THE INTERNET AND PAIN

"I love the Internet because every piece of true pain I've experienced as an adult — with the exception of death in the family and breakups — has come from it." - - - actress Lena Dunham

When a public figure acknowledges that the world around her is a painful place, but then accepts the pain as being part of her public life, there is some profound truth that rises to the surface of our collective intelligence.

The Internet is a vast, open world. But it really is a tool, a utility, to help people communicate thoughts and ideas. However, it has turned into a dark space where trolls, haters, criminals and weak-minded prey on the lives of more fortunate people. High school bullying has gone from the playground to the global stage. 

Since the Internet is an all-consuming place, people can get lost in this world just as an intense gamer can get lost for days or weeks in a open world multi-player epic console game.

Then the lines of reality and virtual reality blur.

People need connections to other people. People need real connections to other people, and not virtual, cliche or fake connections. Friends are different than acquaintances, but on the web more and more people fall into the latter category because they don't do anything else together expect exchange messages or photo tags.

Since the daily interaction with the network and the people who you friend becomes more important, the ability to hurt one another grows exponentially.  People can be meaner because you don't have to be face-to-face to hurt someone. There is a growing segment of people out on the net with the sole purpose to hurt other people (most people they don't even know.)

There was a recent line from Dr. Who which is applicable here. "Hate is such a strong emotion that it should not be wasted on people you dislike." 

Think about that.

If someone or something causes you pain, why continue to interact with it? Because someone or something (like the internet) has woven itself into your core principles, it occupies the center of your mind and thoughts, it makes you a complete being and it defines who you are as a person.

Life is filled with ups and downs, pain and pleasure. The management of those emotional highs and lows is what separates the good from the bad, from those who can cope and those in despair, those who hide from the world from those who live life to the fullest despite the painful pitfalls that the future may hold.

BRAIN TO BRAIN CONNECTION

 Image Credit: Stocco et. al in PLOS One

Mental Floss had an interesting article on brain thought transfer research.

Imagine a future where you could transmit a unique feeling, a hard-to-translate thought process, or precise motor movements via a neural pattern from your brain to someone else’s brain, sharing what can’t otherwise be easily communicated. This is the goal of new research conducted at the University of Washington (UW).


In the UW experiment, test subjects played a 20 Questions–style game through a direct brain-to-brain connection, and accurately guessed what object was on the other person’s mind 72 percent of the time.


“We wanted to show that this brain-to-brain interface can be used to do something highly interactive and collaborative,” says lead author Andrea Stocco, an assistant professor of psychology and researcher at UW’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.


"The function of the experiment is conceptually simple, Stocco says. Two people sit apart in different buildings. One, the respondent, is wearing a cap connected to electroencephalography machine (EEG) that records electrical brain activity. A magnetic coil is placed behind the head of the other participant, the inquirer. The coil delivers “transcranial magnetic stimulation.” The respondent is given an object to think of, much like in the game Twenty Questions. Then the inquirer chooses questions to send to the respondent via the Internet. The respondent answers the questions using only their brainwaves, by thinking the answer “yes” or “no.”


“Yes and no buttons are designed with lights around them to generate different visual signals, which we can pick up by analyzing brain waves in the visual part of the brain,” Stocco says.


These yes and no answers send a signal to the inquirer and activate the magnetic coil connected to the inquirer’s cap. Only a “yes” answer generates enough stimuli to activate the visual cortex, thus allowing the inquirer to see a subtle flash of light, or “phosphene.”


"We have a lot of control conditions to limit chance and use complicated math to measure the results," Stocco says. “After, we measured performance and found the rate of success was much higher than what would happen by chance."


Participants were able to guess the correct object 72 percent of the time, compared with just 18 percent in the control rounds.


Stocco hopes that this technology could one day be used to “transfer more complicated things” between brains, like emotions but also brain states, such as signals from an alert person to a sleepy one, and other forms of nonverbal communication. “There is an entire realm of things we have a hard time communicating,” Stocco says. He gives the example of one day taking an ADHD student who struggles to focus, and linking them up to the brain of a "neurotypical"person who has good focus. In theory, the calm neural pattern of the neurotypical student could perhaps be transmitted to the ADHD student to help him focus.


