The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

Sometimes, with folk tales, you can pinpoint exactly when a legend entered the public awareness.  Someone writes and publishes a story in one of those "True Weird Tales" books or magazines; a report of a haunting makes the local news or newspaper; or, more recently, someone makes a claim in a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Such, for example, is the famous story of the tumbling coffins of Barbados, about which there seems to be zero hard documentary evidence -- but which first appeared (as a true tale) in James Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, and has been a standard in the ghost story repertoire ever since.  Likewise, the story of Lord Dufferin and the doomed elevator operator has a very certain provenance -- Lord Dufferin himself, who enjoyed nothing more than terrifying the absolute shit out of his house guests by telling the story over glasses of cognac late at night.

One of the scariest ghost stories, though, seems to have been built by accretion, and has no certain date of origin.  It's the tale of the "most haunted house in London" -- Number 50 Berkeley Square.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Metro Centric, Sophie Snyder Berkeley Square, CC BY 2.0]

The house itself is a four-story structure, built in the late eighteenth century, that looks innocent enough from the outside.  Until 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, which certainly gives it some historical gravitas right from the outset.  But gradually the ownership descended down the socioeconomic scale, and in the late 1800s it had fallen into disrepair.

At some point during that interval, it got the reputation for being haunted.  Apparently, it's the upper floor that is said to be the worst; some say it's occupied by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from one of the upper windows, others that it's haunted by the ghost of a young man whose family had locked him in the attic by himself, feeding him through a slot in the door until he went mad and finally died.  Whatever the truth of the non-paranormal aspects -- the suicide of the young woman, or the madness and death of the unfortunate young man -- it's clear that neighbors viewed the house askance during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.  And that's when the legends really took off.

The earliest definite account of haunting comes from George, Baron Lyttelton, who spent the night in the attic in 1872 after being dared to do so by a friend.  He saw (he said) an apparition that appeared to him as a brown mist and that "generated a feeling of absolute terror."  He shot at it, to no apparent effect, and the next morning found the shotgun shell but no other trace of what he'd fired at.  Lyttelton himself committed suicide four years later by throwing himself down the stairs of his London home -- some say, because he never recovered from the fright he'd received that night.

In 1879, Mayfair ran a story about the place, recounting the then-deceased Baron Lyttelton's encounter, and also describing the experience of a maid who'd been sent up to the attic to clean it, and had gone mad.  She died shortly afterward in an asylum, prompting another skeptic, one Sir Robert Warboys -- a "notorious rake, libertine, and scoffer" -- to spend the night, saying that he could handle anything that cared to show up.  The owner of the house elected to stay downstairs, but they rigged up a bell so that Warboys could summon help if anything happened.  Around midnight, the owner was awakened by the bell ringing furiously, followed by the sound of a pistol shot.  According to one account:

The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand.  The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth.  The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man's terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall.  He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the 'Thing', to no avail.

The house was (according to the legend) left unoccupied thereafter because no one could be found who was willing to rent it.  This is why it was empty when two sailors on shore leave from Portsmouth Harbor, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, decided to stay there one foggy night when they could find no rooms to rent.  They were awakened in the wee hours by a misty "something" that tried to strangle Martin.  Beside himself with fright, he fled, thinking his buddy was right behind him.  He wasn't.  When he went back into the house the following morning, accompanied by police, he found the unfortunate Blunden -- with his neck broken.

What's interesting about all of this is that after the Mayfair story, the whole thing kind of died down.  It's still called "the most haunted house in London," and figures prominently on London ghost tours, but it was purchased in 1937 by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Book Dealers and has shown no sign since that time of any paranormal occurrences.  And it's been pointed out that the story The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- published in 1859, right around the time the rumors of the haunting started -- bears an uncanny resemblance to the tale of 50 Berkeley Square, especially the account of the unstable Baron Lyttelton.

Sad to say for aficionados of "true ghost stories," the likeliest explanation is that the entire thing was spun from whole cloth.  There's no evidence that any of the paranormal stuff ever happened.  In fact, "Sir Robert Warboys" doesn't seem to exist except in connection to the haunted attic; if there is a mention of him anywhere except in accounts of his death at the hands of the misty "Thing," I haven't been able to find it.  As far as "two sailors from Portsmouth," that has about as much factual reliability as "I heard the story from my aunt who said her best friend in high school's mother's second cousin saw it with her very own eyes."  And Lyttelton, as I've said, doesn't seem like he was exactly the most mentally stable of individuals to start with.

