Live from Austin!

A month ago, I wrote about myself and other myths–some interesting scientific results from research into the nature of consciousness. I missed a couple, however.

For many years, scientists have studied the nature of sleep, and of dreams. These studies have started to overlap with those looking at the nature of consciousness. One experiment involves stimulating the brain using transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS, and watching the outcome on an FMRI scanner as the patient is gradually anesthetized or allowed to fall asleep.

In the conscious, self-aware mind, TMS results in patterns of excitation that range over large areas of the brain. This kind of non-localized excitation is now being used to prove that coma victims are not brain-dead; they are asked to visualize playing a game of tennis, which produces an easily measurable and distinct excitation pattern in FMRI scans.

So similarly, TMS excitation of a conscious mind produces a clearly distributed pattern of neural firing. In a non-conscious mind, the excitation is highly localized and remains wherever the stimulation occurs. In a dreaming mind, the excitation stimulates adjacent areas, but doesn’t range as far as in the conscious mind.

So in effect, the difference between being alive and being in a coma is like the difference between a lab full of disconnected computers, and a lab full of computers connected via a network. Dreaming is like a degraded network where the signals are rerouted to nearby systems instead of their proper destination.

What struck me as shocking is this: When you’re in deep sleep, not dreaming, the network is down–exactly like when you’re in a coma, or have just died. The difference between being awake and being in non-dreaming sleep is a difference of kind, not of degree. Awake versus dreaming, on the other hand, that’s a mere difference of degree. And non-dreaming sleep versus coma–well, that’s a difference so subtle that we don’t really understand it, and it seems to have nothing to do with thought patterns.

In other words: My conscious self-awareness, the mythical “myself”, literally ceases to exist every night, just as much as it would if I actually died. There is no “me” until I start dreaming, at which point self-awareness re-emerges partially as the network comes back online. The fact that I’m a lucid dreamer is probably just my network activating more than average.

As the ancient Greeks put it, “sleep and death are brothers”. The Bible uses sleep as a metaphor for death. Now science is starting to discover that our ancient intuitive guesses about the nature of sleep and of death are pretty close to the truth.

I had always assumed that what made me me was some sort of continuity of mental process; that when I went to sleep, the activities that are me continued–just at a lower level, beneath my conscious awareness. It now looks as if this is completely wrong. But if there’s no continuity of thought process between me and the consciousness that will be animating this body tomorrow morning, then in what sense is that person actually me? He’ll have my body, and my memories, but surely that isn’t enough?

I’m only beginning to adjust my worldview to this new knowledge. The odd thing is, rather than keeping me awake at night, it’s almost comforting. If I’ve died over 10,000 times already, the thought of dying one last time seems like much less of a big deal.

I get annoyed by people who say “Oh, I never watch TV”. Sure, 90% of TV is crap; Sturgeon’s Law applies. Similarly, 90% of books are crap, but you wouldn’t hear the same people saying “Oh, I never read books”.

TV can be educational. It can even be educational and entertaining at the same time. You just need to be careful what you watch. Tonight I watched a couple of episodes of Penn and Teller’s show “Bullshit!”

I learned that until around the early part of the 20th Century, houses had a parlor. When someone died, the family would lay them out in the parlor, which was the room used for serious events. The family would clean and dress the body. Everyone would view the body in the home, satisfy themselves that the person was really dead, and do any grieving they needed to do. The body would then be taken to the burial plot, and simply buried.

Then around 1910, marketers decided that the parlor was old fashioned–and more importantly, that it was inappropriate for families to perform funerals themselves. The parlor was rebranded with a new name, designed to make it utterly clear that it was an inappropriate place for the deceased: “living room”. For your funeral services, you were to go to a “funeral parlor” and have things done by professionals. The old family heirlooms that reminded you of the past were cleared away, and new modern furniture replaced them.

