Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages.  Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see the faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever it was you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real, and alive.  And pretty soon, she realizes that one of them has become aware that she can see it -- and it starts to stalk her.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as the static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is fun reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor.  I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my puppy Jethro, and he clearly had no idea, because he's got an even shorter attention span than I do.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an ability to stay focused longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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Turning the focus knob

I am really distractible.

To say I have "squirrel brain" is a deep injustice to squirrels.  At least squirrels have the focus to accomplish their purpose every day, which is to make sure our bird feeders are constantly empty.  If I was a squirrel, I'd probably clamber my way up the post and past the inaccurately-named "squirrel baffle" and finally get to the feeder, and then just sit there with a puzzled look, thinking, "Why am I up here, again?"

My "Oh, look, something shiny" approach to life has at least a few upsides.  I tend to make weird connections between things really fast, which long-time readers of Skeptophilia probably know all too well.  If someone mentions something -- say, an upcoming visit to England -- in about 3.8 milliseconds my brain goes, England > Cornwall > Tintagel > King Arthur > Monty Python > the "bring out yer dead" scene > the Black Death > mass burials > a weird study I read a while back about how nettle plants need high calcium and phosphorus soils, so they're often found where skeletons have decomposed, and I'll say, cheerfully, "Did you know that nettles are edible?  You can cook 'em like spinach," and it makes complete sense to me even though everyone else in the room is giving me a look like this:

Talking to me is like the conversational equivalent of riding the Tilt-O-Whirl.

Which, now that I come to think of it, is not really an upside after all.

A more significant downside, though, is that my inability to focus makes it really hard in noisy or chaotic environments.  When I'm in a crowded restaurant or bar, I can pay attention for a while to what the people I'm with are saying, but there comes a moment -- and it usually does happen quite suddenly -- when my brain just goes, "Nope.  Done," and the entire thing turns into a wall of white noise in which I'm unable to pick out a single word.  

All of the above perhaps explains why I don't have much of a social life.

However, as a study last week in Nature Human Behavior shows, coordinating all the inputs and outputs the brain has to manage is an exceedingly complex task, and one a lot of us find daunting.  And, most encouragingly, that capacity for focus is not related to intelligence.  "When people talk about the limitations of the mind, they often put it in terms of, 'humans just don't have the mental capacity' or 'humans lack computing power,'" said Harrison Ritz, of Brown University, who led the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "[Our] findings support a different perspective on why we're not focused all the time.  It's not that our brains are too simple, but instead that our brains are really complicated, and it's the coordination that's hard."

The researchers ran volunteers through a battery of cognitive tests while hooked up to fMRI machines, to observe what parts of their brain were involved in mental coordination and filtering.  In one of them, they had to estimate the percentage of purple dots in a swirling maelstrom of mixed purple and green dots -- a task that makes me anxious just thinking about it.  The researchers found two parts of the brain, the intraparietal sulcus and the anterior cingulate cortex, that seemed to be involved in the task, but each was functioning in different ways.

"You can think about the intraparietal sulcus as having two knobs on a radio dial: one that adjusts focusing and one that adjusts filtering," Ritz said.  "In our study, the anterior cingulate cortex tracks what's going on with the dots.  When the anterior cingulate cortex recognizes that, for instance, motion is making the task more difficult, it directs the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the filtering knob in order to reduce the sensitivity to motion.

"In the scenario where the purple and green dots are almost at 50/50, it might also direct the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the focusing knob in order to increase the sensitivity to color.  Now the relevant brain regions are less sensitive to motion and more sensitive to the appropriate color, so the participant is better able to make the correct selection."

The applications to understanding disorders like ADHD are obvious, although of course identifying the parts of the brain that are responsible is only the beginning.  The question then becomes, "But what do you do about it?", and the truth is that current treatments for ADHD are a crapshoot at best.  Even so, it'd have been nice if this understanding had come sooner -- it might have saved me from being told by my third grade teacher, unkindly if accurately, "You have the attention span of a gnat."

