THE HUM

Scientists have been calling it "The Hum."

On the morning of November 11, 2018, a series of unusual seismic pulses rippled around the world almost undetected.

The waves rang for over 20 minutes, emanating about 15 miles off the shores of Mayotte - a tiny island in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Africa. From there, the waves reverberated across Africa, setting off geological sensors in Zambia, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

They crossed the Atlantic, and were picked up in Chile, New Zealand, Canada, and even Hawaii nearly 11,000 miles away, as National Geographic reported the event.  t

Despite their huge range, the waves were apparently not felt by anybody. However, one person monitoring the earthquakes in the US said  live stream of seismogram displays did show the unusual waveform.

The waves were very low frequency, typical of the third phase of a normal earthquake event. However, there were no high frequency waves before this event to signal that an earthquake had occurred in that area.

One speculation is that somehow an island "had moved." How can an island dislodge itself from the depths of the Indian Ocean?

The story has a science-fiction, conspiracy theory aspect to it. In LOST, the island was an enigma. It had unique electromagnetic properties, odd light bending effects and the potential to move both time and space. But is it possible in the real world?

The earth does have a planetary electromagnetic grid. Scientists are aware that this field generation is based upon the physical elements of the planet and its core. Theorists have speculated that this magnetic field could be used to send electricity throughout the globe, or be used as a transmission device for advanced communications. 

But it is possible that the seismic waves were not from the ocean floor plates shifting but from something happening deeper inside the Earth's core. Scientists have made the analogy that the hum was like a bell ringing, and its sound waves circled the globe several times. Typically, a large bell has a striker inside its shell to send sound waves outward. A shift in the molten core could be a possible explanation of the wave activity, in conjunction with another planetary event that experts are watching closely: the probable inversion of the magnetic poles.

Then again, it may have been a signal before the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Alaska.

COMPUTER FUSION

Several theories describe the possibility that LOST was merely a technological construct of digital ties in the brain or brains of the main characters. A neuro-network fused together to share dreams, memories, fears and nightmares. The island story was merely the expunged data of a wired community in a bizarre experiment.

These theories may not be that far fetched after all. Science is continuing to press computer technology to new limits. Currently, it is trying to be integrated more into every person's daily life. From powerful hand held smart phones to wearable technology (like fit bracelets), humans are being merged into data collectors.

Google's Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, who has made 147 predictions since the 1990s and has a success rate of 86 per cent, stated recently in a Daily Mail (UK) article that within the next 12 years the human brain will be directly connected to computers.

Kurzweil says when we live in a cybernetic society we will have computers in our brains and machines will be smarter than human beings.  He claims this is already happening with technology - especially with our addiction to our phones - and says the next step is to wire this technology into our brains.

Technological singularity is when carbon and silicon-based intelligence will merge to form a single global consciousness. "By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence," Kurzweil said in the  interview with SXSW.

He believes that implanting computers in our brains will improve us."We're going to get more neocortex, we're going to be funnier, we're going to be better at music. We're going to be sexier," he said. 

But once computers are integrated directly into a person's brain, people can be networked like machines. The fantasy world of Ghost in the Shell seems to be the premise of this scientific research.  People will have the option of swapping their internal organs with sophisticated machine parts. 

But this begs to ultimate question: would this end our humanity?

THEORY OF ANCIENT MINDS

In the television re-boot of Westworld, one of the characters recently explained the theory behind the level of "consciousness" in the robotic hosts.  He explained a theory that had been kicked around since the mid-1970s. (Again, when sci-fi shows base their own mythology on actual theories, the premise of the show is enhanced in viewers.)

Bicameralism (the philosophy of "two-chamberedness") is a hypothesis in psychology  that argues that the human mind once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind. The term was coined by Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3000 years ago.

According to Wikipedia, Jaynes uses governmental bicameralism as a metaphor to describe a mental state in which the experiences and memories of the right hemisphere of the brain are transmitted to the left hemisphere via auditory hallucinations. The metaphor is based on the idea of lateralization of brain function although each half of a normal human brain is constantly communicating with the other through the corpus callosum. The metaphor is not meant to imply that the two halves of the bicameral brain were "cut off" from each other but that the bicameral mind was experienced as a different, non-conscious mental schema wherein volition in the face of novel stimuli was mediated through a linguistic control mechanism and experienced as auditory verbal hallucination.

The bicameral mentality would be non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so. The bicameral mind would thus lack metaconsciousness, autobiographical memory and the capacity for executive "ego functions" such as deliberate mind-wandering and conscious introspection of mental content. When bicamerality as a method of social control was no longer adaptive in complex civilizations, this mental model was replaced by the conscious mode of thought which, Jaynes argued, is grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language learned by exposure to narrative practice.

According to Jaynes, ancient people in the bicameral state of mind would have experienced the world in a manner that has some similarities to that of a schizophrenic. Rather than making conscious evaluations in novel or unexpected situations, the person would hallucinate a voice or "god" giving admonitory advice or commands and obey without question: one would not be at all conscious of one's own thought processes per se. Research into "command hallucinations" that often direct the behavior of those labeled schizophrenic, as well as other voice hearers, supports Jaynes's predictions.

There is application to this theory to LOST. Several fans once remarked that many characters, mostly secondary ones like the Others, were more rote in their thinking and actions than a normal human being. Some tied the work of the Dharma scientists (including mind control) with the possibility that people were brought to the island to supplement, interact and experiment with "conscious androids."

 It is not out of the realm of possibility. LOST's world collides with many random scientific disciplines. Ben was a master of mental manipulation in order to seize and retain his power. Likewise, the idea of reversing the brain's mental polarity back to the ancient way of processing thoughts (3000 + years ago) would back track to the world of ancient Egyptians, another major theme.

As in Westworld, one really does not know who is real and not real on the island. How did some people survive the plane crash, while others did not? Why did the characters have constant "flash backs?" Was it that their "mind" was being reprogrammed with virtual memories? And if these firmware updates tried to over write existing memories, is that why some characters lashed out, had mental breakdowns or began to have nose bleeds?

