Give me a break...

A while back I wrote a piece about the Mandela Effect, which is the idea that when you remember some major event differently than other people, it's not because your memory is wrong, it's because you have side-slipped here from an alternate universe where the version you remember actually happened.  The phenomenon gets its name from the fact that a lot of people "remember" that Nelson Mandela died in jail in the mid-1970s, which of course didn't happen.  These same folks are the ones who make an enormous deal over "remembering" that the Berenstain Bears -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as "Your parents and teachers are always right about everything" and "Kids should follow the rules or else they are bad" -- were originally the Berenstein Bears.

Why their name would be spelled different in an alternate universe, I don't know.  From watching Star Trek and Lost in Space, I always assumed that the major differences you'd find in an alternate universe is that all of the good guys would be bad guys, and because of that, many of them would be wearing beards.

But the Mandela Effect isn't going away, despite the fact that if you believe it you're basically saying that your memory is 100% accurate, all of the time, and that you have never misremembered anything in your life.  The whole thing has become immensely popular to "study" -- although what there is there to study, I don't know.  Witness the fact that there is now a subreddit (/r/MandelaEffect) with tens of thousands of subscribers.

The most recent thing to be brought to light by this cadre of timeline-jumpers has to do with the "Kit Kat" candy bar.  Apparently many people recall the name from their childhood as being "Kit Kats" (with an "s"), even though that doesn't really work with the candy's irritating ear-worm of a jingle, "Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar."  So once again, it's more likely that you're in an alternate universe than you just aren't recalling the name of a candy bar correctly.  

But now, at long last, we have someone who has proposed an explanation as to why all of this is happening.

You ready?

The Mandela Effect is caused by...

... CERN.

Yes, CERN, the world's largest particle accelerator, home of the Large Hadron Collider, which became famous for not creating a black hole and destroying the Earth when it was fired up recently.  CERN has been the target of woo-woo silliness before now; back in 2009, projects had to be sidelined for months while the mechanism was repaired after a seagull dropped a piece of a baguette onto some electrical wires and caused a short, and the woo-woos decided that the seagull had been sent back in time to take out the LHC before it destroyed the entire universe.

So I guess there's no end to what CERN can do, up to and including vaporizing specific letters off of candy bar wrappers.  But you know, if CERN can alter our timeline, don't you think there's more important stuff that it could accomplish besides changing the spellings of candy bars and cartoon bears?  First thing I'd do is go back in time and hand Donald Trump's father a condom.

But I might be a little biased in that regard.

What baffles me about all of this is that not only is there abundant evidence that human memory is plastic and fallible, but just from our own experience you'd think there would be hundreds of examples where we'd clearly recalled things incorrectly.  The fact that these people have to invent an "effect" that involves alternate universes to support why they're always right takes hubris to the level of an art form.

So anyway.  I'm not too worried about the possibility of my having side-slipped from another timeline where I am a world-famous author whose novels regularly rocket to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.  I'm more concerned at the moment over how the hell I'm going to get the "Kit Kat" jingle out of my head, because that thing is really fucking annoying.

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Mind over matter

The difficulty with a lot of claims of psychic phenomena (besides the unfortunate lack of hard evidence) is that they kind of fall apart when you say, "show me the mechanism."  Even the practitioners can't tell you how the whole thing is alleged to work.  It's very seldom you get anyone willing to go out on a limb and tell you, specifically, how paranormal experiences happen; most of them say something like "some folks can do it, others can't, it's mysterious," and leave it at that.

So the link sent to me last week by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia is a bit of an anomaly.  In it, we are given  a set of step-by-step instructions for learning...

... telekinesis.

Yes, telekinesis, the skill made famous in the historical documentary Carrie wherein a high school girl got revenge on the classmates who had bullied her by basically flinging heavy objects at them with her mind and then locking them inside a burning gymnasium.  Hating bullies as I do, I certainly understand her doing this, although it's probably a good thing this ability isn't widespread.  Given how fractious the current political situation is, if everyone suddenly learned how to move things with their minds, the United States as viewed from space would probably look like a huge, whirling, debris-strewn hurricane of objects being thrown about every time something about the former president appears in the news.

