The sleeping dragon

When most people think of seismically-active regions, Bangladesh is not ordinarily near the top of the list.

Cyclones, sure.  They come roaring up the Bay of Bengal with a horrifying regularity, and most of the country is low enough in elevation that the storms barely even slow down.  The worst was the 1970 Bhola cyclone, which still holds a record as the deadliest storm in recorded history.  The official death toll was five hundred thousand, but is likely higher than that, mostly people who lived in the lowlands near the city of Chittagong.

Unfortunately for the citizens of Bangladesh, though, they're also at high risk for earthquakes -- something that has only been recognized recently.  A 2021 study led by Muhammad Qumrul Hassan of the University of Dhaka found that the region is right on top of the junction of three different tectonic plates, the Eurasian Plate, the Indian Plate, and the small Burma Plate ("small" here means geographic area, not capacity for damage -- the devastating 2004 earthquake and tsunami was caused by a slippage of the Burma Plate relative to the Indian Plate).  But the compression and twisting of the land near the junction has created enough stresses that the entire country is crisscrossed with faults, most notably the Dauki Fault and the Haflong Thrust (which crosses into the Indian states of Meghalaya and Assam to the north).

The whole thing is exceedingly complex, and still poorly understood.  Imagine laying a sheet of pie crust on a table, and you and two friends each stand around it and push, pull, or twist it from the edge.  The sheet will wrinkle, tear, and hump up in places, but exactly where those deformations will end up isn't easily predictable because it depends on where there was weakness in the dough before you started messing with it.  This is the situation with the chunk of the Earth's crust that underlies Bangladesh.  Add to that the fact that the region is poor, and much of it is jungle- or swamp-covered and pretty inaccessible to study, and you have a picture of the extent to which we don't understand the situation.

However -- alarmingly -- a 2016 study found that the entire region has been building up stress for at least four hundred years, meaning when the some piece of fault slips, it's likely to be catastrophic.

The whole topic comes up because of a rather terrifying discovery that was the subject of a paper this week in Nature Communications.  Geoscientists Elizabeth Chamberlain (of Wageningen University). Michael Steckler (of Columbia Univeristy), and colleagues were studying a puzzling historical shift in the channel of the Ganges River, and quite by accident -- it was in an area some locals were digging in to create a pond -- they saw the unmistakable signs of seismites.  These are features in rock layers created by massive earthquakes, in this case a column of sand that had erupted through pre-existing strata during a colossal temblor.  Upon analysis, they found that the river had changed course because of a massive earthquake about 2,500 years ago.

Imagine an event big enough to shift the path of a river that size.

A change in the course of a river is called an avulsion, and it normally takes decades or centuries.  (It's an avulsion of the Mississippi River that the levee system in southern Louisiana is attempting to prevent -- something I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.)  Seismic avulsions are much less common, but when they happen it's sudden and spectacular.  The only other one I've ever heard of is the shift in the Mississippi caused by the 1812 New Madrid earthquake, which dropped the land so much it cut off a meander and created Reelfoot Lake.

The seismic record in Bangladesh indicates that they're dangerously at risk for another earthquake -- and because of the complexity and our lack of comprehension of the fault system underlying the country, the geologists aren't certain where is likeliest to rupture.  There's a sleeping dragon underneath one of the poorest countries in Asia -- and we're only beginning to understand when and how it might suddenly awaken.

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Ephemera

I think a lot of people -- and I'm very much including myself in this -- sleepwalk through a lot of our lives.

We focus on what's right in front of us, often skewed by what we expected to see or hear.  That inattentional blindness is what makes eyewitness testimony so fundamentally flawed; combine the fact that most of the time, we aren't even seeing what's around us, with the plasticity of human memory and it's a wonder eyewitness accounts are even admissible in a court of law.

I still remember the first time I was shown the most stunning example of inattentional blindness I've ever run across, in a college psychology class.  The video was set in a hotel lobby, where a young man was seated behind a table draped with a cloth.  He had a clipboard, and politely asked each passerby if they'd mind taking a brief survey.  When someone said yes, he handed them the clipboard, simultaneously "accidentally" dropping the pen on the floor behind the table.  He smiled, said, "Sorry," and ducked down to get the pen...

... but the young man who came back up was a totally different person.  They looked nothing alike.  One was blond, the other brunette; one had facial hair, the other didn't; and so on.

