some things are built in biologically, though: the perception of octaves, things like that, and obviously music which is fast may be seen as animated, and music which is slow has a funereal quality. Sometimes when if we listen to music from another culture -- Hindu music or Chinese music -- we may not know how to respond, emotionally.
Universe: I heard growing up that kids who took music lessons ended up being better at mathematics. Is there any truth to that?
Oliver Sacks: Oh, I don't know, the so-called "Mozart effect" or whatever? Certainly, intensive musical training develops various parts of the brain to deal with music, and there's probably some bonus effect on other skills.
Universe: So it has nothing to do with the underlying structure of music?
Oliver Sacks: No, it doesn't, and simply listening to music doesn't do this. I mean, one is speaking of fairly intensive lessons or training...but then again, there are lots of great musicians who are absolute dunces mathematically, and vice-versa. There's no guarantee here.
Universe: What kind of music are you listening to these days?
Oliver Sacks: Well, it sort of depends on my mood. I sometimes like rather rousing music when I wake up, to get me up, and there's music which calms, and music which consoles...but since you ask, I happen to have here, let me look at the tape, I have some Brahms concertos here, which for some reason I always seem to be listening to. I don't use an iPod.
Universe: You don't?
Oliver Sacks: No, I'm actually a little frightened of iPods because I think that not only can you be given music all the while, but you can use it to ward yourself of from your environment. You can have it too loud, I think it can make you functionally deaf. I don't know how it is in Portland, but New York is full of people who are either on cell phone or iPods -- they walk in front of cars, and they're sort of like zombies.
Universe: Do you think it's music or the device which turns them into zombies?
Oliver Sacks: Well, perhaps they go together. There's the self-contained machine, the cell phone syndrome, but if music at great intensity is being piped into your head all the while...I think it can be wonderful in a way, but slightly dangerous.
12:00 PM | Permalink | (1) Comments