The Terrors of Sleep Paralysis

Imagine living in medieval times, when weird and unexplained phenomena, especially those related to strange subjective experiences (such as feeling that you're being suffocated by demons in your sleep), were seen as indications and evidence of malevolent spiritual forces at work. In the famous Bull of 1484, for instance, Pope Innocent VIII (don't you love the irony of these names?) declared that:

members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi and succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations, charms and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the births of women [among many other evil things].

As Carl Sagan recounts in his book, The Demon Haunted World, "with this Bull, Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture, and execution of countless 'witches' all over Europe." This would lead to the publication of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (the "Hammer of Witches"), one of the most vile, irrational, fearsome and cruel documents in all of human history. There's a chance even Hitler might have shuddered at it... Yay religion!?

Fortunately, and as usual, science has helped to shed some light on this otherwise dark and obscure phenomenon, saving people from medieval persecution and from forced mental institutionalization by discovering some of the underlying mechanisms at work, as well as their ubiquity because, believe it or not, it happens to most of us...

If you know someone whose life has been affected by the fear that they are being visited by probing aliens or haunted by evil spirits in the middle of the night, you might want to show them this video and assuage those feelings of fear and anguish...

And in case you are not aware of the distinction between an incubus and a succubus, and assuming these demons were not gay, incubi were 'seducers' of women, while succubi were 'seducers' of men, although if they're having their way with you while you're paralyzed, I'm not sure that would really count as 'seduction'...

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Shooting an AK-47 Underwater

Here in the US, we seem to be obsessed with guns, with our right to own them, and with the ridiculous fear that the government is going to try to take them away from us. Predictably, the people who are most vociferous on the issue are not exactly luminaries and scholars with a solid understanding of constitutional law and jurisprudence, which is really putting it mildly and generously...

But since this is a blog dedicated (for the most part) to sharing education and interesting ideas, why don't we take this obsession with guns to watch someone shoot an AK-47 underwater and, most importantly, to learn some fascinating principles of physics to understand what it is that we have just seen?

Explosions and physics... awesome!

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John Searle - Our Shared Condition: Consciousness

Studying consciousness is notoriously difficult, and until only the last couple of decades, very few intellectuals (apart from philosophers and psychologists) dared to even think about how to try to understand it. But with the rise of new disciplines and technologies, consciousness is starting to become the hot topic among academics. One of the problems, however, is that we don't yet quite have a theory about what consciousness is, and without an answer to that question, it's not always clear what disciplines and methods are most appropriate to use to study it.

In the following TEDTalk presentation, philosopher of mind John Searle (famous among other things for his Chinese room thought experiment) makes the case for studying consciousness, and for his own understanding, not so much of what consciousness is, but of how to approach the question. In the process, he shoots down some of the most popular objections to try to study consciousness scientifically, arguing that regardless of its ultimate ontological status, it's a biological process with multiple levels of description.

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Brian Cox - Wonders of Life - Expanding Universe

Our knowledge of the world comes from our experience of the world. And our experience is based on our sensory apparatus, but how do our senses work? What is it about the physical laws of the universe that make it possible for creatures like us to perceive anything at all?

In the following documentary, Brian Cox visits some interesting animals in the US (giant catfish, glowing scorpions, mantis shrimp and octopi, among others) to explore and understand how they, and we, are able to create mental representations of our environment through taste (chemicals), sound (air waves) and vision (light), and how it is that the gradual process of evolution through natural selection has slowly sculpted the amazing machinery of perception, by taking fish jaws, for instance, and slowly turned them into the ear bones that make hearing possible for you and me...

To catch that catfish, he didn't have to enlist the help of a scientist... he could have just told a redneck to go noodling :)

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Flatland - Exploring Other Dimensions

Plato's myth of the cave is an allegory that tries to make the point that there may be more to reality than meets the eye, that our experience is simply of a very limited and lowly aspect of reality. Given the knowledge and technology of the time, Plato's use of puppets and shadows in his ancient writing is brilliant in conveying the difference between the real and the apparent, but in the 1800's, Edwin Abbott took this idea much further, and in a way more rigorously and convincingly, as he was able to tell it through a creative exploration of mathematical space:

Compare the experience of a creature from three-dimensional space against one from a two-dimensional world. Easy, and completely reasonable to understand why the two-dimensional figure was skeptical of "more" dimensions, even if it was wrong, right? Well, apply the same reasoning to the difference between four-dimensional space and the three-dimensional space we're all used to. Wouldn't the reasoning you applied in the first case also apply to this one? And just like that time we were introduced to these ideas by the irreplaceable Carl Sagan, when he tried to show us the projection of a tesseract, here's a fun little animation to inspire your imagination and help you explore the beauty of mathematical space that can be understood by the mind even if it cannot be always perceived by the senses :)

Now, are there 'really' more dimensions than the three spatial ones we're used to or is this just a fancy mathematical abstraction? That's a topic for another discussion :p

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Open Access Explained, PhD Comics Style

As biological creatures, we are very adaptable. If we notice that some background condition remains relatively stable, we tend to ignore it after a while. On the one hand, this makes perfect sense, since we can't afford to devote all of our energy and attention resources to things that are unlikely to affect us in sudden ways. On the other hand, this makes us very susceptible to the status quo bias (failing to recognize better alternatives; failing to even acknowledge that there could be potentially better methods; perpetuating the current system as the solution to a problem that we often don't realize is the result of the very same system we use to 'fix' it; and even actively working against new possibilities, even while being fully cognizant of the problems and negative consequences associated with the systems currently implemented).

This problem is ubiquitous, and there are entire industries built upon the simple and great idea that for any given situation, there are probably better solutions than those that are currently being implemented. Unfortunately, some of these same industries, once they acquire a certain level of success and financial power, tend to re-affirm their own system instead of the original idea of constantly improving things. And if they have enough power and influence, they can actually become an impediment to improved efficiency. Professional academic journals, for all the wonderful work they do, have also fallen into this self-reinforcing pattern where their financial success has replaced the original idea for which they were created, and maybe it's time we start a dialogue to figure out how to make everyone better off...

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Louis CK - If God Came Back...

After God created the heavens and the earth, he thought to himself:

Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Traditionally, this has been understood to mean that God created everything for the benefit of humans, and at the expense of everything and everyone else. Quite convenient for us, but what if what has been translated as "dominion" (in the sense of ownership) should really have been more accurately translated as "stewardship" (in the sense of "look after this for me till I come back, and don't fuck it up in the meantime!")?

Comedian Louis CK has a few thoughts on the subject...

I bet God is wondering how successfully He managed to make us in His image :p

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