Virtually no one noticed the switch.  When asked afterwards, most of the test subjects said they'd had no idea there was another man hiding under the table who took the first man's place when the pen was dropped.  A couple of them said, "I thought I was just remembering wrong."

It's one of the things that has to change when you start doing science.  In science, the key is not only to see, but actually to see what you're seeing.

Take, for example, the strange little plant called false mermaid weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides).  It's in the family Limnantheaceae, which contains only eight species, seven of which are mostly found in wet meadows in California and Oregon.  False mermaid weed, though, is thought to live in many shaded woodland habitats in North America, but is such an unassuming little thing that honestly, we're not sure what its range is.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons cassi saari, Floerkea proserpinacoides flowering, CC BY-SA 4.0]

It's an annual (only lives a single season) and a spring ephemeral (only has above-ground visible parts in the spring), so that added to its tiny size makes it extremely difficult to spot.  It had been recorded in Vermont in 1916 by botanist Nellie Flynn, who during her lifetime described, collected, and sketched over twenty-two thousand different species of plants.  But since Flynn spotted it, no one has seen false mermaid weed in Vermont.

And not from lack of trying.  Botanists are trained to recognize plant species in the regions they study, and Vermont has been thoroughly surveyed.  But for over a hundred years, no one saw this tiny woodland plant in the state of Vermont.

Until botanist Grace Glynn rediscovered it last month.

"I sort of did a double-take and rubbed my eyes and couldn't believe I was seeing this plant," Glynn said.  "Most people thought it had been extirpated because of extreme flooding, invasive species and human development.  Its rediscovery is a sign that good stewardship by landowners and conservation organizations really can make a difference."

You have to wonder how many people walked right by this little plant without realizing its significance.  I'm sure I would have; I'm fair-to-middling at recognizing plants, but there's no reason this one would have struck me as anything special.  It was a combination of extensive training and an exceptionally good eye that allowed Grace Glynn to find it.

Unlike most of us, she actually saw what she was seeing.

"It was just amazing to touch this plant and to think, 'Oh, Nellie Flynn was probably the last person to ever touch this species in Vermont back in 1916,'" Glynn said.  "And I always think about how there are just these threads through history that kind of tie you to other botanists, and it just adds depth and richness, I think, to an already rich story."

The world is full of ephemera that we walk past every day and miss, caught up in our day-to-day struggles and locked in the bubble of our perception.  Most of us aren't trained scientists like Grace Glynn, but we all can work toward opening our eyes to what surrounds us.

Who knows what wonders we might end up seeing?

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Song of the Rifleman

As an avid birdwatcher, I've learned many of the vocalizations of our local species.  Some, especially the migratory species we only hear from May to September, I have to relearn every year, but a few of them are so distinct that my ears perk up whenever I hear them.  One of my favorites is the whirling, ethereal song of the Veery (Catharus fuscescens):

Another lovely one, often heard in the same sorts of deep-woods habitats as the Veery, is the Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina):

By far the strangest bird songs I've ever heard, though, we came across when we visited the lowlands of eastern Ecuador about twenty years ago.  There were two we heard but never saw -- first, the aptly-named Screaming Piha (Lipaugus vociferans), which can be heard for miles:

And second, the Great Potoo (Nyctibius grandis), which is cryptically-colored and nocturnal, so they're almost never seen.  But when they sing at night... holy crap.  Imagine being out in the jungle, alone, at night, and hearing this:

It's no wonder the locals thought there were monsters out there.

Bird songs serve two main purposes.  They're territorial defense signals and mate attractants.  (Which led a former student of mine to say, in some astonishment, "So birds only sing when they're mad or horny?")  Songs are usually only done by males, and mostly during the breeding season.  Calls, on the other hand, are done by both males and females, at any time of the year, and can mean a variety of things from "there's food over here" to "watch out for the cat" to "hey, howsyamommaandem?"  (The latter mostly from birds in the southeastern United States.)  Those of you in the eastern half of North America certainly already have heard the difference; our local Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) has a call, the familiar "chicka-dee-dee-dee-dee" that gives the species its name, and a song -- a two-note whistle with the second note a whole step below the first.  Listening to them, you'd never guess it was the same bird.