MAN OR MACHINE

In 1973, a movie called Westworld captured the sci-fi world with its realistic but imaginative look at an artificial intelligence based theme resort. The concept has rebooted itself in an HBO series.

In the original movie, guests could chose to live out their sexual pleasures in either a Wild West town (filled with brothels, prostitutes, drunks and gunslingers) or at a Roman orgy (with its own backstabbing senators, harlots and slaves).

The sci-fi foundation for the movie (adapted from Michael Crichton’s popular book) was that advanced robotics would come to recreate the human body to almost flawless perfection. The skin, eyes, pores, hair and features would look and feel real. The artificial brain would be almost as fast as a human brain. The last leap would be whether the androids would find a consciousness in their programs.

The drama unfolds when the robots malfunction. The gunslinger goes on a killing rampage when its "do not harm guests" governor malfunctions.

It is a classic trope of machines taking their program intelligence into conscious rage against their human creators.

This does go back to one theory of LOST. A few viewers believed that the island itself was a Westworld-type creation. It contained human robots interacting with "guests" in an adventure theme park setting. The theme was a cross between Survivor and Robinson Caruso. Two teams, the 815ers and the Others, battled to control the island. Each team was filled with robots to churn the game activity.

One example was Patchy, the Other who apparently died several times during the series. Yet, he continued to pop up to turn a story line gruesome. He was like the gunslinger in Westworld who continually got gunned down by a guest, only to return after repairs.

There is no clear distinction between who were the "guests" and who were the android game players. One could assume flight attendant Cindy was an android as an Other she mixed with both groups. One could think Jacob was also robotic. Even though his body was burned to cinders, he appeared again to the 815ers in human form to guide them on their island decisions. Even Desmond, who was jolted in the EM machine, and had program glitches (his visions) could be considered an android prop in the storylines. Even Locke would be considered a hapless robot since his form was found dead in the Ajira hold at the same time he was walking the island (with new character program of Flocke).

If you put LOST into the context of a Westworld sci-fi world, it does add some unique "what ifs" in the mythology of the series.

TIME TRAVEL THEORY

According to Stephen Hawking, there are plausible explanations for no paradox in time travel:

“A possible way to reconcile time travel, with the fact that we don't seem to have had any visitors from the future, would be to say that it can occur only in the future. In this view, one would say space-time in our past was fixed, because we have observed it, and seen that it is not warped enough, to allow travel into the past.”

Carl Sagan made a similar argument during a NOVA interview in the 1990s: “Maybe backward time travel is possible, but only up to the moment that time travel is invented. We haven't invented it yet, so they can't come to us. They can come to as far back as whatever it would be, say A.D. 2300, but not further back in time.”

So, time travel may indeed be possible, but you can’t go back any further than the point at which the time machine was first invented in the space-time line.

This line of reasoning would mean that there would be little chance of a time traveling paradox - - - i.e. going back in time to kill Hitler before World War II. But it also stops future paradoxes since the time traveler would not not what the future holds when he arrives in the future so he cannot change it. But perhaps, his mere presence in the future would cause changes that could alter the future - - - but then, is his arrival already part of that future time line?

The Hawking-Sagan reasoning was not applied in LOST. The characters quickly time skipped to the past (1970s) and to the future-present. There was no logical or systemic way the island took only a few characters along for the time ride, while leaving others in different time periods in the same place. In LOST's time travel loops, it is more likely that there were not truly time-space jumps but hallucinations, simulations, vivid dreams or laboratory rat experiments to challenge and change the main characters behaviors.

X-FILES REVIEW

The X-Files ran on Fox TV for 9 years, ending in May, 2002. It returned to the small screen after a 13 year hiatus through the work of the original creator, Chris Carter, and the original cast.

It started as a cult hit then morphed into a cultural phenomenon. The government conspiracy theories of the show's mythology hit a cord in the public, and spawned other science-fiction series and "alien" speculative shows that congregate today on the History Channel.

So I wanted to believe that the show re-boot could be well made. However, I did not have high expectations because the show leveled out and then faded away with answers to most of the big questions that the show runners had posed early on in the series.

By the end of the series it was revealed that a stealth group of men, The Syndicate, acted as the  liaison between mankind and a group of extraterrestrials that intends to destroy the human species. They were usually represented by "The Smoking Man," a ruthless killer, masterful politician, negotiator and the series' principal antagonist. As the series went along, Mulder and Scully learn about evidence of the alien invasion piece by piece. It is revealed that the extraterrestrials plan on using a sentient virus, known as the "black oil,"  to infect mankind and turn the population of the world into a slave race. The Syndicate—having made a deal to be spared by the aliens—have been working to develop an alien-human hybrid that will be able to withstand the effects of the black oil.

In between that main story arc, FBI agents Mulder and Scully went on paranormal and monster investigations of strange cases. Scully, a physician, was skeptical at first but slowly turned as she started to not being able to explain away conflicting scientific evidence. It was the chemistry between the two main characters that made the original show very good.

But in the re-boot premiere, there was no real chemistry between the main actors. David Duchovny went on monotone rapid fire speeches and Gillian Anderson looked tired and wooden in her performance. The only believable actor was John McHale's protrayal of a conservative conspiracy nut who has made a personal fortune out of poking a stick at government shadows. It is through McHale's character's television show connections that Mulder resurfaces from his apparent Unibomber retirement existence, while Scully is working with surgeons at a hospital who correct rare birth defects in children.

Part of the problem of the premiere was the forced writing to bring a new audience up to speed with the 9 years of past episodes between the main characters. It did not work.

The main reason Mulder and Scully are re-united in a new investigation is to meet a young woman named Sveta, who claims to have fragmented memories of having her fetuses stolen from her during her alleged alien abductions. She hints that Mulder had interviewed her and her family before, but may not have believed her. If she does possess alien DNA, Mulder asks Scully to run a DNA test.

 Later, McHale's character, O'Malley,  takes Mulder to a secret location where human aircraft built from alien technology is being housed by the next generation of the Lone Gunmen, but with much more resources and capital. Mulder is amazed by the alien spacecraft replica that runs on "free" energy and can disappear/teleport. We are led to believe that this is what the bad guys are after.