But I have to admit, it's a hell of a scary tale.  Part of what makes it as terrifying as it is is the fact that you never see the phantom's face.  As Stephen King points out, in his outstanding analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, there are times when not seeing what's behind the door is way worse than opening the door and finding out what's actually there.  So even though I'm not buying that the place is haunted, it does make for a great story -- and 50 Berkeley Square will definitely be on my itinerary when I have an opportunity to visit London.

****************************************

Wandering in the Tower of Babel

How many languages are there in the world?

Seems like it should be an easy question, right?  Not so much.  Just like the issue of biological species (that I touched upon in Wednesday's post, about dogs and wolves), figuring out where to draw dividing lines in linguistics isn't simple.  How different do two modes of speech or writing have to be to constitute separate languages?

Here's an admittedly rather facile example from my own experience.  I grew up speaking both French and English; for three of my grandparents, and my mom, French was their first language.  What I heard, though, was Cajun French, a dialect brought into southern Louisiana by people who had been exiled from Acadia (now called Nova Scotia) in the mid-eighteenth century.  (In my mother's family's case, they did a thirty year stint in France first, and left on the 1785 Acadian Expeditions when the king of France decided they weren't fitting in and basically paid them to go away.  Just as well; they missed the French Revolution, which broke out only four years later.  A couple of years after that, the king regretted not going with them.)

What's interesting, though, is that when I go to Québec, I have a really hard time understanding spoken French.  Part of it is that admittedly, I'm a bit rusty; I haven't been around francophones for forty years.  But the accent is so different from what I'm used to that it often befuddles me.  Further still are French-based creoles like Haitian Creole, Antillean Creole, and Seychellois; those have a lot of French vocabulary but a great admixture of words (and grammatical structures) from African languages, particularly from western Volta-Congo languages such as Fongbe and Igbo (for the first two) and the Bantu language (for Seychellois).

And I can verify that Haitian Creole and French aren't mutually intelligible.  A well-meaning principal I worked for was welcoming in a young lady who was a refugee from Haiti, and told her that I was someone she could speak to in her native language -- assuming that Haitian Creole and French were close enough that we could chat.  She and I had a good laugh when we found out that neither of us spoke the other's language, so we had to get by on her broken English supplemented when necessary with my rather ill-remembered French, when the words were at least close enough to help.

Another example is Breton, a Celtic language related to Welsh that's spoken in Brittany.  My band recorded a couple of songs in Breton (here's one example), and a friend noticed how much it sounded like French.  Like Haitian Creole, though, it really is a different language, with its own grammar, syntax, and lexicon -- but enough borrowed words and pronunciation influence from French that it has a superficially French sound.

So even with currently extant languages, it's hard to know where to draw the lines.  Standard French, Cajun French, and Québecois are usually considered close enough to count as the same language (more specifically, as three dialects -- the linguistic analog to a subspecies).  Breton, and the creoles I listed, are universally considered to be separate languages.  The current estimate is that there are now around seven thousand languages spoken in the world, although that number gets revised all the time as we learn more about them.

The situation becomes even more difficult when you start considering languages across time.  Languages evolve, despite the prescriptivists' best efforts, and -- once again, like with biological evolution -- it's an open debate where you draw the line.  English today is pretty similar to English spoken in England and eastern North America in the eighteenth century; a few different words and some odd (to our ears) grammar, is all.  Go back to Shakespeare's day, and it was more different still, although -- with practice -- modern readers can see a performance of Macbeth or As You Like It and understand what's being said.  (And even, in the latter, be able to laugh at most of the bawdy jokes.)  Back in Chaucer's times, today's English speakers would have a difficult time of it.  And actual Old English -- no, Shakespeare isn't "Old English," even if you've heard it called that -- is a completely different, mutually unintelligible language with Modern English.  For example, can you identify this passage?

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum,
si þin nama gehalgod.
To becume þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa,
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.

If you recognized it as the opening lines of the Lord's Prayer, you're either a language nerd or else really good at picking out patterns.  Old English was a language related to a dialect of West Germanic spoken in Saxony -- on the border of what is now Denmark and Germany -- and so unlike Modern English that if you went back to tenth century England, you'd need a handy phrase book to be understood.

The reason all this comes up is because I stumbled upon a site listing "spurious languages" -- written or spoken systems that we once thought were languages, and now we are kind of saying, "Um, maybe not."  And there are a lot of them.  Some, like Malakhel -- an Eastern Iranian dialect spoken in the Waziristan region of Pakistan -- were, like Cajun French, found to be close enough to an existing language (Ormuri) that the two were combined.  Some, like Dazawa, a Chadic language spoken in northern Nigeria, are so poorly studied we honestly don't know if they're separate languages or not; in the case of Dazawa, there are only a handful of speakers, and most of them have switched to speaking the majority language of Hausa, so it might be too late to find out.  Some, like Palpa, a language supposedly spoken by a small group of people in Nepal, are probably due to inaccuracies in study, and may never have existed in the first place.

