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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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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Einstein Mask Optical Illusion

In our everyday experience, it seems as though perception is simply a matter of information hitting your sense organs and going straight to our brain. In reality, however, perception turns out to be an incredibly sophisticated and complex concatenation of various brain modules actively trying to interpret and synthesize the disparate information sent by the different senses. The reason perception may seem to be a passive phenomenon is that it's effortless, but that doesn't mean that there's not a hell of a lot of stuff going on in the brain. It just means that our brains have evolved to do all this amazing work without making us consciously aware of what it's doing.

But how do we know that perception is an active process of interpretation, synthesis and recognition? Well, a great place to start would be the lessons we get from the study of optical illusions, such as the following spooky Einstein illusion because even if you understand why you experience the illusion, you can't not experience it. Feel your brain fooling you:

For a great introduction to perception and optical illusions, check out Beau Lotto's TEDTalk.

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Test Your Awareness : Whodunnit? And Look Out for Bikers!

Summer is here, and those of us who are sick of driving and public transportation, or just environmentally or health conscious, are ditching conventional means of commuting and resorting to biking instead.

And as the number of bikers is increasing, tension between drivers, pedestrians and bikers seems to be on the rise, so the first thing I would recommend is that we all chill down a little and become more considerate of all our fellow commuters, no matter how they commute.

And especially for those who drive cars (aka, metal death machines), please be aware that, as human beings, you have physical and cognitive blind spots, and that no matter how good a driver you are, any sudden maneuver may result in a collision that may seriously hurt (or possibly even kill) those of us who are trying to reduce our CO2 footprint by riding bikes.

Don't believe that you might miss something that's right in front of your eyes? Well, you could always check out the invisible gorilla test to see how fallible human attention is, or you could try to solve the crime below, and see how your own observational skills stack up:

Did you pass with flying colors? I didn't think so. So, please, drive with caution, respect traffic rules, be courteous and remember that getting to your destination a minute later is totally worth not living with the guilt of having killed someone because you got impatient and rushed into a thoughtless decision.

In other words, I'm concerned for my life. Don't run me over!!! :)

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The Secret You

What does it mean to be you? How is it that the physical matter making up the many neurons in your brain somehow produce your subjective, conscious experience? Are your neurons themselves conscious? While we're at it, what exactly is consciousness? Where does your sense of self come from? Do you actually have a self? Can you be made to experience your self from outside your body? Can your consciousness be transferred to an inanimate object, or to someone else's body? If you are your consciousness somehow, do you get to consciously make your own choices, or are these determined by factors over which you have no conscious awareness and control?

Those are just some of the fascinating questions that Marcus du Sautoy explores in the following mind-bending documentary that gets right to the intersection of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience:

For more, check out the Brainspotting tag.

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The Cyclotrope

Sorry about the recent lack of entries, but I've been buried grading finals and term papers. Now, while I continue the grueling ritual of reading students' work, I thought I'd share something to mess with your noodle...

The cyclotrope is a cycle of sequential images spun at a particular speed such that the frame rate of the camera filming it produces the illusion of spirits and objects coming to life. The background music makes me think cartoonish Native Americans...

You know what I'm talking about, right?

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Pendulum Waves

Pendulums have been around for a very long time, at least since the 1st century, when the Chinese polymath Zhang Heng used one to build what is widely considered to be the very first seismometer in history.

The rigorous and scientific study of the properties of pendulums, however, didn't start until the 17th century, when Galileo took up the question. Undeniably, Galileo did some great and unprecedented work, but one can't help but wonder how much easier and productive his time could have been if he had thought up of this beautiful little experiment (without just becoming mesmerized by the optical illusion created by it):

And here is another beautiful version of the same basic idea.