During her medical examination, Sveta makes several observations which allude to Scully's strained relationship with Mulder, making her uncomfortable. She remarked at one point that it was very difficult for her to contact Mulder, who appears to be living underground in some state of echo paranoia.  There is a throw-a-way line from Sveta that infers that Mulder and Scully had a child. When the test results on Sveta's blood come back, Scully orders it re-examined but we don't know why. Later, Scully herself takes a blood test to check herself.

Because of what O'Malley has shown him, Mulder comes to believe that he and Scully had been misled all along during their original career with the X-Files. Mulder's suspicions are confirmed when he with the old doctor from the Roswell crash site. Mulder tells him that he believes that alien technology was used on people and made to look like aliens had done so. He also outlines a global conspiracy involving hoarding and testing alien technology to prepare for an attack on America. The old man tells him he is close to the truth.

Following these revelations, Mulder begins to doubt his belief that aliens are the primary force behind the global conspiracy against humanity, but is instead a group of violent ultra-fascists armed with alien technology attempting to subvert democracy and assume power over the United States and then the Earth. He rattles off a list of government intrusions into America's private lives, liberty and constitutional rights since 9/11 (all done for "national security") plus the "distraction" of many different wars across the globe.

However, at a meeting Scully lies to Mulder and Sveta about the DNA test results. She states that she found no alien DNA. This puts a major hole in the hole conspiracy evidence chain. It unravels Mulder's entire theory.

Before O'Malley can go public with his claims, there is a counter strike: O'Malley's website is shut down, Sveta goes on TV to tell the world that O'Malley is a liar and a fraud, the replica space ship and scientists are killed by men dressed in military uniforms, and a UFO stops then destroys Sveta's car, seemingly with her inside. Mulder and Scully meet in a dark parking garage and Scully reveals that she has alien DNA, just like the girl O'Malley introduced to them. Mulder states that she is the key to exposing the testing and those responsible.

The episode ends revealing the Smoking Man, cancer having taken his throat,  alive in the present day, stating that the FBI unit, the X-Files,  has been re-opened to apparently re-start an investigation into his sinister group.

It is okay to manipulate and twist the main character into doubting his old past into a new conspiracy direction, but the premiere did it too swiftly and awkwardly to make us truly want to care about what is about to happen. By turning the original premise that aliens were coming to Earth to set the stage for a global invasion and world enslavement on its ear may not sit well to original fans by now claiming that the aliens are not the enemy but a band of human Illuminati taking alien technology to rule the world.

For the first part of the premiere, it was underwhelming. The second part of the premiere needs to bring back the action and clever writing between the main characters or the short series will turn into a very bad relationship counseling session between two old, tired and uninteresting main characters.

SHARED MEMORIES

One of the theories in LOST is that the main characters had some sort of "shared memory" even though they were strangers. Sci-fi aspects of this theory speculated that could have been done as a metaphor for a on-line game world, connected series of mental patient fantasies, or some mental/drug induced brain washing experiment.

But researchers are trying to implant memories into living beings.

Vulcan mind-melts and magic wands or hypnotism are ways in which people share memories in fictional films and TV shows.

But such fantastical ideas could soon become a reality, using electrodes implanted in the brain.

Neuroscientists have already begun trying implants that boost memory loss, and in the future they believe these implants could be used to replicate memories in the brains of others.

Research teams from the University of Southern California and University of Pennsylvania have been testing the technology on epilepsy patients.  These patients already have electrodes implanted in their brains, which means the experts didn't need to insert the prostheses in new patients through risky brain surgery.

The research centers on the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped part of the brain associated with the formation of memories. The hippocampus gathers sensory information that is then transformed into short-term memories, between 15 and 30 seconds.  These can then form more lasting memories, but only if they are accessed while the hippocampus is storing them. This seems to be the portal for long term memory creation.

People with significant memory deficits typically have a damaged hippocampus. Scientists are trying to restore memory loss to patients with a damaged memory center.

The USC team, led by brain implants expert Ted Berger, was interested in two particular areas of the hippocampus, called CA3 and CA1. Researchers thought that an electrical signal travelling from CA3 to CA1 was key to memory formation. Therefore, they tried to recreate a similar signal in order to restore the hippocampus' functionality. To do this, the researchers monitored the brain of 12 epilepsy patients performing a memory exercise that included memorising pictures to see how CA3 and CA1 interacted.

Eventually, they developed a mathematical model to predict the pattern of the signal CA3 would fire to CA1. The predictions were correct 80 per cent of the time. The USC team's idea is that brain implants could provide electrical stimulation resembling that key CA3 signal to improve memory in patients with hippocampus damage. 

Once scientists can create a connection to the hippocampus, and send signals that the patient can understand and remember, it is a logical conclusion that the signals can be enhanced to the point of adding visual and audio information. It would be like a direct imput of a VR movie straight into your memory banks.

The odd thing is that your brain will not realize that this is not "a real, personal memory."  And that is why LOST theorists think the complexity of the brain in creating real memories caused many continuity errors in the series because the "forced" new memories did not take or conflicted with real events.

THE NEXT STEP

Another twist on our discussion of brain patterns, personality and ability to transfer data between human beings (to network them like computers). A new movie, Self/Less, has the premise of fully memory and personality transfer of human consciousness.

When business tycoon Damien Hale (played by Ben Kingsley) faces death from cancer in Self/Less, in theaters today, he doesn’t go gently into that good night. Instead, he undergoes a radical underground medical procedure called “shedding” that allows him to transfer his mind into another, younger, healthier, lab-grown body (Ryan Reynolds’s body, to be exact) and start a whole new life with a new identity.

For now, this is science fiction—but, says Charles Higgins,  a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona, it could one day happen. “We cannot yet conceive of a machine that could scan the brain to the extent required to do what is in the movie,” he tells mental_floss. “But 100 years ago we could not conceive that in our pockets we would carry what are, essentially, supercomputers and communicators that we can talk to anyone on the planet with.”