Then there are languages (probably?) that are known from only an inscription or two, so there's not enough information available even to make a firm determination.  One of many examples is Noric, a presumed Celtic language spoken in the Roman province of Noricum (present-day Austria and Slovenia), known from a grand total of three short inscriptions. 

The Grafenstein fragment, one of three known examples of the Noric language [Image is in the Public Domain]

It's written in Old Italic script, an alphabet also used for the only-distantly-related Etruscan language.  This particular one appears to be a record of a financial transaction.  Another, found near Ptuj, Slovenia, says:

𐌀𐌓𐌕𐌄𐌁𐌖𐌈𐌆𐌁𐌓𐌏𐌙𐌈𐌖𐌉 (ARTEBUDZBROGDUI)

It's thought to be a personal name -- Artebudz, son of Brogduos.  Linguists suspect that the name Artebudz comes from Celtic root words meaning "bear penis," which I think we can all agree is a hell of a name.

The thing is, with only short bits to analyze, any determination of what this language was, who (other than Bear Penis) spoke it, how widespread and long-lived it was, and how it was related to other languages at the time, are all little more than educated speculation.

It's astonishing to think that even as small as the world has gotten, what with near-instantaneous digital communication, international travel, and maps of damn near the entire planet, we still have a hard time pinning down language.  It's fluid, ever-changing, dynamic, with new forms cropping up all the time and old ones dying out or being subsumed.  But that's part of the fascination of linguistics, isn't it?  Something like speech and the written word, that most of us take for granted, is actually phenomenally complex, to the point of being nearly impossible to pigeonhole.  

It's no wonder the ancient Israelites thought of the myth of the Tower of Babel to explain it all.  Even wandering amongst its many rooms is enough to boggle the mind.

****************************************

Pride in ancestry

Here in the United States we're celebrating Thanksgiving today.  It's a day a lot of folks think about their heritage, and the weird old story about the Pilgrims and Native Americans having dinner together gets rehashed, despite the fact that just about everything we're taught about it in elementary school is wrong.  That's the way with cultural mythology, though, and we're hardly the only ones to engage in these sorts of exercises in history-sanitation.

It did, however, make me start thinking about the whole pride-in-ancestry thing, which also strikes me as kind of odd.  To quote my evolutionary biology professor's pragmatic quip, "Your ancestors didn't have to be brilliant or strong or nice; they just had to live long enough to fuck successfully at least once."  Which might be true, but it hasn't stopped me from being interested in my ancestry, while always trying to keep in mind that my family tree is as checkered as anyone else's (and, as you'll see, possibly more than most).

Take, for example, my 3x-great-grandmother, Sarah (Handsberry) Rulong.  She was born some time around 1775 in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and her surname probably started out as something Teutonic like Hansberger or Hunsberger, especially given that her marriage certificate says she was a Lutheran.  At the age of twenty she set out with a group -- none of whom were her immediately family members -- to cross just shy of a thousand miles of what was then trackless wilderness, finally ending up in New Madrid, Missouri.  She lived there for a time as a single woman, ultimately marrying three times and outliving all three husbands.  She had a total of nine children, including my great-great grandmother, Isabella (Rulong) Brandt, and was in southern Louisiana in 1830 after being widowed for the third time -- but I don't know what happened to her after that.

Now there's someone who I wish had left me a diary to read.

Sarah's father-in-law, Luke Rulong (the father of her third husband, Aaron Rulong, and my direct ancestor) also was a curious fellow.  We'd tried for years to figure out who he was; the Rulong family was of Dutch origin and lived in Ocean County, New Jersey, but we couldn't find out anything specifically about him in the records of the time.

Turns out we were looking in the wrong place.  Look in the court and jail records of Ocean County in the late eighteenth century, and he was all over the place, having been arrested multiple times for such misdeeds as "riot," "mischief," "disorder," "public drunkenness," and "poaching."

See what I mean about interest not equaling pride?

Most of my ancestry is from France, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, and England, something I know both from genealogical research and from the results of my DNA tests.  So I'm solidly northern/western European, something I found a little disappointing.  It'd have been kind of cool to discover a Nigerian ancestor I didn't know about, or something.  But no, I'm pretty much white through and through.