There's an interesting distinction in how animals vocalize.  Some vocalizations seem to be innate and hard-wired; the barking of dogs, for example, doesn't need to be learned.  A great many bird species, however, including songbirds and parrots, learn vocalizations, and deprived of examples to learn from, never sing.  (This includes the amazing mimicry of birds like the Australian Superb Lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae), which can learn to imitate not only birdsongs but a huge variety of other sounds as well):

The topic comes up because of a study that came out this week in the journal Communications Biology about the Rifleman (Acanthisitta chloris), a tiny species from New Zealand that is one of only two surviving species in the family Acanthisittidae, the New Zealand wrens, which are only distantly related to the more familiar and widespread true wrens.  (If you're curious, its odd common name comes from the cheerful colors of the plumage, which someone decided looked like a military uniform:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons digitaltrails, Lake Sylvan - Rifleman (5626163357) (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The Rifleman is not a songbird, and (if the preceding distinction holds) should be unable to learn vocalizations; any sounds it makes should be instinctive and fixed, like the clucking of a chicken.  But the study found that there were variations in the vocalizations of different individuals, and those variations were independent of how closely related they were; what mattered was how nearby they lived to each other, implying that the alterations in sound were learned, not innate. 

"The vocal behavior that we were unravelling in this study is very similar to what is known as vocal accommodation in human linguistics," said Ines Moran, of the University of Auckland, who led the research.  "It's similar to our ability to adjust our ways of speaking in different social, dialectal, or hierarchical settings -- modulating our voices to better fit in certain social groups."

So bird vocalizations may not be as simple as we'd thought.  Like most things, I suppose.  It brings up the silly distinction that I heard over and over again from students, that there's a split between "human" and "animal."  We're clearly animals; and, conversely, what we call "animals" share a great deal more with us than we often realize.  We have a lot to learn from the other species we whom we cohabit the planet.  It's nice that we're beginning to pay more attention.

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Silence is golden

Yesterday over at The Anomalist, a website I frequent that acts as a sort of clearinghouse for News of the Weird, I ran into a link to a post at the Jamza Online Forum by Paul Dale Roberts, whose title apparently is "Esoteric Detective" at Sacramento Paranormal Investigations.  Which, I have to admit, is pretty badass-sounding, and puts me in mind of Carl Kolchak running around chasing werewolves and vampires and zombies and succubi, not to mention special offers like Spanish Moss Monsters where you can actually see the zipper running up the front of the Monster Suit.

It's a job I'd like to have, although living as I do in the middle of abso-freakin-lutely nowhere, opportunities for esoteric detection have been pretty slim.  I've only done one in-person esoteric investigation, which fortunately happened to focus on a place not far from where I live, and once visited a haunted hotel in Arkansas.  My experience both times was that absolutely nothing happened other than in the first case I met a stoned guy who was extremely impressed that I was a paranormal investigator even though it was technically the only actual paranormal investigation I'd ever done, and in the second I saw some old ladies in period dress and had to be reassured by the other members of my party that (1) they saw them, too, and (2) the old ladies were tour guides.

So my experience as an esoteric investigator is kind of slim, but I'll just put it out there that if an opportunity arises, I'm all in. 

Anyhow, what Paul Dale Roberts tells us about is a place that sounds well worth investigating.  It's nicknamed "the Zone of Silence," and is located about four hundred miles from El Paso, Texas, near the point where the borders of the Mexican states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, and Durango meet.  From the sound of it, the Zone of Silence is a little like the Mexican version of the Bermuda Triangle.  Within this area, "radio and TV signals... are gobbled up," "strange lights or fireballs (maneuver) at night, changing colors, hanging motionless and then taking off at great speed," and there are falls of "small metallic balls... known locally as guíjolas," which are "collected by locals and visitors alike, and treated with great reverence."

My thought on this last part is that if you are the sort of person who might be tempted to treat a small metallic ball with great reverence, you probably should not be allowed to wander about in the desert unaccompanied.

One difference between this place and the Bermuda Triangle is that being dry land (extremely dry, in this case), the Zone of Silence can also host honest-to-Fox-Mulder Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  There have been several reports of meetings with "tall blond individuals," who spoke flawless Spanish "with a musical ring."  In one case, they were wearing yellow raincoats, and helped some lost travelers whose car was stuck in the mud during one of the area's infrequent, but torrential, downpours.  This is encouraging; most of the other aliens I've heard of seem more interested in evil pastimes, such as infiltrating world governments, dissecting livestock, and placing computer chips in the heads of abducted earthlings, after the obligatory horrifying medical exam on board the spacecraft, about which we will say no more out of respect for the more sensitive members of the studio audience.  Myself, I find reports of helpful aliens distinctly encouraging, and hope you won't think me self-serving if I just mention briefly that if there are any like-minded aliens visiting upstate New York soon, I could sure use a hand weeding my vegetable garden.