Studying the brain is Higgins's business. “I’m interested in the interface between the mind and the brain and quantifying things that are normally unquantifiable, like depression, mood, consciousness, and self,” he says. Among the things he and his team are working on in his research laboratory: grabbing electrical signals from insect brains to build high-tech robots with excellent vision; figuring out how cognition works by creating a simulated, computerized rat that wanders around a digital maze; and gathering data on human sleep with a device he built. So though he didn’t consult on Self/Less during production—the studio brought him on afterward—he’s an excellent source to talk to about the film’s science.

According to Higgins, there are huge hurdles to jump before we transfer consciousness from one body to another. For one, there’s a lot we don’t understand about how the brain—and consciousness in particular—work. “If you ask 100 different experts to list what the brain does, you’ll get 100 different answers,” Higgins says. “The brain definitely regulates your life support. Sometimes we use the word cognition—is that what the brain does? It’s a memory system as well. You could go on and on.”

Once we understand the brain in the same way we understand the heart or a computer, Higgins says, “we’ll be able to see how brains are related and understand what the important details we need to get out of the brain are.”

Another challenge: Computers have software, but the brain isn’t quite so simple. “The software and the hardware are all [together],” Higgins says. “So what details of the brain structure do I need to read out?”

Some people, he says, think we need to go down to a quantum level. Others think it might be unnecessary to go subatomic to scan consciousness: “You could go just to the level of of neurons and other connections,” Higgins says. “But we don’t really know.”

Even if we did know where consciousness was found, we don’t have the technology to transfer it. In Self/Less, the company Phoenix Biogenic uses what looks like a souped-up fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to access and transfer consciousness from one body to another. Higgins says this is “the right idea, although at this point fMRI technology does not allow us to get down to sub-neuron resolution.”

Computers use electromagnetic markers to store and access data. The human brain uses biochemicals and proteins to make connections to organic synapses. Science does not know how the brain encodes memories, emotions and data for storage and later retrieval. Medical science does not know why in the aging process, people begin to lose memories. Rehab therapists have trained patients to mentally use artificial, mechanical limbs. 

The next step in research is to find how a person's mind interacts with his or her organic materials in the brain. 

HARD WIRED BRAIN NET

A recent story in WIRED shows how close science is to science fiction. And the sci-fi is the Star Trek collective mind think called the Borg.

The premise is simple. Brains work better than computers. They’re faster, more creative, and can store a vast amount of accessible memory. So computer science has tried to emulate the brain to create faster, better and near human computers. One way to do this is to network brains.

Researchers at Duke University announced they have wired animal brains together so they could collaborate on simple tasks. Network monkeys displayed motor skills, and networked rats performed computations.


Lead researcher,  Miguel Nicolelis, is a neurobiologist who has been wiring animal brains to machines since 1999, when they connected a rat to a robot arm, says this is the first time that anybody has directly wired together multiple brains to complete a task—a so-called brain-to-brain interface.

To build the monkey network, Nicolelis’ team first implanted electrodes in rhesus macaque brains, positioned to pick up signals from a few hundred neurons. Then they connected two or three of the macaques to a computer with a display showing a CG monkey arm. The monkeys were supposed to control the arm, directing it toward a target like a boat crew rows forward. When the monkeys got the arm to hit the target, the researchers rewarded them with juice. The monkeys don’t think “move my arm” and the arm moves—they learn what kind of thinking makes the arm move and keep doing that—because monkeys want the juice reward.

The rat study was even weirder as it involved the transfer of data.  The neuroscientists directly wired four rats’ brains together—using the implants to both collect and transmit information about neural activity—so one rat that responded to touch, for example, could pass on their knowledge of that stimulus to another rat. Then the researchers set the rats to a bunch of different abstract tasks—guessing whether it might rain from temperature and air pressure data, for example, or telling the difference between different kinds of touch-stimuli. The brain collectives always did at least as well on those tests as an individual rat would have, and sometimes even better.

The goal of the research is see if networking brains might help accelerate medical rehab in people who have neurological damage such as relearning motor skills after a stroke or brain injury. Normally, this rehabilitation is a long, painstaking process. Nicolelis wants to learn if a healthy person’s brain could help a stroke patient re-learn how to move a paralyzed leg faster than current therapies do.

A few LOST theories speculated that the real premise of the show was a vast neuro-network linking various individuals together in a vivid, digital universe like Ghost in the Shell. Memories, emotions, experiences, goals, aspirations, fears and knowledge combine to be one's ghost in an alternative, cyber-reality.

If the main characters were not "real" in the sense of being humans surviving a plane crash on a mysterious island but virtual selves caught up in an illusion of surviving a plane crash on an island filled with the collective memories, emotions, experiences, goals, aspirations, and fears - - - that could create a very real looking, complex world. It would also explain how certain continuity errors, mistakes and criss crossed fantasy, science and sci-fi elements could co-exist in the same main story line.

The idea that the characters are actually institutionalized individuals connected by brain electrodes is not a new theory. Some speculated that this set up would be found in a mental institution (where Hurley went) or a medical research facility (like DHARMA) or even a prison hospital ward where illicit medical experimentation on mental patients used to be performed in secret. 

If this was the true premise, sedated or coma patients were linked together to share their dreams and nightmares in shared space, would this make the show experience any different to you? Would the ending make more sense to you?

BRAIN WAVES

Despite all the physical poking and question &  answer probing, we really don't know how the human brain functions. We think it is like a hard drive, but we cannot download its information. We can test stimulation to see where electro-neurons fire in a brain CAT scan, but don't know how information is stored in a biochemical, electromagnetic or other way. It may be the most important and confusing organ in our bodies; it plays a central role in both our intellectual and emotional states. In fact, the overlap between intellectual and emotional is razor thin.

WIRED published a recent article on how science is trying to probe further into mental illness.

A brain surgeon begins an anterior cingulotomy by drilling a small hole into a patient’s skull. The surgeon then inserts a tiny blade, cutting a path through brain tissue, then inserts a probe past sensitive nerves and bundles of blood vessels until it reaches a specific cluster of neural connections, a kind of switchboard linking emotional triggers to cognitive tasks. With the probe in place, the surgeon fires up a laser, burning away tissue until the beam has hollowed out about half a teaspoon of grey matter. 