But if you'd like to be able to do this, you can learn how at the aptly-named site HowToTelekinesis.com.  But to save your having to paw through the site, I'll hit the highlights here.  You can try 'em out and afterwards report back if you had any success in, say, levitating your cat.

Polish spiritualist medium Stanisława Tomczyk levitating a pair of scissors that totally was not connected to a piece of thread tied to her fingers  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Step one, apparently, is that you have to believe that there is no external reality, because otherwise "your logical mind will be fighting your telekinesis endeavors every step of the way."  I know this would be a problem for me.  The author of the website suggests that you can accomplish this by studying some quantum physics, because quantum physics tells us the following:

Everything we see, hear, feel, taste and smell is light and energy vibrating at a fixed frequency.  This energy is being projected from within, both individually and collectively.  Our energy projection is reflected back and interpreted and perceived as “real” via the mind through our five senses. That is the condensed version of reality.

The problem is, quantum physics doesn't say any such thing, as anyone who has taken a college physics class knows.  Quantum physics describes the behavior of small, discrete packets of energy ("quanta") which ordinarily only have discernible effects in the realm of the submicroscopic.  It is also, in essence, a mathematical model, and as such has nothing whatsoever to do with an "energy projection (being) reflected back and interpreted and perceived as real by the mind."

But apparently if you're inclined to learn telekinesis, you can interpret the findings of physics any way that's convenient for you.

Oh, and we're told that it also helps to watch the woo-woo documentary extraordinaire What the Bleep Do We Know?, which was produced by J. Z. Knight, the Washington-based loon who claims to channel a 35,000 year old guy from Atlantis named "Ramtha."  The author waxes rhapsodic about how scientifically accurate this film is, despite the fact that damn near everything in the film is inaccurate at best and an outright lie at worst.

Step two is understanding your "telekinesis toolkit," which includes "empathy, mindset, and energy."  They explain it this way:

Imagine feelings being the words spoken on your phone, and empathy is the signal or wire connecting you.  Your mindset is the phone itself and energy is the electricity used to run it.  You have to have a phone, signal and power to communicate.  A lame phone, weak signal or low battery will make doing telekinesis nearly impossible.

I daresay it will.

Step three is finding a good mentor.  Since these mentors aren't free, let's just say that I had a sudden "Aha" moment when I got to this point.  The website tells us that the best mentors are at the Avatar Energy Mastery Institute, where we can learn the following:

You will learn all about energy, chakras, clairvoyance, out of body travel, mind and soul expansion, healing, higher-self, time travel, lucid dreaming and pretty much everything else a seeker could hope for.  I also know that Ormus from www.SacredSupplements.com really enhances psychic abilities and speeds the learning process.

When I saw "Ormus," something in the back of my brain went off.  I knew I'd seen this before.  At first I thought it was the name of the evil blob of black goo that killed Tasha Yar in season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation and wondered why anyone would take supplements made from that guy, but turns out his name was Armus, not Ormus.

But it still sounded somehow familiar, so I did a little research, and sure enough, a while back I did a post on Ormus, which is an acronym standing for "Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements."  And yes, I know that spells "ORME" and not "ORMUS," but since we're kind of disconnected from reality here anyhow, we'll let that slide.  Evidently the believers in Ormus think that taking this stuff can do everything up to and including (I am not making this up) changing your inertial mass, and I don't mean that you got heavier because you just swallowed something.  They claim that taking Ormus makes your inertial mass smaller, which would be surprising for any supplement not made of antimatter.

And taking antimatter supplements has its own fairly alarming set of health risks, the worst of which is exploding in a burst of gamma rays.

So anyway.  The step-by-step instructions turned out to be kind of a bust, frankly.  I'm thinking that if you do all of this stuff, telekinesis is still going to be pretty much out of the question, which is a shame, because it could be kind of fun, as well as making moving heavy furniture a lot easier.  But feel free to give it all a try.  Let me know, though, if you're planning on lobbing any heavy furniture my way.  The hate mail I get on a daily basis is bad enough.

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The lunatic fringe

If there's one thing I still don't understand about the past eight years of politics, it's the ongoing support of right-wing Christians for Donald Trump.

