Tag: story

Dozens Died During The Dance Epidemic of France

By Anupum Pant

Background

In the year 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea suffered with a very mysterious, contagious and a scary disease. Till date, doctors or science has no explanation on what really was going on in her body and the disease is still named among one of the most bizarre and the most unexplainable diseases ever – The Dance plague of 1518.

In the month of  July Frau Troffea came down to a quiet street in the city of Strasbourg, France and started dancing fervently on the street.  Even 6 days later, the woman was still dancing. On the 6th day, she probably died out of exhaustion.

But by the time she had stopped, the dancing disease had spread to 34 more people. And by the end of that month there were 400 others who were experiencing this irresistible urge to dance. Dozens died out of exhaustion.

Ironically, doctors and physicians suggested that the cure to this dancing plague would be to dance more. It was literally dance till you drop. Musicians were hired, stages were made for these hoards of dancers.

Similar contagious of these dancing epidemics in other European cities have been recorded in the history at least 10 other times before this. There was one in the year 1374, which the records say, spread to several towns!

Agreed the story is too old and seems to have become hyped due to repeated story telling, but clearly that isn’t the case because the certainty of the event, is established through a number of independent records.

Why was this happening?

Well, no one knows for sure. The mysterious disease has baffled scientists for years. However, there are of course some weak theories that explain the behaviour of these dancing people.

One theory says that the dancers got high on ergot – A psychotropic fungus that grows on rye and must have reached these people through bread. Since the symptoms associated with ergot poisoning are very similar to what these people were experiencing, it seems like a valid explanation. But there’s almost no chance that ergot poisoning happened…

That is because when a person gets poisoned by this fungus, they start having hallucinations and involuntary muscle contractions. However, the people who were affected by the dancing plague, according the people who had seen this happening, were clearly not willing to dance – which doesn’t happen when you are poisoned by ergot.

Also, these “muscle contractions” they were experiencing weren’t just involuntary contractions that are associated with ergot poisoning. They were moving in a very coordinated manner, actually dancing. Clearly, it wasn’t ergot.

Another possible explanation says that it was out of fear, anxiety and desperation among the people because of the widespread famine and disease in that area during this period. This is presently a widely accepted explanation.

Still, what exactly was happening their brains and what exactly caused it, no one knows.

[Source] [Read more here]

Is Global Warming Real? You’ll Find Your Own Answer

By Anupum Pant

In the year 1964, the surgeon general of U.S. Public Health Service released a comprehensive scientific report that linked cigarette smoking to several deadly diseases. Of these diseases, the worst were lung and laryngeal cancer.

Even after 10 years from when this report was released, the real dangers linked with cigarette smoking could not reach the public. And even today, after having killed 100 Million people in the last century, not everybody believes that this deadly habit, really is a deadly one. There was a reason for that…

In the face of all the scientific evidence and reports, people were still being convinced to smoke, by elaborate campaigns. Before 1964, the ads promoting smoking were too absurd. But, even after 1964, when the report was released, this propaganda did not stop. In fact it blew up, as if to cover up the scientific evidence, as if to nullify the findings of the report, to seed a doubt, and to keep the public from recognizing the truth. People were being coaxed to smoke.

Fake science

Fake science was being conjured up to disprove the findings of the 1964 report. A doubt was being created in the minds of the public. The tobacco industry, a flourishing one, was funding various institutions to create fake studies that create a doubt in people’s minds. These were real scientists who were being paid to speak.

And now people started thinking that there was an actual debate going on between scientists. They thought, since scientists weren’t too sure about the harmful effects, they need not be careful with cigarettes.

Dr. Fredrick Seitz was one big player in this. He was a founding chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute. The job of people at this institute was to popularize cigarettes (or tobacco) by creating a doubtful atmosphere, saying with phony scientific studies, that the scientists who said cigarettes caused cancer, were not really sure about what they said.

The same institute ran several campaigns against the dangers of other actually dangerous things like acid rain, ozone depletion and DDT. They said acid rain, ozone depletion and DDT weren’t really harmful. In return, they were being funded big bucks from major businesses.

Their campaign against the dangers of cigarettes delayed the response of general public by a decade. Roughly, you could even say that this very campaign was one reason that caused 10 Million deaths. They probably weren’t happy that their fake science was killing masses. But they were getting paid well. Wasn’t it a massacre?