This is modern psychosurgery: ablating parts of the brain to treat mental illnesses. 

Instead of a big scalpel, it is a narrow focus beam of light that cuts away gray matter. This is the new lobotomy, which was once in favor in the 1930s to treat aggressive, demented, or otherwise affected people.

Removing parts of a person’s brain is always a dicey proposition. But for people who are mentally ill, when pills and psychiatry offer no solace, the laser-tipped probe can be a welcome relief. Physicians perform these procedures as a last resort only on people who’ve failed to respond to at least three types of medications, and for whom months on a counselor’s couch have had no effect. 

In the 1990s that physicians  brought them back to treat a mental illness: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Without any visible biomarkers, obsessive-compulsive disorder is difficult to treat with drugs. But neuroscientists have narrowed down the faulty wiring involved in the disorder to fewer than a half dozen places in the brain—some of which psychosurgery can target. Probably the best target is a region called the anterior cingulate cortex. Put your finger on your temple, then move it about an inch back. If you were to triangulate a point between your fingertip, the top of your head, and the center of your forehead, you’d land roughly on the right spot.

This may seem strange, but drilling a hole and inserting a fiber optic tube to fire a laser into your brain sounds science fiction like Ghost in the Shell. But since medical science is not at the Star Trek stage of being able to diagnose at the molecular level, physicians are still fishing with hand grenades.

One can easily see the road being built in this field of study. And the pit falls. If one can insert an optic thread into the brain to destroy, alter or control a person's mental state, why can't at some point pull out the brain's information to be placed in another vessel (like a computer core). That's very Max Headroom. And considering the whole field of cryogenics is to keep people alive forever, keeping their brain, consciousness or information stored on a hard drive seems to fall in a solid second place.

We don't know how a patient reacts when parts of his brain are being probed by psychosurgery. Does he hallucinate? Does he dream? Does he travel to a dangerous tropical island to fight smoke monsters (the subconscious representation of a laser burning brain cells to ash)? Science gives a plausible sci-fi foundation for many LOST mental illness premise theories.

THE BACKGROUND CHARACTER

There was one thing that moved through the island stories in stealth mode: Vincent.

Walt's dog was the first to find and wake Jack after the crash.
Vincent was also the reason Michael tried to bond with his son by going into the jungle to find the lost dog.
Vincent was the one character that no one suspected of doing anything wrong.

But one clue that everyone missed first time around was this:

if Walt was so attached to Vincent, why did he not bring the dog with him on the raft?

If the one true rule of the island was that the smoke monster could not leave it - - - that could lead to an assumption that Vincent was NOT real, but a smoke monster in disguise. Which makes perfect sense if the smoke monster wanted to learn about the new humans on its island. What better way to gather intelligence than roaming through the camp listening to what everyone was saying. Vincent would have been the perfect spy.

We were introduced to Vincent in an odd way. Shortly after the crash. Vincent was searching the jungle. While doing this, he heard a whistle. It was Christian, who we would know later, was dead. And this Christian form was actually a smoke monster. He called Vincent over and told him to go wake up "his son." As Vincent ran off towards Jack to do this, Christian stated that Jack "had work to do." Vincent then continued running until he found Jack, who had just regained consciousness. As Jack awoke, he saw Vincent running towards him through the jungle and stopping to look at Jack. Vincent then continued exploring the jungle.

But since he had a "light" coat, perhaps Vincent was a manifestation of Jacob, who some believe was also a smoke monster due to his immortality and his inability to kill another smoke monster, MIB. Perhaps, both smoke monsters needed to awake, reincarnate or "save" a dead or dying Jack in order to fulfill their mutual desire to "die and leave the island."

We know that many "lost" souls remain trapped on the island (the whispers) including Michael. In the end, Vincent returns to the bamboo jungle to curl up next to dying Jack. Was this Jacob comforting Jack for taking the leadership role on the island - - - to direct his soul to the afterlife reunion?

Likewise, was Jacob in Vincent form attached Jack's dying soul from the plane crash into the island realm so it could be prepared for the after life?

THE LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE

Throughout human existence, mankind has been aware of a few absolute truths: people are born and people die.

It is how one perceives life is what has changed over the tens of thousands of years.  In the past, ancient cultures mostly saw their lives in the cycles of Nature. Every year, like the seasons, would follow birth, harvest, death and rebirth. But in modern societies, the view is that life is a linear plane where each year of existence is another marker on a ruler.

Also, it is interesting that ancient cultures believed that there were present gateways from their creator gods to themselves on Earth. Ancient people looked to the stars in the heavens as the source of their own lives, including seeing the Milky Way as a portal to everlasting life.  Modern religions have adapted some of those past beliefs into a system of morality, where the human spirit lives on after mortal death on Earth, to be transported to a new realm of existence (heaven or hell).

But in this modern view, there is debate on whether there are intermediate steps in the transition from human to soul spirit. The ancient Egyptians believed that a human soul is divided at death so one part has to suffer judgment through a long, dangerous journey through the underworld with the hope to be reunited with its other part in paradise. Modern theology tends to state that if a person is good in his or her life, they will be rewarded in some fashion: external bliss in heaven in angelic form or reborn as another person or life form on Earth.

It is the transitory nature of life to death to potential rebirth that keeps the human mind from going completely mad at the prospect of nothingness at the end game.

So how could LOST fit into this existence time line?  The island was supposed to be the place of life, death and rebirth. It did not have the physics of an actual Earth island, so it is assumed that it is either a supernatural place or overlaps into another dimension of time-space. In other words, the island could be the space between human life and death.

For some viewers, that intermediate place makes sense. The characters pre-815 back stories show edtheir lives, troubles and sins. The sideways world showed the waiting room in the after life. The bridge between the two different existences had to be the island. It goes to show then that the characters could still be "alive" on the transitional island realm, but not able to "move on" to the after life unless certain conditions were met.

