That one threw me a bit when I heard the word used in a recent episode of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Much like the fact that Pluto is no longer a planet, this is a something-that-makes-me-feel-old. Although it is true that jellies are not fish, and that calling them "jellyfish" is just as erroneous as calling sea stars "starfish", it still doesn't SOUND right. So, for today at least, I'm going to stick with the old term.
Don't believe me? Here are 5 ways in which jellyfish resemble the lord of darkness.
1. Immortality. The species turritopsis nutricula, is basically immortal. This is because individuals of the species do not, unless they are killed or eaten, ever die of old age. Instead, the creatures revert from a mature form to that of polyp once they have reached sexual maturity. This process can go on indefinitely, provided cells from the exumbrella (dome) and gastrointestinal system remain intact.
2. Giant nightmare fuel. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story entitled "The Horror of the Heights" in which a pilot travels up to an "air jungle" and encounters enormous jellyfish-like creatures once he hits 40,000ft. While the story describes these things as being "far larger [...] than the dome of St. Paul's", the largest living species of jellyfish is the Lion's Mane Jellyfish. An arctic species, the largest recorded Lion's Mane had a bell the size of a smart car and tentacles 120 feet long.
3. Omnipresence. Jellyfish are found in every ocean, and in both salt and fresh water, from tropical water to the arctic (which is where the giant ones live), and from shallow waters to the sea floor (where they hang out by the thermal vents). You'd think that would be enough, but no. Their reign knows no bounds. They've managed to invade the continents proper. Here's a map of the mainland US, with the territory of Craspedacusta sowerbyi highlighted in red.
Oh god! They're EVERYWHERE.
4. The capacity to inflict unspeakable pain. Everyone's favorite land of deadly critters, Australia, is home to the box jellyfish. An animal whose sting is so painful that the sheer pain of it cause a human to immediately enter a state of shock and can induce cardiac arrest within minutes of contact. It's best buddy, the Irukandji jellyfish, is the size of a thumbnail and takes the less direct rout to torturing people. Instead of instantaneous pain, the sting of a Irukandji is only mildly irritating at first, but thirty minutes later victims of an Irukandji sting will begin to experience "severe pains at various parts of the body (typically excruciating muscle cramps in the arms and legs, severe pain in the back and kidneys, a burning sensation of the skin and face), headaches, nausea, restlessness, sweating, vomiting, an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, and psychological phenomena such as the feeling of impending death." There is no anti-venom.
and
5. Beauty.
You were the seal of perfection, Full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
You were in Eden, the garden of God; Every precious stone was your covering:
The sardius, topaz, and diamond, Beryl, onyx, and jasper, Sapphire, turquoise, and emerald with gold.
The workmanship of your timbrels and pipes Was prepared for you on the day you were created. -Ezekiel 28:12-13
"ThiZ," you say "what is Applied Kinesiology (Hereafter shortened to "AK" which is, coincidentally, the noise I make when choking on my own bile.)?"
AK, my friends, is a "chiropractic diagnostic method" that was invited by one George Goodheart Jr. and is based on the premise that physical ailments, and even allergies, can be tested for, and diagnosed by, how the body moves. Practitioners believe that by asking participants to do things like resist movement, or eat/smell something while moving a target muscle, they can determine what is wrong with their "patient" and whether or not the product they are trying to sell will help the aforementioned mark.
Let's watch a video from our wonderful friends in Australia, shall we?
Now the tl;dw: Let's say you want to make some money with a cheap piece of Chinese plasticrap or your left-over vegetable stock.
Good for you, GIR.
Begin by asking the subject to perform a certain, awkward, physical action. (E.g. Standing on one leg and being asked to keep their balance while you press on their arm.) Most people will find the requested action at least somewhat difficult to perform, as it is not something to which they are accustomed.
Then, introduce the product you are trying to sell. It can be anything, really, even food, you don't even have to give them a sample.