I found this image of a "Nordic Alien" on a website that cautions you against getting into a spaceship piloted by tall blond extraterrestrials, which honestly seems like good advice, although it must be said that this one is kind of hot-looking.  It also says that The Matrix was a coded message warning us about the dangers of being harvested by aliens. The good news is that if you are approached, all you have to do is say, "I decline your offer to a contract," and they'll have no choice but to retreat in disarray.

Of course, my more scientific readers will be asking themselves why, exactly, is this spot a "zone of silence?"  Answers vary, as you might expect.  One explanation I've seen proffered is the presence of uranium ore in nearby mountains (because diffuse deposits of radioactive ores clearly attract aliens, cause small metal balls to fall from the sky, and interfere with radio signals).  Another is that this spot represents a "concentration of earth energies."  Whatever the fuck that means.  It is also claimed that there is an "astronomical observatory thousands of years old... a Mexican Stonehenge" in the area.  Well, that's enough for me!  Uranium ore + "concentration of earth energies" + anything that can be compared to Stonehenge = some serious shit!  The Upstate New York Esoteric Detective is on it!  Mobilize the troops!

Well, not really.  Sadly, I'm not able to mobilize in this direction at the present time.  The disappointing fact is that given the current state of affairs in northern Mexico, it's not all that appealing to go down and visit the place.  I mean, tall sexy blond aliens with yellow rain slickers are one thing; dodging bullets from members of mutually hostile drug cartels is quite another.  I think the field work will have to wait until things calm down a little.

Until then, however, keep your eyes open for any other esoteric phenomena that may pop up -- I'm ready to investigate, especially if it's close enough to where I live that I can be back by nap time.  Should such opportunities come to my attention, I'll post further research notes here.  You'll be the first to know.

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The chalk mound

There's something about the mysterious that invites attention.  Curiosity is built into the human mind; it's just not in us to say "we don't know what this is, and probably never will," and forthwith let the matter go. 

Our deep and abiding fascination with the unexplained has its positive aspects, of course.  It's largely what drives science.  On the other hand, it can sometimes impel wild speculation -- and the less hard evidence there is, the broader the field is for fancy to take hold.

Take, for example, Silbury Hill, near Avebury, Wiltshire, England.  The area has been occupied for a very long time.  If you're an archaeology buff, you undoubtedly know about the Avebury Ring, a stone circle a little like Stonehenge that appears to have been built for some unknown purpose on the order of five thousand years ago.  Like the other stone circles in England, Scotland, Ireland, and northern France, the Avebury Ring is surmised to have had some sort of ceremonial purpose, but what exactly that might have been is a matter of conjecture.

Silbury Hill, though, is even more puzzling.  It's a forty-meter-tall conical chalk mound, a little less than one hundred and seventy meters in diameter at the base, making it similar in volume to the Egyptian pyramids (which were built around the same time).  It has been the subject of repeated archaeological investigations since the seventeenth century, with shafts drilled down into it vertically from the top and horizontally into the side, and what's been brought up is nothing more than the chalky local soil and fragments of branches from native plants like oak, hazel, and mistletoe.  The few bones found there were from oxen and deer, and date from about 4,500 years ago, so about the same general era as the Avebury Ring was built.

Other than that, and a handful of tiny artifacts of uncertain provenance... nothing.

It does really appear to be just a gigantic mound of clay and chalk.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Photograph by Greg O'Beirne, SilburyHill gobeirne, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Why would people build something like this?  Whatever the reason, it must have been important to them; a 1974 study estimated that constructing it -- moving and shaping the 250,000 cubic meters of heavy soil that composes it -- would have taken eighteen million person-hours.  Put another way, it would take five hundred strong individuals, working eight hours a day, fifteen years to create something like Silbury.