If you then view the island as a land of make believe, not of Earth but its own unique sphere of existence, it is easier to gloss over the factual inaccuracies or inconsistent story plot points because none of those really matter in a place which has no normal rules.

DARK MATTERS

Science knows about the element called dark matter. It can be observed by the gravitation pull of other objects. It makes up about a quarter of the universe. But science does not know what it really does.

Some researchers have tried to postulate that dark matter may attach itself to dying pulsars, in such a fashion that the density becomes so great that a black hole is created in the universe.

Scientists also believe that at the edge of any black hole, where the gravitational forces are the greatest, physics and notions of time and space are out of whack.  Even a pinpoint black hole singularity could disrupt time and space.

These are known concepts. Using known science concepts is a good basis for science fiction.

LOST posters have often looked to black holes, dark matter and strange energy as a basis of trying to explain the underlying events in the series. The show's time travel events became quite problematic. Even the island's "re-sets" have inconsistent triggers which does not lead to a clear explanation.

Humans are curious; we want answers to mysteries.

What is the universe? What is our role in the universe? What is life? Is there something after life? Why can't we take all the chemicals found in a human body and mix up a human being in the lab?

To explain sporadic time events on the island, one must assume that the cork has to be shifted in some manner to release the built up energy. However, the Swan computer station was not tied directly the heart of the island. In fact, the cork was a large stone, not a mechanical device. So was the Swan station a pressure value to release energy used to keep the light source in check? And why would anyone need to do that anyway? The light source was on the island long before humans. Did the ancient Egyptians first harness its power, i.e. ability to time travel through space portals, in the quest to actually get the after life? That makes some sense in the realm of the burial temple rituals. But in order to create such a time riff, one must have the pull of a black hole singularity.

So it is possible that the island is the bridge between a dark matter pocket creating a black hole and the unique electromagnetic light source (the Big Bang so to speak) from which all life in the universe got its component parts. So is the island the location of a possible Second Big Bang?

We think the island was returned to balance when Jack died. So the existing universe would have been saved from destruction. But then again, a second parallel universe was created from the island which we called the sideways world - - - one in which Desmond was aware of on the island prior to his awakening in the sideways plane of existence. So the fabric of normal space time had to have been altered by the island time shifts. Then, was the sideways truly an after life experience, or merely an alternative dimension populated by the memories of the island castaways? A echo, a memory, a fiction created by the disruption of the known universe carried about on the nodes of dark matter.

NINE LIVES

The old saying is "cats have 9 lives." It is not really based upon any actual science, but mere observation that cats tend to get in and out of trouble in McGuffin fashion. For some reason, cats that fall off building ledges always land on their paws.

What if people had this cat-like trait?

We clearly saw Patchy, the one-eyed Other, "die" numerous times only to come back and thwart the Losties plans. That seems to be an obvious writer's ploy to surprise the viewers, and add the taint of mystery about the island (why do some people die, and some do not?)  Ben was taken to the temple and was "reborn," but Sayid was taken to the temple waters - - - died and was reincarnated as an evil minion. Locke "survived" a 10 story plunge, an airplane crash, and being shot in gut. Pretty darn lucky; 9 lives cat lucky.

Like most things in LOST, story continuity and rules are very inconsistent. Who lives and who dies is probably more attached to the emotional viewer meter than anything else.

But if life teaches us, everyone comes across events that could change their path, for good or ill. Just like in Monopoly, some people tend to get more "Get Out of Jail Free" cards than other people.

But to put a more sci-fi spin on this concept, one could look at a person's life as having one of those sub-sandwich shop customer loyalty cards: after 9 meals, you get one free. But in the scope of one's life line, the card allows 9 critical events to pass that does not cost you your life. The grim reaper clicks off those events until you run out of freebies - - - then you have to pass on.

You can reflect on your own life to remember various events that could have gone badly.

One probably does not realize that this is happening. But a few, like Patchy, who did crazy stupid and clearly suicidal things, probably did know that he would return. With that type of knowledge, one would have great power to control any situation.

You can count on your own how many of the main characters survived car crashes, mental illness, alcohol /drug addictions, shootings, falls, explosions, fights - - - before, during and after their island dangers.

If you look at the characters as counting down not time, but their 9 lives in order to get to the promised land, then that may explain the dull attitude and lack of grasping their dangerous surroundings when they flew off into the jungle on crazy missions. Their subconscious must have been pulling them through the gateway of their own existence.

SOUL POSSESSION

In the new British series, Intruders, the premise is that after people die, their souls can live on . . . by possessing a live individual. It is an interesting concept of demonic possession from ancient times (which in many instances was misdiagnosis of actual medical conditions like seizure disorders).

LOST did feature elements of multiple souls. In ancient Egyptian death rituals, the person's soul is divided at death into the ka and ba which separately have to journey through the underworld to try to be reunited in the after life. If souls were released upon death, sci-fi allows for these intelligent vessels to inhabit other human beings.

In a bait-and-switch type theory, the 815 survivors could have been "possessed" by lost souls, the whispers, trapped on the island. In fact, the only reason the survivors "lived" after the crash was that they were re-possessed by island souls.

For example, what if Jack was near death in the bamboo grove when dead Horace, the former leader of the Dharma group, possesses his body? There were many of the Dharma group that was purged by Ben's Others. And when the Others member died, they destroyed the body which may be so that that body could not be repossessed by an island soul.

If there were possession by island souls, that could explain why Jack immediately took to pushing back against Ben and the Others because deep inside he knew of their threat and danger because Horace's soul was influencing his decision making process. When they talked about "a war" on the island, it may be a never ending saga of souls reanimating their revenge with new visitors time after time for eternity (much like the reality of the Middle East conflicts).

The island souls could become the dominate personality in a person's body; repressing the person's actual soul until its "second death." The real soul may be in a sort of suspended animation, a dream state of confusion, during the island time line. Perhaps the suspended animation of souls is a better explanation of the sideways limbo state.

THE LOCKE NESS MONSTER

You are what you are.

And . . . you can't tell me what to do!

The lasting frontal lobe demons that lurked inside the skull of John Locke.