(Seriously, when I tried this, the guy just asked me to hold it in my hand. The explanation I got was that the "energy" would reach my body even without you consuming the product itself. "Imagine how much more effective it will be when you actually take them!" ..."Imagine" indeed.)
Then, introduce your product and ask subject to repeat the activity. They'll perform better. Amazing!
But why?
In the case of the first activity, the balance-on-one-leg-test, the subject's ability to resist your push is entirely dependent on HOW you apply force to their arm. The first time around, forced is applied in a downward fashion, perpendicular to the ground. The second time you try, you will take advantage of the body's center of gravity. You can put your arms in the exact same spot as before, but if you push towards their center of gravity, they will find it much easier to resist.
In the case of flexibility tests, you can get better results from your subjects, simply by NOT allowing them to go back to a resting position. Have them turn, or stretch, then introduce your product while they are still in that position. The extra seconds of rest will allow their muscles to loosen up a bit, allowing them to go even further when you say "Now try just a little bit more."
Are you a liar? Yes. Are all practitioners consciously lying? Not exactly...
The problem is, half the time you run into these people, they really do think they're helping, and that their products really are effective, and that the "testing methods" they're using really do measure physical changes in the body's performance and health.
Both practitioners and their "patients" usually come into such situations already carrying a belief in the paranormal. The practitioners probably learn the tricks of AK through unconsciously learning which actions result in the "correct" response from their subjects. The patients, on the other hand, may even put more effort into their resistance, for example, if they already believe that the product works, even subconsciously.
The belief in the paranormal is of emotional importance to both parties, and practitioners take advantage of that need to believe, and any objections from the scientific community are likely to be met with aggression, and drive the two closer to each other.
And then, you know, there are the people who know EXACTLY what they're doing.
More than any other form of humiliation, possibility the most damaging, and most human, is that of saying something inappropriate. It is the single situation in which you cannot shift the blame away from yourself and are instead forced to accept your mistake. The shame is almost physically painful.
Eg. Saying infants are unpleasant when there is a mother nearby. Her kid wasn't with her at the time, ok?
Despite this, we generally do not stop swearing or voicing our opinions with people with whom we feel comfortable speaking in that manner. Despite its bad reputation, the benefits of swearing a worth the risk of making an ass of one's self .
Let us first consider swearing in a single-person system. While the topic of exactly why stubbing one's toe hurts like a sonovabitch (See? Told you.), how we deal with pain is not a matter of conscious control, we instinctively withdraw our injured body part from the offending object, and, in a fabulous expression of our species' affinity for language, vent our frustration orally. While it may not have developed explicitly for this purpose, I am particularly fond of this phenomenon in that it prevents us from attacking others or putting our fists through a wall.
In the August 5th Issue of NeuroReport, researcher Richard Stephens et. al. from Keele UniversitySchool of Psychology published the results of a study in which participants were found to perceive less pain if they were allowed to swear while they kept their hand submerged in freezing water. In addition to the perceived pain tolerance among the test group (the exception to this trend being men who "catasthrophise" or believe things are worse than they actually are) researchers noted increased heart rates in the swearing group, and hypothesized that this may be a result of the verbal cue actually triggering one's fight-or-flight response and in doing so, allows the speaker to dull their sensations of fear and pain.
Ow, dammit.
Expanding beyond control of one's emotional and physical response, we find that profanity acts as a social lubricant, a common language into which one may lower their usual vernacular in a such as way as to mimic their peers and promote social bonding. This phenomenon was explored in 2007 by Yehuda Baruch and Stuart Jenkins of the University of East Anglia in Swearing at work and permissive leadership culture in which the researchers suggest there are cicumstances under which businesses and work-groups should allow for a "permissive leadership culture" (i.e. an environment in which swearing is permissive so long as it is not used to harm others) as it may promote greater group cohesiveness and allow workers to become more productive.