Naturally enough, the oddity of the structure, and its lack of any obvious purpose, has led to some bizarre speculation.  In the sixteenth century, the locals believed it had been created when the Devil brought a gigantic bag of dirt with which he intended to smother the town of Avebury, but the priest of Avebury prayed to God to intercede.  God forced Satan to drop his burden prematurely, creating Silbury.  Another legend is that a monarch named King Sil is buried inside the mound, his skeleton riding a gigantic statue of a horse made of solid gold -- but needless to say, no evidence of that has been forthcoming.  (As far as King Sil, he probably didn't exist in any case; the name Silbury seems to come from the Old English selebeorg, meaning "barrow hall.")

Even later investigators weren't immune to attributing Silbury to wild legends; eighteenth-century amateur archaeologists William Stukeley and Edward Drax thought the mound was connected to the Greek myth of the god Apollo killing the monster Python and burying him under a mountain.

Needless to say, no evil dragons were found by the excavations, either.

In the end, we're left with a mystery.  Silbury Hill was built by some extremely dedicated Neolithic Britons, but toward what end, we have no idea.  It's certainly curious, rising above the flat Wiltshire plains like the cone of a small volcano, and to this day it attracts tourists.

We are drawn to puzzles -- even if in this case, it's very likely one we'll never be able to solve.

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The ghost children

It's often difficult to look at other cultures, especially ones in the distant past, in a dispassionate way, without making value judgments about them based on the way we do things in our own.

I've written recently about the Roman Empire, which is a culture a lot of people in the western world revere for its dedication to art, architecture, and literature.  The fact remains, however, that they were (from our standpoint) classist and sexist, had no problem with slavery, and punished people for minor offenses in a way most of us would describe as extremely brutal.  You can't laud them for their (very real) accomplishments without simultaneously opening your eyes to the many ways in which their culture, from a modern perspective, breaks all manner of standards for conventional morality and ethics.  Those practices were as much an integral part of Roman society as were the beautiful things they created.

I'm not saying we should condone what they did, but it's important to try to understand it. 

Another example, and the reason the topic comes up, is the Classical Mayan civilization, which lasted from the third to the ninth century C.E., at which point the government collapsed from what appears to be internecine warfare triggered by a massive drought and famine.  The Mayans had some traditions that are difficult for us to comprehend -- a good example is the ritual ball game.  It was played on a court ruled by the Lords of Xibalba (the underworld), and so was considered to be a liminal space somewhere between the real world and the spirit world.  The losers were often sacrificed -- but it was considered to be an honor to lose your life in a ball game, and it assured you a high place in the next plane of existence.

Strange, perhaps.  Although given our adulation of sports superstars, maybe it's not as far away from our culture as it might appear at first.

Even further from our norms is their practice of ritual child sacrifice.  A paper in Nature last week describes the discovery in Chichén Itzá of 64 skeletons, mostly young boys, who were apparently sacrificed to the gods -- most intriguingly, the DNA evidence shows that many of them were closely related to each other, and a few were pairs of identical twins.  There's a legend recorded in the Mayan sacred document Popol Vuh of a pair of hero twins fighting (and winning) against hostile deities, and it's possible that this is why the twins were chosen for sacrifice.  The children died toward the end of the Classic Period, and the conjecture, based upon inscriptions in the tunnels where the skeletons were found, is that the sacrifices were to the rain god Chaac.

Understandable considering what was unfolding climatically at the time.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Escritura maya, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Unfortunately, too little is known for sure about pre-contact Mayan practices to be all that certain about the context in which these sacrifices were made.  The Christian missionaries who came into what is now Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala did far too thorough a job of stamping out indigenous beliefs and destroying the Native people's artifacts and writings to have very much to go on.  But what's certain is that child sacrifice was widely practiced -- and not of captured children of conquered enemies, but of their own offspring, leaving behind these pathetic remains, the ghost children of a long-gone civilization.

It's hard to fathom.  "Protect your children" is one of the foundational moral values of most of the world's cultures.  But what I wonder is, what if they believed this was protecting them -- dedicating them to the gods, assuring their place in the afterlife, just as the losers of the ball game believed?  Belief can make people act oddly -- at least, oddly from our perspective.  If the climate was careening toward drought, crops failing, wells and sinkholes drying up, maybe parents felt it was an honor to offer their children up, both for the sake of improving their fate in the next world but for the good of the entire community.