Of all the passengers on Flight 815, Locke was the most angry and bitter. His final dream, an outback adventure, was ruined by his paralysis. He knew then he would be nothing but a cripple. He felt helpless, alone and betrayed by his father, his mother and the world.

In the after math of the plane crash, we first see Locke on his back, struggling to get up. There is a weird expression on his face (and a new non-bleeding scar on his face) as he begins to move his legs.
For no apparent medical reason, the plane crash "caused" or "healed" Locke's permanent paralysis.

Which leads to two plot points of polar opposite conclusions.

First, if Locke was "alive" and survived the plane crash, the miracle had to be chalked up to a) the island's alleged healing properties or b) magic.

Second, if Locke did not survive the crash, his body may have been "taken over" by a smoke monster (which we saw later on in the series by MIB).

The evidence gets option one is compelling since a) pregnant women died on the island; b) people died of gunshot wounds (lesser trauma) than the plane crash; and c) Locke was shot by Ben in purge pit and should have died there.

If Locke's character was a smoke monster from the very beginning of the show, it would cast the series in a different light. Locke's theme was a man of faith. He was reckless, not very smart, impulsive and emotional. The exact opposite traits of Jack who was cool, collected, smart, with medical skills and detached emotions.

Like Locke, Jack's was found after the crash lying on his back. He was shocked or surprised that he had survived. So, like Locke, there are two ways to interpret Jack's awareness of the island: as a plane crash survivor or as another smoke monster.  The latter would balance out the black and white; faith verus science themes of the show.

And like a childhood game of make believe, if two island smoke monsters inhabit the bodies of two dead humans (and use their memories and skills to play a clever game of island senet), then LOST becomes a very complex and deep science fiction epic.

INTERLOPERS

The cable TV ads have been hyping a new sci-fi series, The Intruders, in which the premise seems to be that undead spirits come back to take over bodies of real people in order to do no good.

Why spirits would need to take over human bodies to do their evil deeds is unknown. The classic ghost story has transparent forms causing havoc in people's minds. It is like when the smoke monster, MIB, took the form of dead John Locke. He really did not have to so it.  At the time, some speculated that it needed to have a dead body in order to reincarnate in its form. However, MIB/Smokey did it without a body with island Christian.

The premise could be an explanation of the two different worlds LOST created in Season 6.

In the sideways world, all the characters were dead. Dead for a long and short time. If this is the true point of beginning, that the characters were dead before the series began and dead before getting on Flight 815, then perspectives change.

If everyone was dead already, and living in a purgatory setting as boring and mundane as their past lives on Earth (which they have repressed including their own fates), how do dead souls dream?

One would expect that being spirits, their dreams may not be confined to a human brain in REM sleep but could be projected without physical limitations because spirits are closer to energy beings than humanoids.

Perhaps this collective spiritual dream state created the island story. (This is the exact opposite position that most viewers perceive the series based on how events unfolded over the years).

The island could be a fantasy island for the dead.  Think about it: the main characters did irrational, stupid, crazy things without thinking about the consequences. It was an adventure vacation for some. It was an intense emotional soul search for others.

Now could the spirits rematerialize as human beings in the real world? Perhaps.
Or would it have been easier to commandeer human beings and steal those bodies for their vacation fun?

The physical imagines of the characters are the same in the sideways and real world, but that is a matter of convenience. Sideways Jack spirit was someone else's ghost who just wound up in real world Jack's body. And the interloper theory helps explain why some characters had dramatic life shifts after boarding Flight 815. This would include the experienced pilots, who lost control of their plane. It also includes Jack, whose human body and mind would not have become the "leader" that spirit Jack wanted to be in the sideways world.

The main characters were kidnapped by sideways world spirits who needed to re-live some part of their lives in order to break the bonds of their purgatory.

PERSONAL EVOLUTION

There is a theory that at some point, human beings will evolve beyond their physical existence. Science fiction writers have been using this idea for a long time, to create intelligent beings made purely of energy and thought.

One would think that evolving beyond a physical body would have its advantages. This new being would not have hunger, the need to consume food in order to survive. It would not feel pain as it would not have a nervous system connected to cells and organs. It would not have emotional bursts since it does not have the stressful demands for food, water, rest and procreation.

Based upon this scientific theory, one "unified" explanation for LOST is that the smoke monster was one of these non-physical body beings. Whether it evolved from humans or aliens is not really the issue. It could have been the last of its species. If so, there could be a vast sense of loneliness. So how could such a higher form of "life" cope with such loneliness?

Humans gather comfort in surrounding themselves with lower life forms. We call them "pets." If the smoke monster wanted companionship, mental stimulation, a sense of purpose or even something to do - - - then bringing those interesting, complex, emotional, primitive, cunning, violent people to his island.

We know that the smoke monster(s) could take the form of human beings (usually dead ones). When they reanimated humans, the smoke monsters had access all the memories of those people. They used those memories to manipulate the other characters into action or inaction.

But even if the smoke monster evolved into a higher order, the ending of the series did not shed any light on this theory or what the smoke monster really represented on the show. It could have been merely symbolic of the fears, anxieties, traumas and spiritual bankruptcy of certain characters. But the show runners would not need a supernatural being to coax those traits from human beings; they are messy enough ruining their own lives to have those matters come to the story surface.

The smoke monster is an enigma. It seems to be a supernatural, intelligent and violent force not known in nature.

A DEBATE

There is a mild debate whether LOST was a science fiction or a fantasy show.

For those sci-fi fans, their fiction is rooted in science and principles of technology that can be extrapolated into future applications. For example, in the original Star Trek, a digital clipboard the crew used seemed beyond the current sciences, but today the tablet computer is mainstream.

On the fantasy side, people who like their fiction in new worlds or magical realms like Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings, find interest in the minute detail of these strange, exotic lands and environments. In the Potterverse, it was the new language of those books that captivated young readers - - - it opened a portal into a new imaginary world beyond Disney.

In some ways, sci-fi fans want some tangible base in which the story can have a foundation. In fantasy, it is a vivid intangible elements explained within their own environment that is the hook.