It's baffling.  The people who have been screeching "family values" for forty years support a guy who is a thrice-married serial adulterer who paid hush money to a stripper and porn star.  The same folks who want the Ten Commandments posted in every public school classroom back someone whose main claim to fame is breaking all ten on a daily basis.  The MAGA crowd considers Trump a "good Christian man" despite the fact that in a public speech he said his favorite book of the Bible was "Two Corinthians" and couldn't quote a single biblical verse from memory.  And the central tenets of the faith -- humility and repentance -- prompted him to state in an interview, "Why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness, if I am not making mistakes?"

What has added a whole new layer of bizarre pretzel logic to the situation is that at long last, it's registering with evangelicals that their support of Trump contradicts the actual words of Jesus Christ.  You know, Jesus Christ?  The guy the Christians believe is the Son of God?  The one the religion is named after?

So when Jesus's words fly in the face of what Trump says, it's gotta be one or the other, right?

Well, when confronted with this conflict, a majority of the evangelicals...

...side with Trump.

This has finally begun to alarm at least a few evangelical leaders, like Russell Moore, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention.  Moore said in an interview a couple of days ago:

It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — "turn the other cheek" — [and] to have someone come up after to say, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?"  And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, "I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ," the response would not be, "I apologize."  The response would be, "Yes, but that doesn't work anymore.  That's weak."  And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.

I'd say so.

In an odd synchronicity, this is a theme that comes up in my novel The Chains of Orion (scheduled for release in November).  In it, a violent reactionary cult called the Zealots revere the memory of an early spiritual leader, Blessed Julia Lowell.  But when a new manuscript is discovered containing the actual words of Blessed Julia, written in her own hand -- and those words command doing exactly the opposite of what the Zealots are actually doing -- they reject the document out of hand rather than change their ways, and ultimately assassinate the religious leader who brought it to light.

As Susan B. Anthony so trenchantly put it, "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

Add to all this the fact that some of the most outspoken evangelical leaders have, in the last few years, seemed to lose the plot completely.  The latest examples include self-proclaimed prophet Hank Kunneman, who "guaranteed" Trump would win re-election in 2020 because God himself said so.  He hasn't been much inclined to address the question since then, but just two weeks ago said that Jesus told him personally "not to apologize" for the error.  

Then we have Lance Wallnau.  Wallnau, you may remember, is the guy who in April went on record as saying that Satan was responsible for Tucker Carlson being fired by Fox News.  Well, he's still hard at it.  (Wallnau, not Satan.)  Just a couple of days ago he said he'd heard a voice while he was praying telling him, "Donald Trump will be elected for one more term," but when he turned around, no one was there.

But instead of seeing this as a sign of an incipient psychotic break, most of the evangelicals consider this business as usual.

Then there's Pastor Greg Locke, who is in another league entirely.  Locke's insane ravings have appeared here at Skeptophilia before, but he took a further leap into Cloud Cuckoo Land this week by preaching a sermon railing against The Barbie Movie, culminating with bringing out a Barbie Dream Home he'd purchased and demolishing it using a baseball bat to which he'd tied Bibles.

I swear I'm not making this up.  If you don't believe me, check out the video.

In a sane world, behavior like this would lead to the audience erupting in gales of laughter and Pastor Locke being hustled off the stage, given horse tranquilizers, and never allowed near a public event again.  Instead, the reaction of the crowd who had gathered to listen to him can be summed up as "Hallelujah!"

A friend of mine explained the response of evangelicals to Donald Trump as, "Of course they support him.  He hates the same people they do."  Free thinkers, the non-religious, immigrants, brown-skinned people, women in non-traditional roles, LGBTQ+ people.  As long as he demands an America free of any of those, the members of the Religious Right will vote for him enthusiastically.

To which I respond: well, okay.  But, you know, the Gospels?  The purported actual words of Jesus?  That contradict ninety percent of what Trump and his cronies are saying and doing?

I'm sorry, I still don't get it.

Given the fact that I just wrote a novel about this phenomenon, you'd think I wouldn't be as gobsmacked as I am.  Somehow having the lunatic fringe I wrote about in a fictional setting leap off the page into the real world is a little alarming.  At least some of the Christian leaders (like Moore) are recognizing the problem, and I have hope that a lot of moderate and progressive Christians are as appalled as I am.

