Free Stress Test

While roaming around one of the most popular streets of my current city of living, my friend and I were stopped by this soft-spoken gentleman about taking a free stress test, with some advice on how to deal with it. Now I am very well clued on how to deal with stress, but even then I wouldn't normally resist something that was being offered free, just to have some fun; I noticed just in time that this was a store that was into selling and promoting the works of L. Ron Hubbard, the chap responsible for Dianetics and Scientology. Indeed, the store display was lined with copies of the book in various languages. I was all for turning away, but was not quick enough, because my friend, knowing nothing about the subject, thought it was a great idea and walked in. I had no choice but to follow.

It turned out to be a fun(ny) experience anyway. The testing equipment consisted of a sufficiently complicated looking device, with a pointer display, some knobs and dials, and two hollow metal cylinders hooked up to it. All you had to do was take one cylinder in each hand, sit down and relax, and think about the questions the guy was asking. Depending on how your mind reacted to the thoughts in your brain, you'd have some invisible response, which would measure up as stress on the display. The funny parts were two: the guy could not convincingly answer any questions we asked him about how the device worked, and secondly, I managed to actually hoodwink the machine.

Anyone with basic high school science education should have been able to figure out that the entire setup was nothing more than a very elaborate stethoscope: your fingers carry a very gentle pulse, which would be transmitted through the cylinder and wires and fed to a very sensitive transducer, that would produce a very tiny current which would move the pointer accordingly (using a basic galvanometer arrangement). It helps that I'm trained as an electrical engineer, but these are basic concepts that you learn in Class 9 Physics in school. One can also design the thing to have knobs to control sensitivity and the zero setting of the galvanometer (which was there in this case).

My friend went first. Certainly, the machine reacted the way I expected it to react; the pointed zoomed out of range when he thought about stressful things. The guy didn't spend much time with him; hardly thirty seconds, because he simply asked him to think about his life and recent events in it. After my friend answered, the guy asked him what he had been thinking about (as expected, the recent exams and the grades that followed). His basic method was easy to figure out. By asking you to think about something, he's very indirectly leading you to think about something stressful, because most people usually have some problem bugging them, and if you sit them down and ask them to think about recent events, their thoughts will jump first to that problem, and their pulse will correspondingly rise, depending on how deep the problem is. To generate a little more 'stress', the guy can start asking questions relating to specific areas of life - family, relationships, work, social activities, anything. Somewhere or the other there is bound to be something, which generates an emotional reaction, leading to that increase in heartbeat.

When my turn came, I kept a smooth, even tone of voice, and a steady breath, to control my heartbeat so that the machine wouldn't react. As expected, it didn't. The guy started to ask me questions almost immediately, starting with what I do. I answered I'm a student, so he asked me if there was something bothering me there. On purpose, I brought a worried tone to my voice as I started talking about courses and grades, but kept my breathing even. The machine stayed even. The guy started to increase sensitivity at various intervals then onwards. He next asked about my family, if I'd had any losses or tragedies. I lost my grandfather a few years back, but I've had deeper losses than that, and I was able to lie my way through it without the machine turning a blip. If the guy was discomfited, he didn't show it, because next he went on to ask about relationships: if I was presently in one, to which I said no (actually the answer is yes); if I had been in one earlier, to which I answered yes (truthfully); what had happened to that relationship, to which I said it hadn't been working out so we broke up.

At this point he came out, saying that I was a very unusual person, because most people get pretty stressed when they think about past relationships and their breakup. My heart did a flip, hoping he wouldn't figure out that I had deliberately been cheating on this test, and then the pointer zoomed! He noticed this, and was quick to jump on it, asking how it was that I wasn't feeling stressed out when thinking about past events of my life, but was showing a reaction after I was done thinking about them. I had to look straight at him and invent a fib on the spot, which wasn't too difficult; I simply told him that I'd moved on quite definitely from my past and had made my peace with it, and thinking about my own past again did not cause me any stress; what did cause me stress was him asking about how I'd made my peace, because that hadn't been an easy thing to do. This wasn't completely a fib though, it was at least partially true. I checked the sensitivity knob surreptitiously; it was at 9 on a scale from 0 to 10!