The “funeral parlors” soon began inventing new services. Embalming, fancy caskets, and so on. It turns out that the funeral industry is sleazier than user car sales. My favorite bit of info from the TV show concerns rubber seals around the lids of coffins. Apparently these are often pushed as an expensive upgrade to protect the body from moisture. Unfortunately, the bacteria in the body chow down after death, producing gases. The rubber sealed coffin ends up like a pressure cooker, the body decomposes more quickly because of the heat and pressure, and eventually when the coffin loses structural integrity the liquified body tissues get pumped out through the cracks by the gas pressure.

Cremation isn’t much better. Prices vary by factors of ten, because the person doing the shopping isn’t in the mood to price compare. While you can get a $60 cardboard box, chances are they’ll try to upsell you to a $1400 wood coffin with extra fluffy pillows. (No, really.) Also, cremation’s not great for the environment, as it releases mercury from the fillings in people’s teeth.

There are alternatives, and home funerals are starting to come back into fashion. In Texas, you don’t have to embalm the body with toxic solvents; you don’t need a mortician’s license to transport the body; you don’t need a traditional fancy casket. If you want to dig a hole in the back yard, put your loved one’s body in, and plant a tree, as far as I can tell that’s legal as long as you own the land. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and haven’t researched thoroughly, so check the facts before proceeding.)

Sure, Penn and Teller are abrasive, and sometimes miss the point. However, their show on the death industry ended on a great human note. They put it this way:

It may be hard to admit, but the dead are dead. Nothing you can do will please them. Ashes don’t know if they’re in a marble urn or an old Starbucks cup. The time to treat people right is when they’re alive. A ham sandwich, a soda and a joke now mean more to your loved ones than a $10,000 coffin after they’re dead. Which brings to mind one more thing: If you’re still lucky enough to be able to do it, call your mother. Yeah, right now. You don’t know anyone in the credits and they’ll be pretty much the same next week, so call your mom. Now.

(She’s on vacation in France, or I’d have talked to her already today.)

“Uncle Joe” once said: A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. I’m not entirely sure what he meant, and it’s possible that it lost something in translation. I take it to mean that we are more affected by one death we are personally involved in, than a million we know little about.

I’ll admit that when I read about many strangers dying in some distant land, it’s a lot less upsetting than hearing about a single person dying whom I happen to have met; even if the victim is someone I only met a couple of times, their tragic death will still make me pause to re-evaluate things.

However, if I subsequently hear that their tragic death was due to autoerotic asphyxia…somehow I can’t help pausing to re-evaluate again. When Tory MPs do it, it doesn’t really elicit surprise; but to suddenly find out such a thing about someone you hadn’t previously had reason to flag as a complete deviant, that’s a different matter.

I don’t think I’m a particular judgemental person, and nor do Meyers and Briggs. I think I’m reasonably hard to shock, too. Still, a few days ago I was wondering how or why a certain person ended up dead, and now I’m thinking that maybe I’d rather not have known.

In a way, AEA is even more tragic than suicide. When your death makes Elvis’s demise look dignified, it’s inevitably going to color how people remember you. The prospect of achieving long lasting fame via News of the Weird or Fortean Times probably wouldn’t be much consolation, if you were around to be consoled.

I still remember the photograph of the poor guy somewhere in Latin America who was crushed to death by an earthquake whilst in the middle of attempting to make love to a chicken. Now that’s bad luck. Not that I believe in luck, really, but I do believe in not tempting fate. So if you, dear reader, are in the habit of staying home alone and choking yourself into semi-consciousness for a good time, please just stop. It’s not how I want to remember you. Buy a chicken or something.

I was just listening to The Sunday Format on Radio 4 when I heard a name I recognized in the credits: DA Barham.