Until they are in the ascendancy, however, I'm afraid that we're going to be stuck with living in a world where, as Oscar Wilde put it, "Life imitates art more than art imitates life."

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Hell's gate

As a diversion from less cheerful subjects like what is currently happening in politics in the United States, today we will consider: the Gates of Hell.

The interesting thing about the whole concept of hell is that it's connected to Christianity, and yet there's not much of a mention of it in the Bible.  The Old Testament version of the Bad Place, Sheol, was not really the traditional flaming inferno; it was more of a gray, dreary spot cut off from hope and light, sort of like Newark but with less traffic.  The concept of a fire-and-brimstone version of hell doesn't seem to come up until the New Testament, for example Matthew 10:28 and Mark 9:43, where we are introduced to such fun notions as "the fiery furnace" and "unquenchable fire" into which you get pitched if you break the Ten Commandments and commit the Seven Deadly Sins, unless you're also a deranged, doubly-impeached, multiply-indicted con man, in which case you get tens of thousands of self-proclaimed Christians supporting your re-election as president of the United States instead.

Wait, I said I was going to keep this post apolitical.  Oops.  My bad.

Because of the mention of fire, there's been a picture developed that hell is a hot place underground, which has of course connected it in some people's mind with volcanoes and other subterranean phenomena.  There are a variety of places on Earth that have been considered possible candidates for the gates to hell, three of which I describe below.

First, we have the Batagaika Crater in Siberia, which locals have nickname the "Hellmouth."  It's a pretty impressive feature, to be sure:

At its widest, it's a kilometer across and 87 meters deep, and is getting bigger. The crater has nothing to do with hell, though, unless you're talking about the manmade hell we're creating by ignoring the human causes of climate change; it's something geologists call a megaslump, when removal of groundwater and thawing of permafrost cause massive subsidence.  So it's pretty awful, but doesn't have much to do with the punishment of the damned.

A second candidate is the Necromanteion of Baiae, a tunnel system near the city of Naples which apparently hosted a magical oracle who was supposed to be able to communicate with the spirits of the dead.  She would enter the tunnel, breath the magical vapors, and come back and tell the locals what the dead had to say for themselves, which mostly was confusing, garbled nonsense, that the oracle's handlers then got to interpret whatever way they wanted.

What the dead probably should have told the oracle was "it's a stupid idea to breathe magical vapors in an area of high volcanic activity," because the gases coming out of the tunnel are high in sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, both of which are quite toxic, and explain her confusion without any magical explanation needed.  Baiae is near the Campi Flegrei, or burning fields, an area of fumaroles and boiling mud pits that illustrate that Mount Vesuvius didn't exhaust its capacity for violence when it destroyed Pompeii in 79 C. E.

Last, we have Darvaza, in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan.  Like Batagaika, Darvaza is due to the actions of people -- in this case, a natural gas drilling facility that went very, very wrong.  At some time in the 1960s -- given that we're talking about the Soviets, here, there's no certain information about precisely what happened when -- the ground collapsed underneath a gas-drilling rig, and during the collapse the methane seeping from the walls of the crater ignited.  People expected that it'd burn itself out quickly.

It didn't.

Darvaza is still burning today, and has become a tourist attraction for travelers who don't mind the fact that (1) it reeks of sulfur, (2) if you stay there long enough, the fumes will make you violently ill, and (3) there are no amenities for miles around.  But if you're an adventurous sort, it's certainly something you won't see anywhere else on Earth.

So that's a trio of candidates for being the doorway to hell. If none of these float your boat, however, there are actually dozens of others.

And that's not even counting Newark.

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Free speech vs. the truth

There are times when my uncompromising support of the right to free speech runs head-first into my uncompromising commitment to the truth.

The topic comes up because once a week, I volunteer as a book sorter for the Tompkins County (Ithaca, New York) Friends of the Library Used Book Sale.  This event, which occurs twice a year (May and October), is one of the biggest used book sales in the United States; we sort, shelve, and sell around a half a million used books yearly.