Still, there are some interesting folks back there on my family tree.  I have a great-great uncle who has his own Wikipedia page: John Andrews Murrell, the "Great Western Land Pirate," who was a highwayman in the early 1800s in what is now Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.  Murrell was also a consummate con artist who claimed he was a revivalist preacher, and went around preaching to standing-room-only crowds (apparently he spoke well and knew his Bible; so the praise-the-Lord-and-open-your-wallets televangelists are hardly a new phenomenon).  While he was speaking, the story goes, his cronies went behind the crowds and looted all the saddlebags.

My great-great-grandfather, John's brother James Henry Murrell, had to go all the way to southern Louisiana to escape the bad reputation John had given the family name.

I have a number of ne'er-do-wells in my ancestry.  One of the wildest stories is about Jean Serreau, one of my mom's forebears, who was a landholder in Nova Scotia (then called Acadia) in the late seventeenth century.  Apparently he came home one day to find his wife in bed with a Swiss army officer, and was so outraged that he walloped the guy in the head with a heavy object and killed him.  (Brings coitus interruptus to new heights, doesn't it?)  He was promptly arrested and looked likely to hang, but his status gave him the leeway to sue for a pardon.  He eventually had to go to France and appeal to the very top -- King Louis XIV -- who upon hearing the case pardoned Serreau immediately.

"Do not fret, Monsieur," the king told Serreau.  "I would have done exactly the same thing."

A good indication of my family's generally sketchy antecedents is that of my four grandparents, three of them had surnames that were the result of a name change -- Bonnet (originally Ariey), Meyer (originally Lévy), and Scott (originally Hamilton).  The last-mentioned one is especially curious, because we have no idea why it happened; my suspicion is that my forebear, John Scott, was on the run from the law, and changed his name to something more generic to escape detection.  But the DNA evidence is incontrovertible; the paternal line of the Scott family was originally a branch of the Hamilton clan from Raploch (near Glasgow), Scotland.  Interesting, too, that the family tradition remembered this change -- two of John Scott's grandchildren were given the first name of Hamilton.

Like all families, mine has its share of tragedy. My mother's great-grandmother, Florida (Perilloux) Meyer, was widowed at the young age of 37, and unlike the redoubtable Sarah never married again.  Her husband was apparently an unreliable sort, a breeder of horses who "made bad deals while drunk" (this sort of thing seems to run in my family).  Florida was left penniless with nine children, four of them under the age of ten, at his death.  She rented out her home as an inn, making enough to squeak by, but ultimately had to sell the house and ended her life as a domestic servant.  Here's a photo of her, taken shortly before her death at age 77 -- can't you see the hard times etched into her face?

It's tempting to be all edified by her tale, and see in it stalwart courage and an indomitable nature, but in reality, who knows how she dealt with her adversity?  She died when my mother was only three years old, and according to my mom and her cousins, no one much talked about that side of the family.  So anything I could extract about her character from what I know of her life would only be a surmise, with no more anchor in reality than the happy Pilgrims and Natives eating turkey together on the First Thanksgiving.

The truth, of course, is something you can't really tell from looking at a family tree; my ancestry, like everyone's, is made up of a broad cast of characters, kind and nasty, rich and poor, honest and dishonest, servant and master.  We're too quick to jump into fairy tales about noble blood and hereditary lordship, without keeping in mind that a lot of those noble lords were (frankly) nuttier than squirrel shit.  Pride in ancestry has all too often slipped into racism and tribalism and xenophobia, and realistically speaking, it's not even justifiable on a factual basis.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts on Thanksgiving.  We're all the products of a mixed bag of forebears, and if you go back far enough -- honestly, only four thousand years or so, by most anthropologists' estimates -- we're all related, descending from the same pool of ancestors who "fucked successfully at least once."  No real point of pride there, or at least, nothing that you should feel superior about.

Much more important, really, how we treat others here and now.

So for those of you celebrating, I hope you enjoy your meals, and I hope you all stay healthy and happy in these fractious times.  Take care of those around you -- let that be the legacy we leave behind, and maybe our descendants a hundred years from now will remember with pride at least a little bit about who we were.

****************************************

Pack mentality

As hard as it may be to imagine, dogs -- yes, all of them -- are the domesticated descendants of gray wolves.

Well, it's hard for me to imagine, anyhow.  I have three dogs whose wolf ancestry is, shall we say, rather well hidden.

This is Jethro.  He's half Plush Toy and half Dust Bunny.

This is Guinness, who is a full-blooded Tennis Ball Retriever.  He is also a very dapper gentleman.

And this is Rosie, who has had just about enough of your shit.