The paper further describes swearing as two separate classes: Social Swearing, and Annoyance Swearing. The latter form are those words and expressions that are used conversationally. As groups grow closer, so too does their manner of speaking. Here, swearing is a positive form of social interaction which indicates trust and comfort in one's environment. Annoyance swearing, in contrast, is triggered by negative occurrences or behavior, but as mentioned above, the result can be positive as it provides a means of expression without any large physical manifestation of that same emotional state.
I love this graph. The key even makes a little face.
My favorite places to observe these interactions isn't in meatspace, but online. Through the veil of anonymity, we are all able to interact as equals. What we know and who we are guides us to others like ourselves, but it is not until one is able to inject a bit of humor, or hyperbolic swearing, that we actually begin to appreciate the existence of the person on the other end.
It is also exceptionally useful in making a point, as the use of these words adds to the hyperbolas one may create for either humorous, parodist, or even educational purposes. Many of my favorite examples of this can be found in the reviews of The Nostalgia Critic, Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's "Zero Punctuation", in YouTuber Thunderf00t's "Why People Laugh at Creationists" series and in one of my favorite shows of all time: Penn and Teller's "Bullshit".
However, it is necessary to call attention to a critical fact: all benefits from swearing stem from a pre-existing relationship with those in whose company one chooses to speak.
Despite how much I love the damn things, they are destructive when used around people with whom one has no common ground. It's fun to remark about how "fucking amazing" a black-and-white cow is to someone who gets the joke, but doing so around someone you don't know is assumes you are allowed to interact with them on an intimate level. If one has not earned the necessary (implied) permission, swearing is jarring. In contrast, when one chooses not to swear they present themselves in a passive position. The speaker assumes nothing, and in doing so is forced to slow down. This allows us to speak and write eloquently, and gives us time to actually consider the opinions of our opponents, and those with whom we are attempting to build a relationship.
"It's the words you use, not the ones you don't, that show what you know." -Penn Jillette
If one person freaks out when they visit your city, they may be just a nutter, if it's a group, they may all be drunk, but when the number of freak-out sessions goes over a couple hundred then you might want to look into it a bit more closely. 1. Stendhal Syndrome You've planned this trip for months, finally you have the chance to go see what you have so often drooled over in travel magazines. You're ready, off you go, excited to see the art and architecture of your dream city. Then you make the mistake of actually looking around... Oh my GOD! That's the most BEAUTIFUL ALLEY EVER! Holy crap-and-a-half! This is the best- Aaand now you've passed out.
Holy crap-and-a-half!
First described by Marie-Henri Beyle (aka. Stendhal), a guy who really had a thing for architecture, Stendhal Syndrome is a psychosomatic response characterized by an increase in heart rate, as well as feelings of vertigo and nausea, in response to art. Here's how the guy describes his experience in Florence:
"I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.''
For centuries it was known only through this and similar anecdotes, and it wasn't until the publication of Dr. Graziella Magherini's book "La sindrome di Stendhal" that it was finally recognized by the psychological community. The topic has since been investigated by James Elkins' "Pictures and Tears: [...]" and used in a 1996 movie which now floods all search results.
2. Paris Syndrome It seems everyone has a fairly romantic view of France, specifically Paris. Even those who claim to hate the smooth talking "frogs" can't help but to think of beautiful farmland, gorgeous people, and delicious food, and "the city of lights". This view has been fostered by hundreds of years worth of art, writing, and most importantly in recent years, film.
Mmm. Pixar.
Given the high expectations placed upon it, no wonder people feel disappointed when they finally visit, only to run into your standard culture shock and the same travel hassles that exist everywhere else in the world. Added stress (especially for travelers from countries where societal approval is considered extremely important) can come from the accidental elicitation of disapproving stares if one breaks certain unspoken social constructs (e.g. ladies should never pour their own wine, sorbet should be eaten with a fork and NEVER utter the phrase "bon appetit" in polite company -Constance Reitzler).