Besides my desire to help the very worthwhile cause of supporting our local library system, I also volunteer for a purely selfish reason; if I put in thirty hours, I get to go to the volunteers' presale and have first crack at the books.  The fall presale is coming up on October 1, and I still haven't gotten through all the books I bought at the spring sale.  

This fact, of course, won't slow me down a bit.

The problem with being a sorter, though, is that sometimes we have to sort (and therefore offer for sale) books that are kind of... out there.  And I don't mean weird.  Weird is fine.  This week, for example, I put in the "Physical Sciences" section a three-volume hardcover set called The Biochemistry of Collagen.  I mean, I know collagen is important, but three volumes' worth?  (Other good examples I saw recently are Fancy Coffins to Make Yourself, The Official Spam Recipe Book, and Successful Muskrat Farming.)

So bizarre isn't problematic.  What bothers me is how to handle books that are, to put not too fine a point on it, bullshit.  For example, what to do with the book I ended up with this week -- Hyemeyohsts Storm's infamous Seven Arrows.  Storm claimed to be Cheyenne, but actually is of German ancestry.  His book is supposedly about Cheyenne history and tribal beliefs, but is a mishmash of maybe five percent facts and the other ninety-five percent made-up gobbledygook.  When his book came out, naturally someone asked the Cheyenne Tribal Authority about him, and they said they'd never heard of him -- and it turned out that Storm (his actual name is Arthur Charles) had presented a falsified tribal enrollment to his publisher to convince them he actually is Native.  As far as his book, the Cheyenne consider it "blasphemous, exploitative, disrespectful, stereotypical, and racist."

So, where do I sort Seven Arrows?  Anthropology?  It isn't.  Religion?  Maybe what Storm wrote reflects his own religious beliefs; and given the popularity of the book with New Age types, evidently he's convinced quite a few folks to join in.  Fiction?  Much like Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan books, he didn't publish it as fiction.  Both men (well, for Castaneda, until his death in 1998) acted as if what they'd written was nothing more than the literal truth, which makes the books the absolute worst sort of cultural appropriation -- attractive lies dressed up as a real, if esoteric, indigenous belief system.

And there are loads of people who do think it's all factual.  Apparently both Storm's book and Castaneda's multiple volumes are still used as teaching texts in college anthropology and ethnology courses, which I find absolutely appalling given how thoroughly both authors have been debunked.

Anyhow, when the actual book was in my hands, I was really troubled about what to do with it.  I'm not allowed to do what I wanted, which was to drop it in the trash where it belongs.  I eventually decided to put it in "Religion" because it seemed the closest, but honestly, I felt guilty even doing that.  I don't want anyone reading this book and having even the slightest inclination to believe it.

What about Laurel Rose Willson's book Satan's Underground, supposedly a true account about her being subjected to ritual abuse as a child in a Satanic cult, but later proven to be a complete fabrication?  (Willson herself later switched gears and wrote a different book, under an assumed name, claiming -- also falsely -- that she was a Holocaust survivor.)  Or The Third Eye by T. Lobsang Rampa (actual name: Cyril Henry Hoskin) which purported to be the real experiences of someone growing up in a Tibetan monastery -- when the real Rampa/Hoskin was actually an unemployed plumber from Plympton, England who had never been to Tibet in his life?

What about books on homeopathy, claiming you can treat your illnesses using "remedies" that have been diluted past Avogadro's Limit?  Or ones claiming you can fix your health if you consume lots of vinegar -- or only foods that are alkaline?  (Presumably not at the same time.)  Or pretty much anything by Joseph Mercola, Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, or Dr. Oz?

And that's not even getting into the political stuff.

I know that the principle of caveat emptor applies here; if people are ignorant or self-deluded enough to believe this nonsense, especially given how much information there is online debunking it, then they deserve to be bamboozled.  As P. T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute," and the unspoken corollary was that suckers deserve everything they get.  And the principle of free speech should also apply, right?

But.

I don't want to be part of it, you know?  I don't want people reading Seven Arrows and the Don Juan books and Satan's Underground, at least not without knowing what the real story is.  (I actually own the first four Don Juan books -- but next to them on the bookshelf are Richard de Mille's The Don Juan Papers and Castaneda's Journey, the most comprehensive takedown of Castaneda's fraud I've seen.)