I apparently haven't changed much, because recalling this comment made me go, gnats > a scene in one of Carlos Castaneda's books where the main character was high on mushrooms and hallucinated a giant man-eating gnat > edible mushrooms, which my wife hates > food preferences > licorice, another thing a lot of people hate > a study I read about using licorice extract to treat psoriasis.

Hey, did you know that the word psoriasis comes from the Greek word ψώρα, meaning "itch"?  I bet you didn't know that.

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The voice of nature

Yesterday I wrote about my difficulty with maintaining concentration.  My mind's tendency to wander has been with me all my life, and at after sixty years of fighting with it I'm beginning to think it always will be.  This, coupled with an unfortunate history of not sticking with things long if I don't see quick results, has been why my attempts to make a practice of meditation have, all things considered, been failures.

I've had more than one person recommend meditation and mindfulness training as a means for combatting depression, anxiety, and insomnia, all of which I struggle with.  I even did a six-week mindfulness training course three years ago, thinking that if perhaps I learned some strategies for dealing with my errant brain, I might be more successful.  But even training didn't seem to be able to fix the fact that when I meditate, I nearly always veer off either into an anxiety attack or else fall asleep.  Steering a middle course -- being relaxed and tranquil enough to gain some benefit from it, but not so relaxed and tranquil that I lose consciousness -- just never seemed to be within my grasp.

Part of my problem is that I have a loud internal voice,  I know we all deal with internal chatter, but mine has the volume turned up to eleven.  And it's not even interesting chatter, most of the time.  I sometimes have looped snippets of songs, usually songs I hate.  (Last week, I woke up at two AM with the song "Waterloo" by Abba running through my head.  God alone knows why.  I don't even like that song during the day.)  Sometimes it's just completely random musings, like while I was running yesterday and pondering how weird the word "aliquot" is.  (For you non-science folks, it means "a sample" -- as in, "transfer a 3.5 ml aliquot of the solution to a test tube."  I also found out, because I was still thinking about it later and decided to look it up, that it comes from a Latin word meaning "some.")

So most of the time, my brain is like a horse that's always on the verge of spooking, throwing its rider, and then running off a cliff.

The topic comes up because of a paper that appeared this week in the journal Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, which found that the old technique used for combatting distraction during meditation -- to focus on your breath -- simply doesn't work well for some people.  Not only is it an ongoing battle, a lot of people have the same problem I did, which is taking those mindfulness skills and then applying them during the ordinary activities of the day.

In "Exploring Mindfulness Attentional Skills Acquisition, Psychological and Physiological Functioning and Well-being: Using Mindful Breathing or Mindful Listening in a Nonclinical Sample," by Leong-Min Loo, Jon Prince, and Helen Correia, we read about a study of 79 young adults who were trained in mindfulness and meditation techniques -- but for some of them, they were instructed in the traditional "return to your breath if you get distracted" method, and others were told to focus on external sounds like quiet recorded music or sounds of nature.  Interestingly, the ones who were told to focus on external sounds not only reported fewer and shorter episodes of distraction during meditation, they reported greater ease in using those techniques during their ordinary daily activities -- and also reported lower symptoms of depression and anxiety afterward than the group who mediated in silence.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons anonym, Bronze figure of Kashmiri in Meditation by Malvina Hoffman Wellcome M0005215, CC BY 4.0]

What's funny is I was just thinking about the idea of soothing sounds a couple of days ago, when I participated in one of those silly online quizzes.  One of the questions was, "What are your favorite sounds?" -- and after I rattled off a few, I realized that all but one of them were natural sounds.  Thunder.  Wind in the trees.  The dawn chorus of birds in spring.  A hard rain striking the roof.  Ocean waves.  (The only one on my list that wasn't natural was "distant church bells at night" -- a sound that reminds me of when I was nine and lived with my grandma for a year, and every evening heard the beautiful and melancholy sound of the bells of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Broussard, Louisiana, rising and falling with the breeze.)

So maybe it's time to try meditation again, but using some recordings of natural sounds to aid my focus.  I know I'll still have to combat my brain's tendency to yell absurd and random stuff at me, and also my unfortunate penchant for giving up on things too easily.  But something external to focus on seems like it might help a bit, at least with the attentional part of it.

