FRIENDSHIP STUDY

Just because you consider someone your friend doesn’t mean that they feel the same way. A new study, published in PLOS One,  indicates that people may have more one-sided friendships than they think they do, according to an article in Science of Us.

In the study, MIT researchers asked 84 undergraduates in a class to score how well they knew other people in the class. They “asked each participant to score every other participant on a 0–5 scale, where 0 means ‘I do not know this person’, 3 means ‘Friend’ and 5 means ‘One of my best friends,’" as the paper explains. Then, the participants were asked to predict how other people would score them.

Predictably, people thought that the people who they considered their friends would also rate them as friends. But this wasn’t the case. Almost half of all the friendships reported in the survey weren’t reciprocal—meaning that only one of the two people considered the other a friend. This, the researchers note, might be about social climbing: People might be more likely to claim friendship with a person of higher social standing, while people who are popular are more choosy about who they call a friend.

The study authors gave a survey to 84 college students in the same class, asking each one to rate every other person in the study on a scale of zero (“I do not know this person”) to five (“One of my best friends”), with three as the minimum score needed to qualify for friendship. The participants also wrote down their guesses for how each person would rate them.

Overall, the researchers documented 1,353 cases of friendship, meaning instances where one person rated another as a three or higher. And in 94 percent of them, the person doing the ranking guessed that the other person would feel the same way. 

Which makes sense — you probably wouldn’t call someone a friend, after all, unless you thought that definition was mutual. That’s why we have terms to capture more one-sided relationships, like friend crush or hey, I don’t really know her but I think she’s neat. Both of which, come to think of it, might have been better descriptors of a lot of the relationships in the study. In reality, only 53 percent of the friendships — a small, sad, oh honey number of them — were actually reciprocal.

Some caveats: The study was small, and all the subjects were undergraduates; friendships change over the course of a lifetime, and it’s certainly possible that, over time, many tenuous lopsided friendships can dwindle to a more solid few. But the study authors also looked at a handful of previous surveys on friendship, ranging in size from 82 people to 3,160, and found similar results: Among those, the highest proportion of reciprocal friendships was 53 percent, and the lowest was a bummer, at 34 percent.

“These findings suggest a profound inability of people to perceive friendship reciprocity, perhaps because the possibility of non-reciprocal friendship challenges one’s self-image,” the study authors wrote. Fair enough. No one likes to think of themselves as the unwanted hanger-on, chasing a relationship that doesn’t really exist and maybe never will; this blind spot, then, may be a form of emotional self-defense.

Recent research has tied friendship to major health benefits, including living longer, having better mental health, and lower risk of dementia.  While some studies have linked these benefits to specifically satisfying friendships, it’s harder to say whether people who have one-sided friendships actually find them unsatisfying, or if they derive just as much pleasure from interacting with people who only consider them acquaintances as with people who perceive their bond as closer. This might also add a layer of complexity to studies about social influence, which typically ask people about their perceived social networks.

One of the major takeaways from LOST's sideways church ending was that the main characters, a bunch of loners, found each other through friendship on the island. The theme that friendship will give one's life meaning and purpose was a powerful reflection to the show's conclusion. But this study shows that may also have been an illusion; if you look at the group of people sitting in the pews in the sideways church as friends - - - you would only be half right. Half of the people would not consider themselves friends with the other half.

Which then begs the question of the End: who was the "mutual" friend that brought all these people together? Most would think Jack - - -  but Jack was never Sawyer's true friend (a rival, perhaps). Locke and Sawyer never hung out. Sayid and Sawyer actually fought. Just about everyone had a gripe with Sawyer.  Rose and Bernard were friendly, but never good friends with anyone. They got fed up with the group to go live by themselves. The best guess of the mutual friend that everyone got along with would have been Hurley. The LOST group was then not really Jack's group, but Hurley's.

OPTICS

There were very strong clues throughout the series about illusion (there was even a boat in the marina by that name.)