I'm not saying I understand it, not really.  This sort of thing still strikes me as the darkest side of what superstition can drive people to do.  But you have to wonder how an advanced alien civilization would view our own culture.  How many of our own accepted practices would horrify and disgust them?  We routinely turn our faces away from homelessness, poverty, and hunger in our own communities.  The same people who proudly call themselves "pro-life" and follow a deity who said "Let the little children come unto me" regularly vote against programs to help our own society's poor children obtain access to food and medical care.  We shrug our shoulders at famine and war and suffering, as long as the ones affected are The Other -- a different skin color, language, ethnic identity, or religion than our own.  We marginalize people -- in some countries, imprison or execute them -- because they are LGBTQ+.

Once again, perhaps we're not so different from the cultures of the past as we'd like to believe.

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Trying to escape

There's long been an association between creativity and mental illness.  Certainly there's plenty of anecdotal evidence -- people like Sylvia Plath, Robert Schumann, Virginia Woolf, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Vincent van Gogh are commonly-cited examples -- and a few controlled studies have suggested that there is at least some degree of correlation between the two.

The question, as always, is whether this correlation is indicative of causation, and if so, which direction the causation points.  Does the underlying physiological problem that causes mental illness create, as a side effect, a greater degree of creativity?  (A recent study supports this conjecture, at least in some cases.)  Or does mental illness cause a desire to cultivate creative outlets as a way to assuage the pain?

This latter possibility was the subject of a paper that came out this week from Ohio State University, authored by psychologist Joseph Maffly-Kipp.  The research had two parts.  The first was a cross-sectional study of people from ages 18 to 72, in all walks of life, that assessed their experience of depression and mood disorders, and also scored them for fantasy-proneness -- to what extent did they find themselves escaping into fantasy worlds, whether through reading, watching television or movies, creative endeavors, or daydreaming?  The other was a longitudinal study took a group of college students and tracked them for six weeks to see how both of those measures changed over time.

Both groups were also assessed for their perceptions of "meaning in life" -- to what extent did they find any kind of meaning behind their daily experiences?  This, like fantasy-proneness, might take many forms, from conventional religiosity, to spirituality, to connection with other human beings, to dedication to a higher purpose.

The results are fascinating.  The people with higher levels of depression and high fantasy-proneness scored higher on assessments for meaning in life than the ones who were high on measures of depression but low on measures of fantasy-proneness.  Apparently for depressed individuals, our ability to maintain a sense of meaningfulness in life is boosted by our capacity to escape now and again into fantasy worlds.  Interesting, too, is the piece of the sample that showed negative results; individuals low for depression-proneness had no significant correlation between fantasy-proneness and meaning in life.

It seems like if you're not depressed, your capacity for finding meaning doesn't depend on your finding that sense of meaning in the imaginary.

"We found across several studies that the tendency to engage in vivid mental fantasies was related to greater perceptions that life was meaningful, but this was only true for people with high levels of depression," Maffly-Kipp said.  "We speculated that, because depressed people are struggling to find meaning in more typical ways (e.g., religion, social relationships, careers, community, etc.), they might resort to finding it through the engagement with fantasies.  Fantasies are less constrained by reality, more controllable, and might be free from the negativity biases seen in depression.  They could help a person find a sense of belonging and purpose, even if it is imaginary."

Nøkken Som Hvit Hest by Theodor Kittelsen (1907) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Of course, it immediately made me think of my own case.  I have struggled with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember, and ever since I was a child I've not only voraciously read escapist fiction (reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time when I was about ten was a transcendent experience), but I've written it, too.  Not that everything I read or write is cheerful, mind you -- if you pick up one of my novels, don't expect that every character is going to have a happy ending, or necessarily even survive to the end.  But what my writing does consistently embody is that there is hope, that there are still selfless, brave, good people in the world, that a powerful cause is worth fighting for, and that love, loyalty, and friendship are the most important things in life.

That some of what I write is spurred by my own attempts to escape the dark, chaotic whirlwind of my own brain, I have no doubt whatsoever.  Maffly-Kipp's study doesn't settle the question of whether we mentally ill people have a higher capacity for inventing fantasy worlds because of some underlying common cause, or if the mental illness came first and trying to escape from it into fantasy worlds evolved later as a coping mechanism; and of course, it could be both, or be different in different people.  Mental illness, like anything having to do with our cognitive apparatus, is a complicated matter, admitting of few easy explanations.

But it does highlight that even those of us who live with depression and anxiety on a daily basis can find ways to manage it -- even if it means leaving the real world at times.

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