The Next Big Thing

Pro-cigarette and others were relatively smaller campaigns. Now, they were on to something big. This time, it was the largest conglomerates – Petroleum industry – in the world who wanted to fund the institute to create phony science that would create a doubt about global warming. The petroleum industries did not want their industry to collapse after the real science came out with results that could hurt them. They wanted to create a delay in the response from the public. Just like the decade’s delay which happened after the 1964 report.

This time the lives of millions are not at stake, it’s Billions.

Now do you really think  that global warming is a delusion? Are scientists really doubtful if the world is getting hotter? Or a fake doubt is being created by the likes of George C. Marshall Institute.

Here is the video which educated me about it:

You probably have your answer.

There is no doubt. Global warming is real. The doubt that is being created is a phony one.

Hit like if you learnt something.

Suicide Attempt Turns into a Successful Surgery

By Anupum Pant

Background

I don’t mean to sound wry with the heading, but it’s a real story, and is a real fact. I can’t be held responsible, if you are stupid enough to try this “surgery” at home. Still, let me say it – Please don’t try this, even if you are stupid. There is no chance you’d survive this. The whole purpose of this article is to keep you informed.

In short, it is about a man (you could even call him a boy) who suffered from an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, shot himself in the head to commit suicide. The very act, ironically ended up curing himself of the OCD.

Crash Course in OCD

To tell you a little about OCD, it is a disorder which creates a serious problem in someone’s life if they suffer from it. They get obsessed with doing some things repetitively. For example, people often have an OCD where they feel compelled to arrange things in stacks. Or others who can’t sit in ease if their clothes are not in a perfect order. Or some, who have an obsessive fear of germs and end up washing hands several times a day….etc.

These disorders usually can make a person lonely as others start staying away from the seemingly paranoid person. Otherwise, they also create a problem in the sufferer’s life by consuming excess time, money, energy, etc of their’s. Most times, the person suffering from an OCD starts experiencing serious emotional distress or depression.

In very rare and extreme cases, where anti-depressant and behaviour therapy doesn’t work, doctors resort to performing a surgery, where they remove a part of the brain from which the problem seems to come from. Even under controlled circumstances, this surgery is considered as a very serious one.

The story

About 30 years from now, a 19-year-old boy George, from Vancouver, British Columbia suffered from a serious problem that used to interfere with his normal life. He had an obsessive fear of germs and used to wash, and used to shower hundreds of times in a single day. Yes, really hundreds, not less. Doing this took away all of his strength and he found it hard to do anything else. This made his education and general life suffer as he could not attend school or work at any place.

He was a top class student and had a pretty good IQ. But the boy was seriously depressed and often complained to his mother that he wanted to die. On unfortunate day, when the boy felt really troubled, he went down to his mother and complained that he wanted to die. This seemed like a final blow to the mother’s exasperation and she  told him to go shoot himself. Not realizing the metaphoric nature of his mom’s statement, the boy decided to go and do just that.

He went to the basement and shot himself in the head using a .22 long rifle. The bullet got lodged in the brain. Naturally, after this, he had to be rushed to the hospital. After a very long surgery, surgeons were able to remove the bullet, but couldn’t successfully remove all the fragments of the bullet that were lodged in the brain.

Fact: There was a similar accident that happened at a particle accelerator, where a proton beam travelling at almost the speed of light, destroyed a part of a man’s brain and yet it left him with almost no serious complications. He went on to complete his PhD after that!

When three weeks later he was admitted at the hospital again, for a check-up, there was no obsessive behaviour observed in him. He was left only with a few minor quirks that did not interfere much with his life. He had apparently cured himself by shooting himself in the brain and destroying the part where the problem originated from. At the same time, his IQ did not drop and and he passed other brain damage tests too! Such a miraculous surgery had never ever been recorded in the history.

[Original article]

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The Astonishingly Funny Story of Mr. McArthur Wheeler

By Anupum Pant

In a wonderful paper titled “Unskilled and Unaware of it“, two social psychologists from Cornell University, Justin Kruger and David Dunning share an incredibly funny story of Mr. McArthur Wheeler. Although it is funny, the story actually beautifully demonstrates an excellent concept – a kind of cognitive bias (discussed later in the post). Here is the story:

The Story of Mr. McArthur Wheeler

On one fine morning in Pittsburgh (PA), in the year 1995, a man aged 44, known by the name McArthur Wheeler decided to rob a bank. Since he thought he knew a lot about a peculiar chemical property of lemon juice, he decided to smear the juice on his face before executing his plan to rob the bank.
His logic – As lemon juice can be used to write invisible letters that become visible only when the letter is held close to a heat source, he thought, the same thing would work on his face too. By smearing lemon juice all over his face, he thought that his face would become invisible to the security cameras at the bank. He did not just think that, he was pretty confident about this. He even checked his “trick” by taking a selfie with a polaroid camera. I’m not sure if the film was defective, or the camera wasn’t operated properly, but the camera did give him a blank image. The blank image made him absolutely sure that this trick would work. Or he would not have ever dared to rob a bank with lemon juice on his face.