None of them, let's say, exactly screams out "Alpha Wolf of the Deep Forest Pack."  But nevertheless, all three of them descend from wolves that were domesticated by our distant ancestors something like twenty thousand years ago, in an encounter that went something like this:

Wolf (snarling): I will terrorize your villages, decimate your livestock, and eat your children!

Early human:  We have sofas, peanut butter, and squeaky toys.

Wolf:  ... I'm listening

What's fascinating is that despite a lot of selective breeding since then, wolves and dogs are still cross-fertile.  It's yet another example of how we think we have a good definition for the word species, then we keep finding exceptions, or at least situations that leave you thinking, "Wait... those are the same species?"  But yes: by the canonical definition of species -- a population whose members are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring -- dogs and wolves are the same species.

And new research by a team from the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution has found something even more astonishing; since domestication, dogs have been backcrossed to wolves multiple times, meaning that since domestication, wolf genetics has been reintroduced into dog lineages over and over.

Not always how you'd expect, either.  It isn't just "big dogs = lots of recent wolf ancestry, small dogs = not so much."  Mastiffs and Saint Bernards both show close to zero reintroduced wolf DNA.  Even chihuahuas have more (at around 0.2%).  The highest amount, unsurprisingly, is amongst the breeds associated with pulling sleds -- huskies, malamutes, Samoyeds, and Greenland dogs.  But most dog breeds have somewhere between two and five percent recent wolf ancestry, even the ones you might not suspect.

What's also fascinating is that the amount of recent wolf ancestry correlates strongly to personality.  Breeds were given descriptors by dog breeders and owners, and a significant pattern emerged.  Low recent wolf ancestry correlated to a breed being described as “friendly,” “eager to please,” “easy to train,” “courageous,” “lively,” or “affectionate.”  High wolf ancestry breeds were more likely to be described as “suspicious of strangers,” “independent,” “dignified,” “alert,” “loyal,” “reserved,” or “territorial.”

John Heywood's comment that what's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh apparently applies to dogs as well as humans.

It makes me wonder about how wolfy my own dogs are.  Jethro, I suspect, is pretty low on the scale.  High wolf ancestry is also correlated with intelligence, and -- to put not too fine a point on it -- Jethro has the IQ of a tuna salad sandwich.  I suspect Guinness is on the high end, because he's part husky, and also checks off most of the boxes for the personality traits of high wolf ancestry dogs.  Rosie is mostly Australian cattle dog, and she's probably in the middle.  All I know is that she's extremely sweet, stubborn as hell, and can give you a reproachful look that makes you feel like you have disappointed not only her, but all of her ancestors.

In any case, this is all an excellent example of introgression -- where populations that initially come from a common ancestry are repeatedly backcrossed to the wild type.  And that, plus twenty thousand years of selective breeding, is why we have the great variety of dogs we have.

But you'll have to excuse me.  Guinness wants to play ball.  I wonder if "extremely demanding and will not take no for an answer" is a wolf trait?

****************************************

Ascensions and synchronicities

In the past week I've experienced a couple of strange synchronicities.  In the first, I was talking with a friend about the strange Swedish musical instrument called the nyckelharpa -- it's sort of the unholy offspring of a fiddle and a typewriter -- and only a couple of hours later, a (different) friend sent me a link to a video of two women playing a nyckelharpa duet.

The second occurred just two days ago.  A post I saw about conspiracy theories brought to mind the be-all-end-all conspiracy theory novel, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.  In particular what I'd read reminded me of the character of Agliè, who said he was the Comte de Saint Germain -- a strange figure from French history who claimed to be immortal.  (If you want to know more about this curious fellow, I did a post on him back in 2023.)  Then, later that day, I was on the way back home from helping out my wife at her art show in Rochester, and I was listening to the wonderful radio show This American Life -- and I caught the tail end of a story about, you guessed it, the Comte de Saint Germain.

The Comte de Saint Germain by Nicolas Thomas (1783) [Image is in the Public Domain]

I'm dubious that these kinds of synchronicities Mean Anything.  If it's a message from the Powers That Be, it's a pretty fucking obscure one.  And if this is some kind of Glitch in the Matrix -- well, I'm a little baffled as to why the Matrix works fine in most respects, but struggles with nyckelharpas and the Comte de Saint Germain.  Me, I think this is likely to be nothing more than dart-thrower's bias -- our tendency to notice (and give undue weight to) oddities and outliers, and ignore all the random background noise that fills our daily lives.

After all, yesterday I was thinking about King Louis IX of France (research for my current novel), and no one later on said to me, "So, how about old King Louis IX of France, amirite?"  Most of the random stuff that occurs in our heads never gets weirdly repeated, so we simply forget about it.  But strange, rapid-fire repetitions?  Those we notice.