“Person-to-person transfer is a long way off, but you would be amazed by the progress,” he says, pointing out that wireless EEG headsets are already available for use in gaming. “We can record brain activity, but no one has been able to transfer it until now. In all kinds of different experiences, the neurosignals recorded could become a shortcut.”


This research has points associated with science fiction stories, such as Ghost in the Shell, where the human mind was linked to the world wide web to communicate directly with other minds.


In LOST, one theory had a "collective consciousness" between all of the main characters. The idea that the characters were not actually experiencing the island adventure but their minds were put into a virtual experiment was a viable explanation of why everyone survived a mid-plane crash and the unexplainable mysteries of the island as being made-up fictional thoughts, nightmares and fantasies.


A direct mental gateway from your mind to your friend's mind would eliminate the need for verbal and nonverbal communication. In some ways, our society is moving toward that direction as more and more young adults rely upon texting messages than actually talking to their friends. If you take away the the requirement of physical activity of texting, and place everyone in their own imaginations, the specter of LOST could come to life.

BRAIN SWITCHES

In the last post, we discussed certain dream theories.  One thing about the brain that is fascinating is that it is the most complex organ in the human body, and the least understood.

For example, did you know certain brain activities can be turned on and off like a light switch?

It has to do with stimulating or deactivating certain areas of the brain associated with a certain aspect of life.

Researchers know the control center for thirst is somewhere in the hypothalamus,  an almond-sized section of the human brain that regulates a number of our basic functions (hunger, sex drive, temperature). But recently, neuroscientists identified two specific populations of neurons in the hypothalamus of mice that control the impulse to hydrate, and they wanted to know what happens when they’re activated. By using a process called optogenetics,  they manipulated these cells to make them sensitive to certain wavelengths of light. Then, fiber-optic cables were implanted in the brains of mice that when illuminated, turned the corresponding neurons on or off. They found that one group of thirst neurons “evokes intense drinking behavior” when activated. How intense? Mice drank up to eight percent of their body weight in water when these neurons were switched on. That’s the equivalent of a human drinking a gallon and a half of water in ten minutes. The second group of neurons reduces the desire to drink, even when the animal is deprived of water.

Using the same optogenetics technique, scientists found the brain cells  that control hunger. When these cells are activated in mice, the rodents are compelled to stuff themselves well beyond the point of being full. But when they’re shut down, the mice ignore food, even when they should be hungry.
 
Consciousness and self-awareness are defining characteristics of human life. But these traits can be turned off and on like a light switch in a lab setting. At George Washington University, researchers accidentally flipped the switch while using electrodes to stimulate different parts of the brain in an epileptic woman.  When they stimulated a section called the claustrum,  the patient lost consciousness, but she didn’t pass out. Instead she sat motionless with a blank stare and showed no response to cues around her. She snapped out of her trance when the stimulation stopped, and had no memory of the lapse.

Other studies have shown the human brain may switch off self-awareness when we’re stressed, without any help from researchers. In 2006, neurobiologists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel observed that when humans are forced to focus on a difficult task (particularly under a strict deadline), the area of our brains associated with introspection, the cortex, becomes quiet, and we go into a sort of robotic mode until the task is done. This ability could have evolved for purposes of self-defense.

Pain can be eased with certain drugs, but many treatments come with side effects like dependency and tolerance. Saint Louis University researchers found a way to treat chronic pain caused by nerve damage, including the physical agony caused by chemotherapy and bone cancer. By turning on the “A3 adenosine receptor” in the brain and spinal cord, they were able to block pain caused by nerve damage in rodents, without any of the side effects associated with drug treatments.

Beyond just physical traits, researchers have looked into emotional components to brain activity. What if we could reduce the human urge to fight? New York University researchers  zoomed in on the hypothalamus, the previously-mentioned hub of bodily functions, to look at the specific neurons that fire during acts of physical violence. By stimulating those neurons using optogenetics, they were able to turn male mice into vicious fighters that attacked anything in their vicinity—including inanimate objects, and both male and female mice. But then the team could also calm them, quelling their violent urges by silencing these neurons. 