And lord help me, if it purges "Waterloo" from my brain, it'll be worthwhile regardless.

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I'm always amazed by the resilience we humans can sometimes show.  Knocked down again and again, in circumstances that "adverse" doesn't even begin to describe, we rise above and move beyond, sometimes accomplishing great things despite catastrophic setbacks.

In Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Hidden Order of Life, journalist Lulu Miller looks at the life of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist whose fascination with aquatic life led him to the discovery of a fifth of the species of fish known in his day.  But to say the man had bad luck is a ridiculous understatement.  He lost his collections, drawings, and notes repeatedly, first to lightning, then to fire, and finally and catastrophically to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which shattered just about every specimen bottle he had.

But Jordan refused to give up.  After the earthquake he set about rebuilding one more time, becoming the founding president of Stanford University and living and working until his death in 1931 at the age of eighty.  Miller's biography of Jordan looks at his scientific achievements and incredible tenacity -- but doesn't shy away from his darker side as an early proponent of eugenics, and the allegations that he might have been complicit in the coverup of a murder.

She paints a picture of a complex, fascinating man, and her vivid writing style brings him and the world he lived in to life.  If you are looking for a wonderful biography, give Why Fish Don't Exist a read.  You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The mental walkabout

I don't know about you, but I have a real problem with my mind wandering.

It's not a new thing.  I can remember getting grief for daydreaming back when I was in grade school.  I'd be sitting in class, trying my damndest to concentrate on transitive verbs or the Franco-Prussian War or whatnot, but my gaze would drift off to some point in the middle distance, my auditory processing centers would switch from "external input" to "internal input" mode, and in under a minute I'd be out in interstellar space or roaming around Valhalla with Odin and the Boys or rowing a boat down the Amazon River.

Until the teacher would interrupt my reverie with some irrelevant comment like, "Gordon!  Pay attention!  Why don't you tell us how to find x in the equation 5x - 9 = 36?"  I was usually able to refrain from saying what came to mind, namely, that she was the one who lost x in the first place and it was hardly my responsibility to find it, but I usually was able to get myself together enough to take a shot at playing along and giving her a real answer.

I never outgrew the tendency (either to daydreaming or to giving authority figures sarcastic retorts).  It plagued me all through college and beyond, and during my teaching career I remember dreading faculty meetings because I knew that five minutes in I'd be doodling on the agenda despite my vain attempt to be a Good Boy and pay attention.  It's part of how I developed my own teaching style; a mentor teacher told me early along that teaching was 25% content knowledge and 75% theater, and I took that to heart.  I tried to lecture in a way that kept students wondering what the hell I was going to say or do next, because I know that's about the only thing that kept me engaged when I was sitting in the student's desk and someone else was in front of the room.

One amusing case in point -- Dr. Cusimano, who taught a British History elective I took as a senior in college.  He was notorious for working puns and jokes into his lectures, and doing it so smoothly and with such a straight face that if you weren't paying attention, it could slip right past you.  I recall early in the course, when he was talking about the fall of the Roman Empire, Dr. Cusimano said, "During that time, what was left of the Roman Empire was invaded by a series of Germanic tribal leaders -- there was Alaric, King of the Visigoths; Gunderic, King of the Vandals; Oscar Mayer, King of the Franks..."

I'd bet cold hard cash there were students in the class who wrote that down and only erased it when one by one, their classmates caught on and started laughing.

I never daydreamed in Dr. Cusimano's class.

Edward Harrison May, Daydreaming (1876) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Anyhow, all of this comes up because of a study out of the University of California - Berkeley that appeared this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Entitled, "Distinct Electrophysiological Signatures of Task-Unrelated and Dynamic Thoughts," by Julia W. Y. Kam, Zachary C. Irving, Caitlin Mills, Shawn Patel, Alison Gopnik, and Robert T. Knight, this paper takes the fascinating angle of analyzing the electroencephalogram (EEG) output of test subjects when focused on the task at hand, when focusing on something unrelated, or when simply wandering from topic to topic -- what the authors call "dynamic thought," like much of the game of random free association that my brain spends a significant portion of its time in.