The science of illusion is quite simple but with complex ramifications. Human eyes skim and our brains tend to jump to conclusions. The act of seeing something begins with light rays bouncing off an object. These rays enter the eyes through the cornea, which is the clear, outer portion of the eye. The cornea then bends or refracts the light rays as they go through the black part of your eye, the pupil. The iris — the colored portion of your eye — contracts or expands to change the amount of light that goes through.

Finally, the light rays go through the lens of your eye, which changes shape to target the light towards your retina, the thin tissue at the back of your eye that is full of nerve cells that detect light. The cells in the retina, called rods and cones, turn the light into electrical signals. That gets sent through the optic nerve, where the brain interprets them.

The entire process takes about one-tenth of a second, but that's long enough to make your brain confused sometimes, conclude neurobiologists.

By arranging a series of patterns, images, and colors strategically, or playing with the way an object is lit, the brain can be tricked into seeing something that isn't there. How you perceive proportion can also be altered depending on the known objects that are nearby. It's not magic — it's an optical illusion.

How can smart individual be "tricked" into seeing what is not there? Evolutionary scientists believe that this is part of a basic instinct of survival - - - the need to instantly recognize the environment and threats and act accordingly.  Early man was not at the top of the food chain. Large animals would attack human beings. When a mammal is a target of a hunter, it needs to develop sensory traits to help level the playing field. Optics was one of those means to detect predators.

 But the information had to be acted upon almost instanteously. And that is where human memory comes into play. If a person has had a similar experience, the brain will store important cues for instant access in case of danger assessment. The better survivors trained their mind and memory to act fast and correctly when in danger.

The application to LOST is apparent. Modern human beings have lost most of their survival instincts. This is because humans evolved into the top predator in most environments. The ability to fashion tools and weapons, strong shelters, and live in communities helped propel that change. But if the roles were reversed, as in the series, the ability to make tools, weapons, shelter, band together and quickly assess danger were all critical to the characters' survival. Or it should have been.

But with the introduction of supernatural or magical elements into the story line, the pure science of human behavior was diluted or removed from the story line equations of cause and effect. The characters were more likely tricked into seeing things that were not present; they were more apt to be manipulated due to their emotional faults than present reality. The island itself could have been a mad creation of a trickster who used the characters like lab rats running a complex maze. And the characters keen sense of believing what they were seeing would have been their ultimate downfall.

PERCEPTION

"Perception is reality."

It is a common phrase.

Perception is the the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses: the normal limits to human perception. It is the state of being or process of becoming aware of something in such a way, such as the perception of pain. It is  a way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something through a mental impressions It also means having intuitive understanding and insight.
In science, it is the neurophysiological processes, including memory, by which an organism becomes aware of and interprets external stimuli.

The word itself comes from Old Middle English for  "seize, understand."

Reality is the world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them. It is a thing that is actually experienced or seen, esp. when this is grim or problematic. Reality is a thing that exists in fact, having previously only existed in one's mind such as the paperless office may yet become a reality. It can also mean the quality of being lifelike or resembling an original. It is also the state or quality of having existence or substance such as death has no reality to young people.

In Philosophy, reality is an existence that is absolute, self-sufficient, or objective, and not subject to human decisions or conventions.


So, how a person sees, hears, or becomes aware of the world around him is his reality.

This is the foundation for the LOST mythology. Viewers has to use their own perception of the images and events on the screen to filter through their own experience and understanding to interpret the show for personal meaning and insight. This is why it is difficult to change a LOST viewer's mind on how they reacted or felt about the show. In a show about light and dark, there were no black and white answers.

Whether the island was actually a Pacific Island, or vegetation atop of alien tortoise, or a space ship, or a time vortex, or another dimension, it cannot set in stone.

Whether the characters were actually who they said they were is also open to debate. Were the characters "real" lives in the sideways world, and they dreamed of island adventures, or was it the other way around? Was Sawyer always a police officer who dreamed of being the bad guy? Was Hurley always a lottery millionaire or was he just a chicken fry cook who dreamed of being a millionaire?

LOST writers did not set down a set of story principles as authority;  incontrovertibly truths. As a result, we are left with any perception as reality.