And if you're curious about how seismometers, including Zhang Hen's, work, listen to this:

And if you want more on pendulums, I'll post an awesome entry on Foucault's pendulum soon. Stay tuned.
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Derren Brown - Miracles for Sale

It's hard to come up with many examples of practices more cruel and exploitative than faith healing because its practitioners deliberately prey on the poor and sick by taking advantage of them in their greatest time of need and desperation. If your kid is diagnosed with an incurable and terminal disease, for instance, and science-based medicine can't help, it's understandable that you might try other 'alternative' methods. What parent wouldn't be willing to try anything to help their children?

And that's precisely what faith healers are counting on. They exploit the general population's lack of critical thinking skills by poisoning the well in such a way that no matter the outcome, it will somehow 'confirm' their doctrine: if you feel immediately better because you've been touched by one of these charlatans (while all the work is really being done by a temporary rush of adrenaline coursing through your body), that counts as evidence of a miracle; but if you don't feel better, or your symptoms come back later (as they inevitably do), it's your own fault for not having enough faith. It's a win-win... for the 'healer'. It's a lose-lose for you.

What kind of purpose drives these healers? No, it's not love for their fellow man... it's greed: you have to pony up a pretty penny to show that you have the requisite faith for the holy spirit to descend upon you (and it takes cash and credit cards... no checks, though).

But the problems don't stop with the healing session itself: because faith is hammered into your head as the cause of your improvement, it wouldn't show much faith on your part if you continue to take the real medicine that medical doctors have prescribed for you. As you might imagine, people stop taking their medication and the result is that they get worse, cancers relapse, medical conditions deteriorate, and some people even end up dying...

Luckily, Derren Brown has been working really hard to infiltrate this group of disgusting con artists and expose them for the frauds they are by training an ordinary man and turning him into a 'faith healer' and unleashing him somewhere in Texas. This documentary should be mandatory in the Bible belt...

And for more, check out The Enemies of Reason.
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The Rubber Hand Illusion

You may feel that you are master of your body, telling it what do do and when to do it. Of course, this mastery presupposes an intimate knowledge of your body, but are you as familiar with it as you think you are? The eighteenth century philosopher David Hume argued that our knowledge of our bodies is acquired, like everything else, from experience; it is not something known innately or purely through reason.

One of Hume's most interesting insights rests on the idea that when it comes to the relationship between mind and body, our experience is merely of their constant conjunction, but never of any necessary connection between them. In other words, you experience that your body does what you tell it to, but you don't actually experience why. You assume that one causes the other to act, but that's ultimately just an inference you make, not something you actually experience.

And as with most things Hume, it's taken a few centuries to scientifically test these observations, but once again it looks like the man was on the right track. Some of the latest research has reached similar conclusions, and has provided valuable lessons about how our brain integrates and constructs its experience of its own body, and the findings are absolutely fascinating: for instance, you can be fooled into experiencing that a rubber hand that you 'know' isn't yours is yours :)

Here is a more concise explanation of what's going on:

And because scientists are not doing this just for shits and giggles, here is an important example of a possible application of this research:

This could provide more confirmation of the natural basis for out-of-body experiences, wouldn't it?
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Spelling Matters

Tkae a look at the piecutre to the rghit and try to see if you can uesdnatnrd waht it syas. In fcat, trehe is a vrey good chncae taht you've arladey raed tihs bfeore beascue it's one of thsoe eamil frwodars knwon to inuntdae ibnoxes ernheyrewe and awe teihr rcienietps.

Now, I don't know what your reaction has been, but I've always found it annoying because it seems so obviously contrived to fool lazy, unsuspecting readers who are only too happy to learn that spelling things correctly doesn't really matter. Here's looking at you, Stephen Fry! Just kidding :)

When I try to break it down for someone, I'm constantly told that I "think too much," and to just relax. If I weren't the nice guy that I am, I'd reply with something like: "no, you just don't think enough," but I doubt that kind of strategy will get me laid, so I just hold back, down my drink and hope she'll become hotter as a result :)

Fortunately, for me at least, it seems I'm not the only one who gets worked up about this because someone has made an awesome video about it:

Go on, forward this to all your friends. What are you waiting for?!? :)
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