These vast different research projects tend to lend some real world perspective on the fictional forays into science with the DHARMA compounds. Turning on and off brain switches have vast potential and power to those who control it.

IS IT POSSIBLE?

Is it possible that someone will be able to take the LOST story and re-work it into a unified climax of the desperate, tangential plots?

Yes, if someone took the time and effort to re-edit the series into chronological order (which I have not seen except the first two hours), then in the buried archeological pit of the scripts there is a lost treasure that ties everything together.

In order to tie every piece of the LOST puzzle together, one will have to consider suspending belief but not to the point of irrational McGuffins. The best science fiction has at its core science principles "extended" by theoretical advancement.

For example, is it possible to survive a mid-air plane separation at 30,000 feet? No. Is it possible to survive a free fall from 9,000 feet (as shown in the Others centric episode showing the crash from Ben's perspective)? Perhaps, but unlikely. Is it possible that since Desmond did not enter the numbers promptly, causing a system failure and release of electromagnetic energy, that the unique EM properties could have acted as parachutes or pillows for the survivors who landed alive on the island? That could be a possibility. With the Desmond error causing an electromagnetic incident, is it possible that based on the FDW's ability to harness the EM to shift the island in time and space, that the EM discharge selectively carried the survivors into a different time, space or dimension (including the afterlife as in Dante's Inferno)? That could be a greater possibility since it links together more key elements of the story mythology.

And this is how it could be possible to use the story clues, stated science principles, island factors, and cause-and-effect relationships to build a detailed model of what actually happened to the characters in a unified story that would tie all the loose ends.

In order to accomplish something this grand, one will need to extract the core mythology elements and make them core building blocks from which "the answers" can logically be found for the show's mysteries. There truly needs to be story rules to avoid continuity issues.

It will be complex, confusing and frustrating. For example, the writers had no consistent concept of "time."  It was linear. Then it was circular. Then it was classified as a moving stream. Each one of these time concepts is different. And when the writers dropped the bomb in the sideways world having "no past, no present, no future, but just now," how does one deal with characters moving forward in a space with no time at all? The "now" is not the present because the present represents the future minus the past. Unless the after life principle is that souls live in a null space, then why would they appear to live "normal" lives along a progressive time line?

Even if one can forge through the serious stuff, can one weave an explanation that would appease, delight and answer all the questions of the die-hard fan? Probably not. And that is why no one has really tried to tackle this ambitious project.

BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH

The BBC recently had an article about the scientific research conducted with severely vegetative patients. The most revealing aspect of the article (and study) was that a patient in a deep coma awoke to tell the medical community what she experienced in her vegetative state. It was totally different than what medical science perceived was happening inside the brain of an unconscious patient.

The problem is that the scientific definition of “death” remains as unresolved as the definition of “consciousness”. Being alive is no longer linked to having a beating heart, explains Owen. If I have an artificial heart, am I dead? If you are on a life-support machine, are you dead? Is a failure to sustain independent life a reasonable definition of death? No, otherwise we would all be “dead” in the nine months before birth.

The issue becomes murkier when we consider those trapped in the twilight worlds between normal life and death – from those who slip in and out of awareness, who are trapped in a ‘minimally conscious state’, to those who are severely impaired in a vegetative state or a coma. These patients first appeared in the wake of the development of the artificial respirator during the 1950s in Denmark, an invention that redefined the end of life in terms of the idea of brain death and created the specialty of intensive care, in which unresponsive and comatose patients who seemed unable to wake up again were written off as “vegetables” or “jellyfish”. As is always the case when treating patients, definitions are critical: understanding the chances of recovery, the benefits of treatments and so on all depend on a precise diagnosis.

In the 1960s, neurologist Fred Plum in New York and neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett in Glasgow carried out pioneering work to understand and categorise disorders of consciousness. Plum coined the term “locked-in syndrome”, in which a patient is aware and awake but cannot move or talk. With Plum, Jennett devised the Glasgow Coma Scale to rate the depth of coma, and Jennett followed up with the Glasgow Outcome Scale to weigh up the extent of recovery, from death to mild disability. Together they adopted the term “persistent vegetative state” for patients who, they wrote, “have periods of wakefulness when their eyes are open and move; their responsiveness is limited to primitive postural and reflex movements of the limbs, and they never speak.”