But at the same time, how is surreptitiously throwing them in the trash when they cross my path at the book sale any different from the book bans and book burnings I've so often railed against?

Gah.  Ethical questions like this are beyond me.  Where's Chidi Anagonye when you need him?

So far, I've been a Good Guy and haven't thrown away a book because I think it's bullshit.  I won't say I haven't been tempted, but as of right now I've sided with free speech and P. T. Barnum, as well as the Friends of the Library rules for volunteers.  I won't say it hasn't been without some pangs to my moral sensibilities, though.

Anyhow, those are the ethical conundrums faced by a book sorter.  Fortunately, most of the books I handle are unproblematic.  Even if The Official Spam Recipe Book makes me gag a little, I have a clear conscience about putting it in "Cookbooks."

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The Earth's dance partner

Ever heard of 3753 Cruithne?

I hadn't, which is surprising considering my obsession with astronomy.  It's an asteroid which is in a 1:1 orbital resonance with Earth -- in simpler terms, it is co-orbital.  It's sometimes been called "Earth's second moon," which is inaccurate because it doesn't orbit the Earth; in fact, its actual orbit is highly elliptical.  At its perigee, 3753 Cruithne is near the orbit of Mercury, and is outside the orbit of Mars at its apogee.

[Nota bene: the name "Cruithne" is from Gaelic, and because of the strange letter-to-phoneme correspondence in the Gaelic language, is pronounced "kroo-in-ya."  It's the name of an obscure king of the ancient Picts; its discoverer, astronomer Duncan Waldron, is Scottish, which probably explains the choice.]

Orbital resonance is one restricted solution to the more general three-body problem, which has yet to be solved by physicists.  The orbital interactions between two objects is thoroughly understood; add a third, and suddenly the math kind of blows up in your face.  You can run computer simulations starting with three objects of specific masses and velocities and see what happens, but a general set of equations governing any three (or more) body system has proven to be impossibly complex.  It's known that a few starting points generate stable orbits (resonance being one of those), and lots more of them prove unstable and eventually result in the objects colliding or flying apart, but trying to come up with the overarching mathematical scheme is currently out of reach.

3753 Cruithne's orbit, at least from our vantage point here on Earth, is a strange one.  If you were out in space, looking down on the Solar System, it wouldn't seem odd; an ellipse, tilted at a little less than twenty degrees away from the orbital plane of Earth:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Derivative work: User:Jecowa, Orbits of Cruithne and Earth, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But because of the weird perspective of being in a non-inertial (accelerated) reference frame, what we see on Earth is quite different.  As we watch 3753 Cruithne, it appears to be traveling in a bean-shaped orbit, first approaching us and then backing away as if we'd said something inappropriate:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons User:Jecowa, Horseshoe orbit of Cruithne from the perspective of Earth, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Makes me realize how hard it is to come up with any reasonable model of moving objects in non-inertial reference frames.  Looking at 3753 Cruithne's strange wanderings almost leaves me sympathetic with Ptolemy and his nested epicycles.  (Isaac Newton, who understood the problem better than just about anyone else, wasn't nearly so forgiving, and called Ptolemy "an outrageous fraud.")

Its orbit classifies it as an Aten asteroid, a group of asteroids whose orbits cross that of the Earth.  For those of you who are of an apocalyptic bent, however, no need to lose sleep over 3753 Cruithne; its orbital tilt makes it no threat.  Its position has been run forward by computer models for thousands of years, and it has a zero chance of striking Earth.

That's assuming the orbital resonance remains stable, of course, and there's no guarantee it will.  There are other players in this gravitational game of pinball besides the Earth and the Sun; Venus and Mercury also come close to 3753 Cruithne on occasion, and a near pass could give the asteroid enough of a gravitational tug to destroy the resonance and destabilize the orbit.  The great likelihood if this happens, though, is it falling into the Sun or being flung out of the Solar System entirely; the chance of some gravitational slingshot effect propelling it into the Earth is about as close to zero as you can calculate.