That day, he went on and robbed not one, but two saving banks in Pittsburgh. A few hours after he had done his job, the police got their hands on the surveillance tape and decided to play it on the 11 O’Clock news. An hour later, an informant identified McArthur in the news video and contacted the police with the man’s name. McArthur got arrested on the same day. Ironically, the same surveillance cameras that he was confident would not be able to capture his face, got him behind the bars. During his interaction with the police, he was incredulous on how his ignorance had failed him.

The Dunning and Kruger effect

Both the psychologists Dunning and Kruger got story of Mr. McArthur. They decided to study it more deeply. The psychologists were interested to study about the utter confidence of Wheeler that made him believe he’d be able to foil the security cameras with lemon juice on his face. He had the confidence, but he clearly wasn’t competent enough…Why was he so sure he’d succeed?

Their study finally demonstrated that the less competent an individual is at a specific task, the more likely they are to inflate their self-appraised competence in relationship to that task. This phenomenon is today known as the Dunning–Kruger effect.

As Charles Darwin rightly said:

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Dunning Kruger effect McArthur Wheeler
At zero experience in the x axis it’s not “no nothing”. It’s *Know nothing (There’s a spelling mistake in the image) – ‘On Finch’ mentioned this in comments below.

Indian Idol contestants and the Dunning Kruger Effect

This effect is clearly observed during the auditions of reality shows like Indian idol (etc). The auditions are usually thronged by a variety of good and bad singers. The ones who are bad at it, never realize their incompetence and yet are genuinely disappointed when they get rejected. Often times, they resort to noisy quarrels too.

If you’ve observed carefully, people who aren’t very good at humour or sarcasm often tell poor jokes and expect people around them to laugh hard. But when people don’t laugh, they seem genuinely shocked. It is incredible to see them totally unaware of how bad they are at it.

At every place, it is a common tendency of the least skilled people to have an inflated sense of self-competency.

Ignorance sure is a dangerous thing.

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Is There a Scientific Explanation for Everything?

By Anupum Pant

Today we have Dr. Eben Alexander III, an American Neurosurgeon and the author of a number one New York Times bestseller, in the house. Well, not really, but let us imagine he is here with us.

Background: Dr. Eben Alexander has been a member of the American Medical Association, a neurosurgeon and has taught at the Harvard school of medical sciences. He has spent a lot of time among scientists believing that there is always a scientific explanation for everything. But, one day, he experienced something that defied all scientific explanation. Turns out, there isn’t a scientific explanation for everything. Later he went on to write a number one New York Times bestselling book – Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.

Like logical open-minded Possibilians, let us read the book first, to start arguing against it. I haven’t read it yet. So, for now, I’ll stick to writing about just what I’ve learnt about it, rather than formulating theories against it.

The story: In the year 2008, Eben was affected by a severe case of bacterial Meningitis and fell into a coma for 6 days. His Neocortex showed no signs of activity. When he got cured miraculously (with just 2% survival chance) and returned from coma, he had experienced something out of this world. According to him, during the coma, he had experienced a vivid journey into the afterlife – kind of a near death experience.

The experience: When he fell into coma, he found himself in a dark and suffocating place for a very long time. Later a spinning bright light with a beautiful melody came in slowly and “rescued” him out of this agony. It took him to a fertile green land. Some points that he makes about this mysterious land:

  1. There was no need for a spoken word to communicate there. Every communication was telepathic.
  2. The instant you asked questions, you knew the detailed answers for those questions. (Something similar to the experience of Zen)
  3. The experience was more real than real-life. In comparison, real-life seemed like an illusion.

You can watch a 42 minute long interview here for further details. [Video]
I’d also suggest reading: Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind

Possibilianism

Although we’ve progressed a lot in science and technology in the past 400 years, there is a much more science doesn’t explain than there are things it can.

For instance, to make our equations sound right, we assume there is something out there we can’t touch, feel or sense in any way; we choose to call it dark matter. The most incredible thing – 90% of our universe is dark matter (and dark energy). That is too much to sweep under the rug. And we know nothing about it.

In the words of David Eagleman – “Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion.”

Or in the words of Carl Sagan – “An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.”