In 2002, Jennett was among a group of neurologists who chose the phrase “minimally conscious” to describe those who are sometimes awake and partly aware, who show erratic signs of consciousness so that at one time they might be able to follow a simple instruction and another they might not. Even today, however, we’re still arguing over who is conscious and who isn’t. 

Kate Bainbridge, a 26-year-old schoolteacher, lapsed into a coma three days after she came down with a flu-like illness. Her brain became inflamed, along with the primitive region atop the spinal cord, the brain stem, which rules the sleep cycle. A few weeks after her infection had cleared, Kate awoke from the coma but was diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. Luckily, the intensive care doctor responsible for her, David Menon, was also a Principal Investigator at the newly opened Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre in Cambridge, where one Adrian Owen then worked.

In 1997, four months after she had been diagnosed as vegetative, Kate became the first patient in a vegetative state to be studied by the Cambridge group. The results, published in 1998, were unexpected and extraordinary. Not only did Kate react to faces: but her brain responses were indistinguishable from those of healthy volunteers. Her scans revealed a splash of red, marking brain activity at the back of her brain, in a part called the fusiform gyrus, which helps recognize faces. Kate became the first such patient in whom sophisticated brain imaging (in this case PET) revealed “covert cognition”. Of course, whether that response was a reflex or a signal of consciousness was, at the time, a matter of debate.

The results were of huge significance for science but also for Kate and her parents. “The existence of preserved cognitive processing removed the nihilism that pervaded the management of such patients in general, and supported a decision to continue to treat Kate aggressively,” recalls Menon.

Kate eventually surfaced from her ordeal, six months after the initial diagnosis. “They said I could not feel pain,” she says. “They were so wrong.” Sometimes she’d cry out, but the nurses thought it was just a reflex. She felt abandoned and helpless. Hospital staff had no idea how much she suffered in their care. Kate found physiotherapy scary: nurses never explained what they were doing to her. She was terrified when they removed mucus from her lungs. “I can’t tell you how frightening it was, especially suction through the mouth,” she has written. At one point, her pain and despair became so much that she tried to snuff out her life by holding her breath. “I could not stop my nose from breathing, so it did not work. My body did not seem to want to die.”

Kate says her recovery was not so much like turning a light on but a gradual awakening. It took her five months before she could smile. By then she had lost her job, her sense of smell and taste, and much of what might have been a normal future. Now back with her parents, Kate is still very disabled and needs a wheelchair. Twelve years after her illness, she started to talk again and, though still angry about the way she was treated when she was at her most vulnerable, she remains grateful to those who helped her mind to escape.

In applying this real life coma story to LOST, there is a theme of "gradual awakening" of the dead in the sideways world to the events of their recent past (i.e. the plane crash). A person in a coma, or in a state between life and death, still can perceive the world around them - - - and still have strong emotions like pain and anxiety. For those who think most people pass quietly in their sleep may have to rethink that position. With her mind still active, the coma victim is trapped inside her own head. And what was she thinking about? Escape. What was the most driving force for everyone on the island, including the smoke monster? Escape. It was the inability of the coma patient to communicate with the outside world that led to frustration and more pain. Likewise, fans continually barked at the television screens when LOST survivors continually failed to communicate with each other, or ask the simple, common sense questions to get answers. 

Many of the same elements of the coma patient study were embedded into the LOST story. It gives those fan theories about mental or coma patients more real scientific evidence to support their viewpoint of the series.

BASIC ELEMENTS REVIEWED

This diagram shows the connections between characters with the same first letter in their names. It is hard to remember that so few letters were used for names. For example, you have Jack, Juliet and Jin; Sawyer, Shannon and Sun.

But two characters pop out alone: Penny and Eloise.

They are related by marriage. Penny is the daughter of Widmore. We can infer from his back story that when he left the island to the main land, he had a child (Penny) which led to his banishment. He later married Eloise and together they had a child, Daniel, the scientific genius for whom Eloise desperately protected in the sideways world.