In any case, the bit of the story I heard from This American Life seemed to indicate that there was some kind of odd connection between the Comte de Saint Germain and Mount Shasta, in northern California, which was new to me, so I thought I'd look into it.

And holy shit.  This stuff makes Glitches in the Matrix sound like hard-edged science.

You ready?

In 1930, an American mining engineer named Guy Ballard was hiking on Mount Shasta, and had an encounter with a young man.  Here's how Ballard himself described it:

It came time for lunch, and I sought a mountain spring for clear, cold water.  Cup in hand, I bent down to fill it, when an electrical current passed through my body from head to foot.

I looked around, and directly behind me stood a young man who, at first glance, seemed to be someone on a hike like myself.  I looked more closely and realized immediately that he was no ordinary person.  As this thought passed through my mind, he smiled and addressed me saying:

"My Brother, if you will hand me your cup, I will give you a much more refreshing drink than spring water."  I obeyed, and instantly the cup was filled with a creamy liquid.  Handing it back to me, he said: "Drink it."

So he did.  At this point, the young man identified himself as the Comte de Saint Germain, who was an "Ascended Master."  He appointed Ballard and Ballard's wife and son, Edna and Edona, as the "sole accredited messengers" responsible for bringing Saint Germain's teachings to the world.

The result was what is called the "I AM" Activity (later called the Saint Germain Foundation), which attracted tens of thousands of faithful adherents despite stuff like Ballard claiming that in previous lives he'd been Richard the Lionheart and George Washington, and Edna (not to be outdone) saying she'd been Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I of England, and Benjamin Franklin.  They published a couple dozen books, including Unveiled Mysteries and The Magic Presence, before Ballard's death in 1939.

You have to wonder who he was reincarnated as this time.  My guess is Deepak Chopra.

Anyhow, what appears in Ballard's teachings is really nothing more than a rehash of stuff from early twentieth century Theosophy and other occult philosophies, although it is notable that Ballard et al. make the unusual claim that the books they published weren't written by him, but dictated to him (or through him) by other historical figures.  For example, one of them, Comte de Gabalis, he said was written by Francis Bacon. 

What strikes me about all this -- and, in fact, I have the same objection to most "revealed knowledge" -- is that it hardly ever tells us anything we didn't already know.  A lot of it is usually well-intentioned advice (of the "we need to be loving and kind to each other" sort), a lot of it is stuff about famous people who are allegedly now Celestial Guides or whatnot, and almost none of it is anything that would count as a scientific revelation.  I mean, Ballard was working back in the 1930s, so just think of what an Ascended Master could have told him about discoveries which were at that point still in the future -- the nature of DNA and its role in genetics, the plate tectonic model, where to find evidence to confirm the Big Bang, how to make an interstellar warp drive, or even practical stuff like how to make antibiotics and do gene therapy to cure human diseases.

You'd think that Ascended Masters would be eager to give us critical information, instead of vague pronouncements that impress a handful of people for a while and then leave the world pretty much loping along as it always did.

Because that, honestly, is what happened to the Saint Germain Foundation.  After Ballard's death his wife Edna took over; she saw it through the pivotal moment of July 1, 1956, when the Age of Aquarius officially started, at which point Jesus retired as Grand Ascended Master and the Comte de Saint Germain took over (I swear I'm not making this up).  Edna died in February of 1971, but her death wasn't reported publicly for months because -- direct quote -- "The movement doesn't believe in death."  It still maintains a temple in downtown Chicago and presents an annual pageant on Mount Shasta every August, but the number of true adherents worldwide apparently only amounts to a few thousand total.

In any case, I find all this curious, but more because of what it tells us about human psychology and our desire to find meaning than any kind of big revelations about the cosmos and how it works.  As far as synchronicities go, I'm still inclined to attribute them to dart-thrower's bias.  On the other hand, we'll see if the universe decides to teach me a lesson.  If I start seeing random references to King Louis IX of France showing up in unexpected places, I may have to eat my words.

****************************************

Batman's watching you

Lately, the political scene in the United States has been dominated by not just the single-cause fallacy (the tendency to attribute complex phenomena to one root cause), but the simple-cause fallacy.  This is the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) writ large; make everything the result of one, easy-to-understand origin, and you'll have a convenient scapegoat when things go to hell.

How many times have you heard our current government officials saying stuff like "(Some bad thing) is because of (pick one: illegal immigrants, Democrats, brown people doing bad stuff, socialism, LGBTQ+ people)."  And unfortunately, this kind of thing has its appeal.  Complexity is challenging.  We often don't like to be confronted with difficult-to-solve problems, especially when solving those problems involves (1) working with people we disagree with, and (2) facing situations where the solution involves painful compromises.