These types of stories run parallel tracks. They each have their good points and bad points. Each can have very good premises and story telling ideas.

LOST certainly stressed a lot of science in the series. The references to the Dharma stations invoked many classic fields of study including biology, psychology, chemistry to sonic technology.  In fact, many fans sought out scientific explanations for the island, time travel, the electromagnetic fields to even the ghost images the characters interacted with while in the jungle.

LOST also had a lot of mythical, supernatural elements. The large portion of the later set designs with Egyptian hieroglyphs seeded the viewer with ancient cultural beliefs in the after life. The supernatural elements included the unexplained smoke monster - - was it nanotechnology or an evil spirit? Some find a basic hero story of Jack slaying the dragon (Flocke). And then there was the sideways world in which everyone was dead but living complex human lives.

Part of the problem is that both sides are right. LOST shifted between the various story genres at will, which causes some form of confusion, inconsistency and practical errors. As the series went on, the continuity of story lines became more problematic. Was LOST going to stay an adventure-survival story as it warped into a sci-fi drama? And when it changed to supernatural elements and the sideways parallel universe, and the Desmond superman arc against EM energy, was fantasy how the show would be explained to the fans?

The vagueness of the producers lack of explanations of their own vision also clouds this debate. For if the writers wanted us to make our own sense of what was shown, then those producers and writers should not be upset with our criticisms or opinions. For if the producers and writers would come out on one side of the debate, sci-fi or fantasy, that would eliminate a great deal tension between these story forms. But then again, it would open another avenue of inquiry on that road and whether the stories made any sense in that genre.

WHAT WAS THE POINT?

Even after reading and digesting the LOST's writer's guide, there was still no clear path in story direction. What was going to be the point to LOST?

Was it going to be purely a castaway show, where the characters settle in with no real chance of rescue like Gilligan's Island?

Or was it going to be an action-adventure show, where the characters would fight, claw, battle and innovate a way off the island to a climatic, series ending emotional rescue at sea?

Either one of those alternative endings would have been fine.

Can you build and sustain an island community with 48 plane crash survivors? Sure.
Can the viewer feel "invested" in their struggles to find food, build shelter, and protect themselves from the dangers of the island and its other tribes? Sure.
Could they have build a new home and lived out their lives on the island? Sure.

In addition, there are several key forks in the story road to consider before running blindly down them.

Was LOST going to be a survival story? The stories would be self-contained on the island, and the drama would be the day to day struggles for the basic necessities for life.

Was LOST going to be an adventure story? The stories would be broader and more full of active dangers, threats and physical altercations, something almost all the main characters had no experience with during their pre-Flight 815 lives.

Was LOST going to be a science-fiction story? Would the story of survival include elements of science fiction such as advanced technology, hidden worlds, or time travel? If this was the case, then the island was not merely an island, but a portal for unbelievable change in how the characters would perceive their world and themselves.

Any one of those story paths would have been fine.

But when the writers began to mix and match elements of those paths into a lumpy porridge of conflicting plot lines, many viewers themselves got lost amongst the growing jungle vines of intersecting and story strangulating questions.

In the alternative of what was guide's story outlines, there could have been crafted a four-person chess match over the island. Four distinct groups of people on the island would want to control it for their own safety and survival. The savages, the native people, who have a spiritual bond with the island - - - and worship its guardian spirit, the smoke monster. The Others, scientists or explorers, who build a vast, secret underground station to monitor the unique properties of the island.  The 815ers, who have crash landed on a place foreign, mysterious and dangerous - - - people who actually don't want to stay but for some reason they cannot leave. And the submariners, a mysterious group of military men who also have crash landed on the island.

The series could have easily gone down the sci-fi path with the introduction of the submariners. It could be the premise of Philadelphia, where a military vessel goes through a time vortex into the past. But in LOST's case, the unrecognizable uniforms stated in the guide could mean that this sub was from the future. As a result, and following the laws of literary time travel, the crew would not want to create paradoxes or reveal the future of anyone they come into contact with . . . which would create intense friction especially if the crew knows what the Others were doing on the island.

The series could have gone further into this realm by the appearance of a mysterious parachutist. One could imagine that this parachutist was a famous person from the past - - - like Amelia Earhart. That would confirm to the castaways that the island is not what it seems - - -  that there is a time vortex that threatens their very existence. In order to solve this sci-fi premise, everyone on the island would need to gather information on how to solve the problem to get back to their real time lines.

The series would then lead up to a final solution on how to get the time lines back to normal so the castaways could get rescued or leave the island.

This simple outline leaves little open ended fragments in plot points. And it was not that difficult to extrapolate from the writer's guide's notes. It would have eliminated many of the bitter fan disputes that continue to haunt the series: that the characters were alive, that they were on Earth, and that they had to work together in order to solve their most important problem, how to get home. Instead, we got seasons filled with ghosts, candidates, immortals, shape shifting monsters stealing memories and dreams, a parallel reality in the after life, and the characters being clearly all dead in the end.

In the past five or so years, I have seen many movie and television reviewers take hard lines on the entertainment they have seen . . . it is not necessarily snark, but an opinionated dissection of the show, the characters and plot. I continue to read reviewers who keep writing that the show or episode was disappointing because "it could have been better executed" based upon the prior episodes, the characters, writers or reputation of the producers. After reading the guide and looking back at the totality of LOST, I have come to the conclusion that yes, LOST could have been a better series. It could have had long lasting staying power if the episodes were self-contained stories (so it could be readily accessible in syndication). It could have had a more clear main story line focus, especially if it kept on one story path, one genre. If that was true, then the last season would have had a coherent story line to realistic conclusion instead of a deus ex machina plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problems are suddenly and abruptly resolved by the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object.

It is still unclear to this day what the original meetings had in store for LOST as a series. What was the goal? Where was the story finishing line? How was the series going to end, or was it supposed to just fade away if it was cancelled abruptly by the network? You can throw as many strange plot twists, unexpected deaths, new devious characters and sci-fi elements into the show so long as they make sense in the main focal story line of the show. But LOST along the way lost its main story line focus. And that is the point between the discussion of what LOST was and what it could have been.