Westerners are lucky, in a way. Although we may not fully comprehend what we are getting into when we head to Paris, we've all heard enough horror stories to know that we should brace ourselves for the worst. Whether it's tales of riots, rude waiters (apparently most people just don't know the waiter-code) or shopkeepers from hell ("I wouldn't bother if I were you - it'll never fit!") We go in there braced, ready for action, Grr, watch us be tough. The Japanese however...
Ever since the Meiji restoration Japanese students have travelled to France as a means of assimilating western culture and use this knowledge to shape the changing nation of their birth. These trips were held in high esteem, as they were seen as symbols of wealth, and such expeditions remain in fashion today. The imagery of Paris itself, depictions of models in cafes ringed by flowers, is often used to sell high fashion and expensive goods to young Japanese consumers.
Currently around one million Japanese of all ages travel to France every year. Not only for tourism either - an increasing number are choosing to settle in their romantic idyll. But the reality of coming to terms with the profound culture shock after realising that their ideals about the French capital are unrealistic sees around 100 Japanese expatriates a year consulting a psychiatrist, and a quarter of that number hospitalised.
These problems are believed to be the result of several contributing factors: the language barrier, the aforementioned cultural differences, the disparity between expectation and reality, and overall physical and mental exhaustion. Desperate to reconcile their ideals with reality, many people may not be able to sleep or eat until they find a way to make themselves feel comfortable. If such a thing cannot be found, they will, of course, suffer physical symptoms.
Now allow me to make a prediction. This phenomenon is going to repeat itself, but not with Japanese tourists. Instead, I predict that American and British anime fans (now in the teens) will experience something similar to this when they finally get old enough (or just get the money) to travel to japan, their dream country.
Massive dissapointment in t-5 years.
3. Jerusalem Syndrome Characterized by religiously-themed obsessions and delusions, Jerusalem syndrome kicks in during visits to the city and seems to affect only those whose religions place significance on the site (i.e. No Buddhists have had to have been pried from the Western Wall with the jaws of life).
This is EXACTLY what I'd see if I went to the Western Wall.
When people dreamof Jerusalem, they do not see the modern, politically controversialJerusalem, but rather the holy biblical and religious city.Since 1980, Jerusalem's psychiatrists have encountered an ever-increasingnumber of tourists who, upon arriving in Jerusalem, sufferpsychotic decompensation.
Over the course of their 13-year study, Bar-El's team examined the cases of 1200 tourists who exhibited "severe, Jerusalem-generated mental problems" and from this were able to classify those suffering from Jerusalem syndrome into three categories.
Type I: Came to Jerusalem for a "religious mission" of some sort, had a history of pre-existing mental illness/family problems and usually traveled alone. They tend to identify with characters from their holy book, obsess of a certain political of religious idea, and develop "magical thinking" about health and healing.
Type II: Travel in groups to Jerusalem either out of curiosity or on "a mission". Although they may lack pre-existing psychotic disorders, they have tended to have already been focused on a fixed idea before arriving. Here, Jerusalem Syndrome can affect either the entire group, or just one individual within the group.
Type III ("Jerusalem Syndrome discrete type"): Regular tourists with no history of mental disorders traveling with their families or simply a tour group.
Although it seems a bit dull, Type III is by far my favorite. Apparently Type III cases have been so dramatic, that Bar-El et al. actually had to classify them into seven stages:
Anxiety, agitation, nervousness and tension, plus other unspecified reactions.
Declaration of the desire to split away from the group or the family and to tour Jerusalem alone. Tourist guides aware of the Jerusalem syndrome and of the significance of such declarations may at this point refer the tourist to our institution for psychiatric evaluation in an attempt to pre-empt the subsequent stages of the syndrome. If unattended, these stages are usually unavoidable.
A need to be clean and pure: obsession with taking baths and showers; compulsive fingernail and toenail cutting.