Penny grew up as part of the privilege class in England. She has aspects of being spoiled, but also has a rebellious streak against her father (as would later turn into her affection for Desmond). Desmond was the anti-Widmore, a man with little ambition, unmarketable skills and lack of commitment. Dez was a drifter, a loner, and man without a cause. Penny never needed Desmond, but when Desmond tried to win her back and lost at seas, he found out that he needed her.

Eloise was part of the plot to get Desmond away from Penny. Eloise was the watch clerk who told Desmond about life's "course correction," people die no matter what events intervene to delay it. Desmond was told he had a great role to play, but he did not believe it. That role was to set sail in a solo race to crash into the island - - - to be trapped there pushing a button that would keep the island in a snow globe.

The reason why Eloise wanted Desmond removed from Penny's life was that she was protecting Daniel from awakening. She knew that Penny had feelings for Desmond, and if Penny re-awakened those feelings in the sideways world, Eloise fantasy after life would be destroyed. So she kept Penny's happiness at bay for the sake of her own selfish goal of being with her son forever.

Her son, if he remembered Eloise killing him in the time travel episode, could have gone off with the other island castaways to the church and into the light, never to be seen again. Sending Desmond to the island prison was a way to prevent that event from happening.

Without that, Eloise would have no bonds to keep her in the sideways dream. Her perfect marriage to Widmore was a ruse since he had not awakened to the island past - - - and their feud/break-up over the island's control. Penny would not be awakened if Desmond was kept at bay, traveling the world at the behest of Widmore (or more likely Eloise's prodding him). Penny would have continued on in a privileged status that she had pre-Desmond relationship, not knowing what she was missing in her life.

If the baseline for the show was love, then the stories of Penny and Eloise demonstrate two sides of the same coin. Penny, in a blissful ignorance and Eloise, in a conning manipulation in the sideways realm. But in the island sphere, it is proactive Penny trying to re-connect to lost Desmond, while Eloise tries to right her wrong caused Daniel. One is a mother's love to an extreme, and the other is a couple's triumph over tragedy.

BASIC ELEMENTS

What do you see in this diagram?

Boil down the individual characters into cells or molecule representation, this is what the diagram represents.

By looking at LOST in this simple simplicity, one can see possible hidden (or subliminal) connections between the characters.

You can analyze the diagram many different ways:

By same letters being grouped together.
By adding a positive or negative to each type to see if there is base attraction or connection.
By looking to see what letters have no companion.
By looking to see patterns.
By looking to see what is out of place.

STAIRWAY

Try to imagine what it took to get to The End.

Then try to figure out why it took that path.

Trying to work backwards from memory of the key deaths that allowed the main characters to move forward, I found an analogy to the Stairway to Heaven.

It seems that each step needed a death, a sacrifice, a closure.

We don't know why some 815 passengers died while others survived the crash. We don't know why the Tail Section survivors were killed off to leave just Bernard alive. We don't know why Daniel was killed off by the time skip nose bleeds (considering he was never on the island before and had a "constant" in his own theory). It did not stop the time quirks on the island. We don't know why Charlie killed himself (he had an opportunity to open the station door and leave with Desmond). We don't know if Juliet accomplished anything tangible when she died after she was recovered from the site debris. Ben got his revenge by killing Widmore, but that did not stop or appease MIB. Sayid took the submarine bomb down the hallway (and created a more dangerous situation by not closing any blast doors to minimize the impact of the blast). Sun's entrapment was improbable and staged, as was their farewell which did not take into account their child on the mainland. We don't know if immortals like Jacob or shape shifting smoke monsters like MIB can ever really "die."  But it seems all those deadly steps led to Jack collapsing in the bamboo thicket to die. The place where his island adventure began ended in the same place.

Now, a few people could conclude that Jack never left the bamboo thicket. He was thrown to the ground and laid there, semi-conscious from his injuries. He could have imagined the entire series in his head. Jack, the hero, in his own mind, "fixes" things in a plane load of broken people. It seems more plausible than the apparent random death steps to get the souls to the sideways church.