I used to chat to Debbie Barham via IRC. She’d moved to London and gotten a regular gig writing for the Rory Bremner show, and would often while away time on IRC at odd hours as she came down from a writing binge. I think we got chatting because there was a discussion of Bond movies, and we both thought On Her Majesty’s Secret Service would have been the best Bond movie ever, if it wasn’t for George Lazenby. We’d mostly chat about radio and comedy, and try to make each other laugh, though she was also interested in geekier topics. I particularly remember her telling me how incredibly thrilled she was when they had The Stranglers guest on the Bremner show, and she got to meet them. I always felt bad that I didn’t get to meet her in person before I left for the US. Another time we got the whole channel swapping ideas for ridiculous phobias after she’d just finished an article on the subject.

Since I consider The Sunday Format to be the best radio comedy I’ve heard in years, I thought I’d see if I could find Dabs’ current e-mail address and send her a note of congratulation. As I recall, the last time I wrote to her was to compliment her on her BBC radio show celebrating The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which she showed her amazing skill by nailing Douglas Adams’ writing style precisely.

A quick search on Google revealed the horrific truth: she’s dead. She died a little over a year ago, aged 26.

Worse, she died of heart failure, from literally starving herself to death through anorexia. The Guardian has an obituary and a feature article about her. The obituary has a photo of her, in which she looks fragile, yet with a somehow piercing gaze. There’s an Evening Standard article with a color photo. Again, the same penetrating gaze. It’s not how I’d imagined she might look, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense.

She could be sharp, yes. To be funny, you often have to be. But at the same time, she was a good person, and always friendly to me. She seemed to need to write the way other people need to breathe; she wrote for everyone on every subject, yet never wanted to be in the spotlight, in spite of how much she deserved it. I’ll be seeing her name in unexpected places for years. I just wish I could hope to see it more and more.

Question from Dan

Do you believe in life/consciousness/existence/etc. after death? Whether you believe or not, do you find yourself with a clear picture of what “the afterlife is like”?

I don’t believe in life after death… but I wouldn’t say I believe it’s impossible either. I officially Don’t Know.

I will say that the “soul” model of life after death seems staggeringly unlikely to me. The Buddhist ideas make much more sense, and seem to fit very well with some of the ideas about consciousness that science is starting to come up with. (There was a recent Scientific American that covered scientific theories of consciousness.)

I don’t have any clear picture of what the afterlife is like. I have a model of how a universe with multiple deities might work, which I tend to apply to RPGs such as D&D. I’m also gradually collecting ideas around how the afterlife might work for a possible novel. If I ever write it it could be one of the few theological science fiction comedy thrillers.

—RISKS digest

Number of Americans killed by cars last year, according to the NHTSA: 42,000

Number of Americans killed every day by health problems caused by smoking, according to the CDC: 1100

From smh.com.au:

Ed Headrick, father of the modern Frisbee and designer of Wham-O’s first “professional model” flying disc, has died. He was 78.

Headrick’s wish that his ashes be moulded into memorial flying discs to be given to a select few family and friends and others who make donations in his memory will be honoured by his family, his son, Ken said today.

Peter Sellers stipulated that at his funeral, as the coffin was being taken away the accompanying music should be “In The Mood”.

Lots of people come up with wacky ways to have the last laugh on death, but all too often the family refuses to follow the wishes of the deceased.

The following is a transcript of a conversation between Bob, a telemarketer for a cemetary outside Louisville Kentucky, and phone prankster comedian Tom Mabe. Name of cemetary changed to protect the guilty.

Mabe: Hello?

Bob: Is Mr. or Mrs. Maybe in please?

Mabe: This is Mr. Mabe. [Sounds of Mabe crying.]

Bob: Hi, Mr. Mabe. This is Bob, and I’m calling to you from Evergreen Cemetary. How are you today?

Mabe: Not that good.

Bob: Oh, I’m sorry. The reason I’m calling you today is to offer you some peace of mind through pre-arranged burial plots. You can rest assured that all of the details can be taken care of for you. [Sounds of Mabe sobbing] …Sir?

Mabe: Bob, you’re not going to believe this. I lost my job on Thursday. Company closed shop. My— My wife left me.

Bob: Oh, I’m sorry.