Preparation, often with the aid of hotel bed-linen, of a long, ankle-length, togalike gown, which is always white.
The need to scream, shout, or sing out loud psalms, verses from the Bible, religious hymns or spirituals. Manifestations of this type serve as a warning to hotel personnel and tourist guides, who should then attempt to have the tourist taken for professional treatment. Failing this, the two last stages will develop.
A procession or march to one of Jerusalem's holy places.
Delivery of a ‘sermon’ in a holy place. The sermon is usually very confused and based on an unrealistic plea to humankind to adopt a more wholesome, moral, simple way of life.
This has got to be pure schadenfreude, but this is BRILLIANT. Wheee hee hee hee. Oh don't look at me like that, it's not permanent.
Their condition usually returns to normal within5-7 days; in other words, a short-lived episode followed bycomplete recovery. These individuals clearly need treatment,and often receive it, but recovery is quite often spontaneousand not necessarily due to the treatment. Experience has taughtus that improvement is facilitated by, or dependent on, physicallydistancing the patient from Jerusalem and its holy places.On the whole, major medical intervention is not indicated; minortranquillisers or melatonin (as in cases of jet-lag psychosis)usually suffice. Our main treatment strategy is to facilitatereturn to the group or the renewal of family ties (includingwith family overseas), or, if deemed appropriate, access toa priest. [Ed. LOL] Crisis intervention psychotherapy plays an importantpart in the recovery process.
See? Now I'm gonna continue giggling, thank you very much.
If you ever want to turn the population into living zombies, I know JUST the drug.
You're hungry. REALLY hungry. The kind of where your mouth begins to get sour and your peripheral vision begins to fade. You rub your eyes, feeling the grains of sleep digging into your delicate face, you need a break, and so, like the silly little monkey you have become, you go to the store on an empty stomach, and there it is... Cue the heavenly choir. I mean, look at it! It's two things in one: pizza and Caesar chicken. Om nom nom nom nom. You run home as fast as you can, tear open the box and...
Ooooh Nooooooooooooo! This is a bigger letdown than when you got that Furby a few years back.
DIE, Childhood disappointment! DIE!
As you've probably realized by now, today's topic is what happens when what you expect meets reality.
Part One- Unrealistic expectations: We humans are lucky, not only do we have built-in self-preservation instincts and the ability to learn from past experiences, but we can also plan ahead. (As a side note, this may not be entirely unique to our species.) Planning ahead allows us to mentally "time travel", our brains actively work to predict what may or may not happen in the future, usually as a result of a certain course of action. It's a great system, but unfortunately it's not all that accurate past a certain point.
Take, for example, the case of how we perceive future happiness:
TL;DW:
We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk. When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded,we're prudent, we're cautious, we're thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless, and we're cowardly.
Imagining yourself running off a cliff, seeing yourself go splat, and then deciding against it, is one thing, but the creation of a mental model for an entire culture or even just another person, is simply beyond us.
Unless you're this guy. Rwar. You solve those mysteries.
"Well screw you Imma do it anyway!" Say our brains, and that's exactly what they do. The result? Totally unrealistic expectations about other people and places which are exaggerated positively or negatively. Once reality hits expectation, the result is often jarring enough to result in culture shock.
"How are you?"
TL;DW: There are four stages. The Honeymoon Stage ("Everything is new and bloody fantastic!"), the Negotiation Phase ("What do you mean we're having durian... again? And I want some ice cream... No... real ice cream."), the Adjustment Phase ("Meh, this is life now.") and upon return: Re-entry/Reverse Shock ("TAKE OFF YOUR F*ING SHOES! Friggin people trompin' around my house...")
But it's not just individuals that have these problems, sometimes these shocks are so severe, and so common, that they become a phenomenon in and of themselves.
No, Patrick. Go away.
Oh god! They're EVERYWHERE.
Posts