It's why there was very little pushback a couple of days ago when J. D. Vance, somehow maintaining a straight face the entire time, said that high housing prices were due to illegal immigrants.  Lest you think I'm making this up, here's his exact quote:

A lot of young people are saying, housing is way too expensive.  Why is that?  Because we flooded the country with thirty million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens.  And at the same time we weren’t building enough new houses to begin with even for the population that we had.

This is in spite of the fact that as of the latest data, the total number of illegal immigrants in the United States is less than half that, and the awkward question of how illegal immigrants (all thirty million of them, apparently) would get bank loans to purchase homes without steady, good-paying jobs -- and Social Security Numbers.  Despite this, the person interviewing him -- unsurprisingly, it was Sean Hannity -- nodded as if what Vance just said made complete sense.

I saw a fascinating example of this tendency just yesterday, which I saw more than once appended to commentary to the effect of "Wow, people sure are stupid."  It's a study in Nature by a team led by Francesco Pagnini, of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Milan, and is entitled, "Unexpected Events and Prosocial Behavior: The Batman Effect."

What the researchers did was send a volunteer who was visibly pregnant onto a train, and counted the number of people who offered her a seat.  Then they did the same thing, but right after she boarded, a man dressed up as Batman boarded as well.  The number of people who gave up their seat for her almost doubled -- from 38% to 67%.  And the vast majority of the posters and commenters I've seen mention this study were snickering about how gullible people are.  Did the passengers really think that was Batman, and he was going to go all Justice League on their asses if they didn't give up their seat for the pregnant lady?  One even went into a long diatribe about how our current online culture has made it hard for people (especially young people, he says) to tell the difference between fiction and reality.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons William Tung, San Diego Comic-Con 2024 Masquerade - Cosplay of Batman 3, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Well, okay, maybe that's one possibility; that being reminded of a character who stands for fair play makes people think they should Do The Right Thing, too.  But I can easily think of two other reasons this might have happened -- one of which the authors go into, right in the damn paper.  (Highlighting another unfortunate tendency, which is that people often comment on social media posts just from the tagline, and without even clicking the link.  I can't even tell you the number of times I've had someone post a comment on a Skeptophilia link that left me thinking, "Bro, did you even read the fucking post?")

The explanation that the authors went into is that having something unusual happen -- like a guy showing up in costume -- makes people take notice.  I don't know about you, but when I've ridden trains, I'm seldom giving a lot of attention to the other passengers.  (I've usually got my nose in a book.)  Unless, that is, one of them is doing something peculiar.  It wouldn't have to be Batman, or anyone associated with Smiting Evildoers; all it would have to be is something odd.  Then I'd look up -- and be more likely to notice other things, such as a pregnant lady standing there hanging onto the grab bar.

The other possible explanation, though, is one that definitely would have occurred to me; if there's a guy standing there nonchalantly, dressed like Batman, is this part of a stunt?  If so, there'd certainly be others watching and waiting to see what the other passengers do -- and possibly filming it.  That would cause me to look around.  It might induce me toward more prosocial behavior, too; if I know I'm being filmed, I wouldn't want to end up enshrined forever on YouTube as the lazy bum who sat there while a pregnant woman was hanging on for dear life trying not to fall down when the train lurches.

The point here is that an interesting finding (people are more prosocial when somebody nearby is dressed as Batman) is not proof that the passengers think that Batman is real, and (by extension) that they don't know the difference between fact and fiction.  That might be true, at least for a few of them.  But in this case, the simple (and wryly amusing) explanation is a vast overconclusion.

The fact that it has shown up over and over, though, is yet another example of confirmation bias; the people who are claiming this interpretation of the experiment obviously already think that humanity is irredeemably stupid, and this was just another nail in the coffin.  So instead of doing what we all should do -- thinking, "what are other possible explanations for this?" -- they stop there, sitting back with smug expressions, because after all if they see how dumb everyone else is, it must mean they're smart themselves.

Or maybe I'm just falling for the single-cause fallacy myself.  It's why I wouldn't want to be a psychologist; people are way too complicated.

But one conclusion I will stand by is that this phenomenon only gets worse with people like J. D. Vance, who not only falls back on simple one-liner explanations, he makes up the data as he goes to support them.