Mabe: And I’m sitting— But this— This is so bizarre. I was sitting here just contemplating suicide, and I was praying, asking God for a sign.

Bob: Yeah, but I’m just calling you because your name is on the list.

Mabe: But no, you don’t understand, just five minutes ago I was— I was just praying and asking God for a sign, and you called.

Bob: Yeah, but I’m just doing my job.

Mabe: I know, I know, but— Something’s in control, I don’t know what it is. You’re the Angel of Death, man!

Bob: Listen, is there anybody that I can call for you?

Mabe: I’ve been working with this company for about six years now, and we just got a bigger house. We have a two-bedroom house. And I lost my job. The company, they just shut down. My wife, she’s just frustrated, she’s back in Vermont. And—things aren’t working.

Bob: Do you have any kids we can call, we can contact?

Mabe: He’s six years old. He’s at his grandmother’s house. I mean, you don’t understand. I mean—just five minutes ago I was praying, saying, God, help me through this, give me a sign of some sort—and you called.

Bob: No, no, I’m not that sign.

Mabe: You’re the Angel of Death.

Bob: Look, I can call someone and have somebody come right over there for you.

Mabe: No, I’m glad that you called. I could use your services here. I mean, how much is this stuff?

Bob: Well, you know, we have different price ranges for different sorts of plots.

Mabe: Is it, is it— So it is kind of expensive, though, some of it?

Bob: No, it’s very affordable, and this way you could take care of it all.

Mabe: Do you take financing down there?

Bob: Mr. Mabe, you know, you just got done saying that you’re thinking of taking your life. Do you have, I don’t know, a credit card? Or a checking account?

Mabe: Hold on. [Sounds of Mabe crying.]

Bob: Let me ask you this: if I got the paperwork out to you, say, this afternoon, do you think you could maybe hold off until tomorrow?

—Reported in Harper’s Magazine

Yesterday I watched Mr Death, Errol Morris’s documentary about Fred Leuchter Jr. The movie tells the story in Morris’s usual style: stay out of sight, and let the subject do the talking. Illustrate with interesting composition, archive footage, and re-enactments. Refrain from moralizing or pushing a particular agenda.

For those who don’t know: Leuchter was an engineer who, quite by accident, built up quite a reputation in the death business. He started out renovating old electric chairs, before moving on to design the lethal injection system used in many US states. Then one day he was asked if he could provide expert testimony in a Canadian legal case in which a Holocaust Revisionist was being prosecuted for hatemongering.

Fred took a plane trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau with his wife, a translator, and a cameraman. He wandered around the ruins, chipping off bits of brick and plaster without permission. He smuggled them back to Massachusetts, where he sent them to a chemical lab for analysis. He then wrote an infamous document called The Leuchter Report, which you can almost certainly find via Google if you want to.

The problem was, Fred didn’t really know anything about the chemistry of gas on solids. The lab tested for cyanide—but they tested the entire sample, not the few microns near the surface that might have shown traces of exposure to gas. Fred didn’t know about history either—he stumbled around assuming nothing at the site had changed, whereas in fact many of the buildings were disassembled to rebuild nearby farmhouses. Fred also didn’t know German, so he didn’t visit the Auschwitz archive, which has extensive original blueprints and other documentation showing that there were in fact ventilation systems and other essentials of mass execution by gas.

After publishing his report and testifying in the trial, Leuchter suddenly found that his old business contacts no longer wanted to associate with him. His wife left him, and he was driven out of Massachusetts for practicing engineering without a license. He turned to his new friends—he headed for California, where he was promised a job by someone in the Holocaust Revisionist movement.

The job failed to materialize, and Fred found himself locked out of his room. He now apparently makes a living giving speeches to adoring fans at Revisionist conferences.

It’s a sad tale of how a gullible nobody believed what people told him, and told them what they wanted to hear, so that he could feel important and famous. And in the end, it destroyed his marriage and his career.