The authors write:

Humans spend much of their lives engaging with their internal train of thoughts.  Traditionally, research focused on whether or not these thoughts are related to ongoing tasks, and has identified reliable and distinct behavioral and neural correlates of task-unrelated and task-related thought.  A recent theoretical framework highlighted a different aspect of thinking—how it dynamically moves between topics.  However, the neural correlates of such thought dynamics are unknown. The current study aimed to determine the electrophysiological signatures of these dynamics by recording electroencephalogram (EEG) while participants performed an attention task and periodically answered thought-sampling questions about whether their thoughts were 1) task-unrelated, 2) freely moving, 3) deliberately constrained, and 4) automatically constrained...  Our findings indicate distinct electrophysiological patterns associated with task-unrelated and dynamic thoughts, suggesting these neural measures capture the heterogeneity of our ongoing thoughts.

"If you focus all the time on your goals, you can miss important information," said study co-author Zachary Irving, in an interview with Science Direct.  "And so, having a free-association thought process that randomly generates memories and imaginative experiences can lead you to new ideas and insights."

Yeah, someone should have told my elementary school teachers that.

"Babies' and young children's minds seem to wander constantly, and so we wondered what functions that might serve," said co-author Allison Gopnik.  "Our paper suggests mind-wandering is as much a positive feature of cognition as a quirk and explains something we all experience."

So my tendency to daydream might be a feature, not a bug.  Still, it can be inconvenient at times.  I know there are a lot of things that would be a hell of a lot easier if I could at least control it, like when I'm reading something that's difficult going but that I honestly want to pay attention to and understand.  Even when my intention is to concentrate, it usually doesn't take long for me to realize that my eyes are still tracking across the lines, my fingers are turning pages, but I stopped taking anything in four pages ago and since that time have been imagining what it'd be like to pilot a spaceship through the Great Red Spot.  Then I have to go back and determine when my brain went AWOL -- and start over from there until the next time I go on mental walkabout.

I guess there's one advantage to being an inveterate daydreamer; it's how I come up with a lot of the plots to my novels.  Sometimes my internal imaginary worlds are more vivid than the real world.  However, I do need to re-enter the real world at least long enough to get the story down on paper, and not end up being too distracted to write down the idea I came up with while I was distracted last time.

In any case, I guess I'd better wrap this up, because I'm about at the limits of my concentration.  I'd like to finish this post before my brain goes on walkies and I end up staring out of my office window and wondering if there's life on Proxima Centauri b.  Which I guess is an interesting enough topic, but hardly the one at hand.

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

I'm always amazed by the resilience we humans can sometimes show.  Knocked down again and again, in circumstances that "adverse" doesn't even begin to describe, we rise above and move beyond, sometimes accomplishing great things despite catastrophic setbacks.

In Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Hidden Order of Life, journalist Lulu Miller looks at the life of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist whose fascination with aquatic life led him to the discovery of a fifth of the species of fish known in his day.  But to say the man had bad luck is a ridiculous understatement.  He lost his collections, drawings, and notes repeatedly, first to lightning, then to fire, and finally and catastrophically to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which shattered just about every specimen bottle he had.

But Jordan refused to give up.  After the earthquake he set about rebuilding one more time, becoming the founding president of Stanford University and living and working until his death in 1931 at the age of eighty.  Miller's biography of Jordan looks at his scientific achievements and incredible tenacity -- but doesn't shy away from his darker side as an early proponent of eugenics, and the allegations that he might have been complicit in the coverup of a murder.

She paints a picture of a complex, fascinating man, and her vivid writing style brings him and the world he lived in to life.  If you are looking for a wonderful biography, give Why Fish Don't Exist a read.  You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages. Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do yard chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery, which is scheduled to come out in a collection called A Quartet for Diverse Instruments in the summer of 2021.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is well worth reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor. I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my dog, and he clearly had no idea.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an attention span longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]