So anyway.  Despite what you may have heard, most people don't think Batman is real, and therefore act nicer when he's around.  My guess is people would have had exactly the same reaction if someone had showed up dressed as the Joker.  It's always best to stop and question your assumptions and biases before jumping to a conclusion -- or commenting on a link just based on the tagline.

****************************************

Mental maps

Picture a place you know well.  Your house, your apartment, a park, a church, a school.  You can probably imagine it, remember what it's like to wander around in it, maybe even visualize it to a high level of detail.

Now, let's change the perspective to one you probably have never taken.  Would you be able to draw a map of the layout -- as seen from above?  An aerial view?

Here's a harder task.  In a large room, there are various obstacles, all fairly big and obvious.  Tables, chairs, sofas, the usual things you might find in a living room or den.  You're standing in one corner, and from that perspective are allowed to study it for as long as you like.

Once you were done, could you walk from that corner to the diagonally opposite one without running into anything -- while blindfolded?

Both of these tasks require the use of a part of your brain called the hippocampus.  The name of the structure comes from the Greek word ἱππόκαμπος -- literally, "seahorse" -- because of its shape.  The hippocampus has a role in memory formation, conflict avoidance... and spatial navigation.

Like the other structures in the brain, the hippocampus seems to be better developed in some people than others.  My wife, for example, has something I can only describe as an internal GPS.  To my knowledge, she has never been lost.  When we took a trip to Spain and Portugal a few years ago, we rented a car in Madrid and she studied a map -- once.  After that, she navigated us all over the Iberian Peninsula with only very infrequent checks to make sure we were taking the correct turns, which because of her navigational skills, we always were.

I, on the other hand, get lost walking around a tree.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Edward Betts, Bloomsbury - map 1, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The topic comes up because of a paper I came across in the journal Cell that showed something absolutely fascinating.  It's called "Targeted Activation of Hippocampal Place Cells Drives Memory-Guided Spatial Behavior," and was written by a team led by Nick T. M. Robinson of University College London.  But to understand what they did, you have to know about something called optogenetics.

Back in 2002, a pair of geneticists, Boris Zemelman and Gero Miesenböck, developed an amazing technique.  They genetically modified mammalian nerve tissue to express a protein called rhodopsin, which is one of the light-sensitive chemicals in the retina of your eye.  By hitching the rhodopsin to ion-sensitive gateway channels in the neural membrane, they created neurons that literally could be turned on and off using a beam of light.

Because the brain is encased in bone, animals that express this gene don't respond any time the lights are on; you have to shine light directly on the neurons that contain rhodopsin.  This involves inserting fiber optics into the brain of the animal -- but once you do that, you have a set of neurons that fire when you shine a light down the fibers.  Result: remote-control mice.

Okay, if you think that's cool, wait till you hear what Robinson et al. did.

So you create some transgenic mice that express rhodopsin in the hippocampus.  Fit them out with fiber optics.  Then let the mice learn how to run a maze for a reward, in this case sugar water in a feeder bottle.  Watch through an fMRI and note which hippocampal neurons are firing when they learn -- and especially when they recall -- the layout of the maze.

Then take the same mice, put them in a different maze.  But switch the lights on in their brain to activate the neurons you saw firing when they were recalling the map of the first maze.

The result is that the mice picture the first maze, and try to run that pattern even though they can see that they are now in a different maze.  The light activation has switched on a memory of the layout of the maze they'd learned that then overrode all the other sensory information they had access to.

It's as if you moved from Tokyo to London, and then tried to use your knowledge of the roads of Tokyo to find your way from St. Paul's Cathedral to the Victoria & Albert Museum.

This is pretty astonishing from a number of standpoints.  First, the idea that you can switch a memory on and off like that is somewhere between fascinating and freaky.  Second, that the neural firing pattern is so specific -- that pattern corresponds to that map, and no other.  And third, that the activation of the map made the mice doubt the information coming from their own eyes.

So once again, we have evidence of how plastic our brains are, and how easy they are to fool.  What you're experiencing right now is being expressed in your brain as a series of neural firings; in a way, the neural firing pattern is the experience.  If you change the pattern artificially, you experience something different.

More disturbing still is that our sense of self is also deeply tied to our neural links (some would say that our sense of self is nothing more than neural links; to me, the jury's still out on where consciousness comes from, so I'm hesitant to go that far).  So not only what you perceive, but who you are can change if you alter the pattern of neural activation.

We're remarkable, complex, amazing, and fragile beasts, aren't we?

So that's today's contribution from the Not Science Fiction department.  I'm wondering if I might be able to get one of those fiber optics things to activate my hippocampus.  Sounds pretty extreme, but I am really tired of getting lost all the time.  There are trees everywhere around here.

****************************************