So that's today's astronomical oddity that I, at least, had never heard of.  An asteroid in an ongoing celestial dance with the Earth.  Just goes to show that to find strange new stuff out in space, you don't need to peer out at the far reaches of the universe -- there's enough right here near home to keep the astronomers busy for a long while.

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Out of your mind

One of the most striking pieces from neuroscientist David Eagleman's brilliant TED Talk "Can We Create New Senses for Humans?" centers around what is really happening when we experience something.

Regardless what it feels like, all that's going on -- the internal reality, as it were -- are some fairly weak voltage changes bouncing around in the brain.  The brain is locked inside the skull, and on its own is blind and deaf.  It needs the sense organs (Eagleman calls them our "peripherals") to send electrical signals in via input nerves to the right places in the brain, and that stimulates changes in the voltage in those areas.

That's it.  Everything you've ever experienced -- good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant -- boils down to that.  And if something messes around with any step in that process, that altered electrical state in the brain becomes the basis of what you see, hear, feel, and think.  If the wiring is faulty (thought by some researchers to be the cause of the peculiar disorder synesthesia), if there's a problem with the levels of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that either pass signals along or else block them (probably involved in schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety, among others), or if you've taken drugs that change the electrical activity of the brain -- that becomes your reality.

I was reminded of this sobering observation when I read an article sent to me my a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  Entitled, "Have Scientists Found the Source of Out-of-Body Experiences?", it describes research into a part of the cerebrum called the anterior precuneus, which appears to be involved in our sensations of conscious awareness.  Neuroscientist Josef Parvizi of Stanford University was working with epilepsy patients who were experiencing drug-resistant seizures, and found that when the anterior precuneus was electrically stimulated (the patients already had electrodes implanted in their brains to try to reduce the frequency and severity of their seizures), they had sensations of floating, and of dissociation and disorientation.

"All of them reported something weird happening to their sense of physical self," Parvizi said in an interview in Scope, Stanford Medicine’s blog.  "In fact, three of them reported a clear sense of depersonalization, similar to taking psychedelics."

Luigi Schiavonetti, The Soul Leaving the Body (1808) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What it made me wonder is if the anterior precuneus might be involved in other types of dissociation.  It's one thing when you artificially trigger a part of the brain to malfunction (or at least, alter its function) using electrodes or chemicals; but what about when it just kind of... happens?  I know I've had this experience while listening to music.  When I was about twelve, my grandma gave me a little portable radio, and I listened to it constantly.  One evening, I happened upon a radio station playing classical music, and just as I tuned in, I heard the wild, joyous trumpets and violins of the overture to J. S. Bach's Magnificat in D.

Then the chorus came in.

Three minutes later, I remembered where (and who) I was.  My face was wet with tears.  I don't know where I'd been during that time, but it wasn't in my attic bedroom in my grandma's house, with its creaky wood-plank floors and pervasive smell of dust and old books.

It was such a powerful and overwhelming event in my life that I wrote it into one of my novels, The Hand of the Hunter -- with setting and character changes, of course -- but to this day when someone says they had a "spiritual experience," this is what I think of.  It's happened to me more than once since then, always associated with music (the first hearings of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Stravinsky's Firebird, Debussy's The Drowned Cathedral, Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel, and Mozart's Requiem had similar effects on me), but that first encounter was by far the most striking.

I wonder if the mental and physical sensations that accompanied it had something to do with the anterior precuneus?  And if, by extension, it might be the source of all such transcendent experiences?

If so, what possible purpose could this serve?

Figuring that out is considerably above my pay grade, but considering the similarities -- a loss of awareness of where your body is, dissociation, the feeling of a "time slip" -- it did bring the question up.

In any case, finding a part of the brain that, when stimulated, it makes you lose connection to the outside world is pretty staggering.  I recall one of my mentors Cornell University Professor Emeritus Rita Calvo (of the Department of Human Genetics) saying that if she were going into biology today, she'd choose neuroscience instead of genetics.  "With respect to the brain, we're right now where we were with the gene a hundred years ago.  We have an idea of some of the 'wheres' and 'hows,' but little understanding of the mechanisms behind them.  Think of what was on the horizon for geneticists in 1923 -- that's what the neuroscientists have to look forward to."

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