We asked him about how the device worked, how it actually was able to measure stress. He did not answer clearly. Either he was ignorant of how it worked, or did not want to reveal it and spoil the wonder device for us. We mentioned that we study engineering, and this device looks interesting and so on, but he was careful to lead the conversation towards what was really on his agenda: to talk about Dianetics; the philosophy, book and its author. That Hubbard discovered the 'active' and 'reactive' mind and how the reactive mind behaves, that he wrote this book which is the best selling book in the world today (huh? I thought that was the Bible, but never mind), and that he founded Scientology, which is helping so many people overcome their problems by aiming at the root, rather than the symptoms. He talked about how psychology is now dead, how modern psychology treats humans as mere animals, without paying any attention to the 'spirit', and deplored the state of psychology medicine today. What nonsense. (It was funny to watch him sidestep the questions though.)

I haven't read Dianetics myself, but I remember I did try once. I couldn't get beyond the first page. I've read summaries of the ideas in it, and by all standards, they are fanciful and despicable. That so many people believed in that nonsense, started over fifty years ago, and still believe in it to the extent that there is now a Church of Scientology which feeds all those and even crazier ideas to the unsuspecting public stands testimony as to how stupid people can be. And cleverly enough, the Church maintains a strict copyright over its documents and teachings, so that only initiates have access to it, and those who do cannot make them public for fear of severe legal action. Of course, there are always leaks, so we have some idea of what those teachings precisely are, but I would think that one read of Dianetics (for those brave enough to undergo such torture), or of the gist of it (for those smart enough to spare themselves the torment) should be enough to indicate the level of ludicrousness that Scientology must be attaining with its initiates, never mind the secrecy.

Anyone who wants to read a good summary of Dianetics can read the relevant chapter in the book Fads & Fallacies: In The Name Of Science, by that excellent gentleman Martin Gardner. The language of the book may seem harsh to many, and the book was written in the 1950s, so quite a few of the fads mentioned have been rendered irrelevant in today's world. Nevertheless, it is an excellent book, painstakingly researched and written, evident by the details presented in the book. For those who want to buy it, it's available on Amazon. (If you'd rather just read about Dianetics and Scientology, you can read up on Wikipedia. It is truly hilarious.) Fifty years on, I would be highly delighted to read a book written and updated to reflect pseudoscience today (hopefully there isn't too much of it floating around, apart from this Scientology madness). Of course, it won't be easy, with all the tangled webs of copyright protections and such, but if anyone can direct me to such a book, I'd be highly grateful. If there isn't one yet, maybe I'll write one in due time.

And moving back to the stress test, well, once we were done with the Dianetics lecture, I made a firm case for leaving, without buying the book (he offered us a Hindi translation of it!), and once out of there, explained the entire thing in detail to my friend. To his credit, he is not a gullible person and had retained enough skepticism all throughout the session to be able to see through the charade, and we laughed a lot over the entire thing afterwards.

You'd ask me why I was fooling around with this guy; even if it is pretty elaborate, at least he is giving you a stress test and telling you that something's not okay, right? Wrong. If it's nothing more than an elaborate stethoscope, let him come out and say that. There is no cause for anyone to try make an impression by showing magic tricks and illusions in matters such as stress, which have been shown to profoundly impact health. Also, this is not being done with a goal to helping people; it is nothing more than a money-making exercise. The aim of going through that entire routine of a stress test is to harp on later about Dianetics and how great it is, this is a sales pitch in the end. Don't sit back and tell me that the choice of buying the book is mine in the end. People are smart enough to know without being told that they are under stress.

I do not have to waste time sitting through this charade of a stress test, then find out that I'm stressed, listen to a sales pitch from someone who has little or no training in medicine and finally buy and read a book of pseudoscientific fairy tales. It makes much more sense to seek professional help (qualified professional help at that). Any good psychologist would be able to not only tell me if I'm stressed, but also help objectively determine factors causing that stress, counsel me accordingly, and prescribe lifestyle changes, diagnostic procedures, therapeutic treatment or medication as required. The last thing they would do is tell me to read some crackpot book and believe what it says. If nothing else, this episode highlights how important it is for every individual on this planet to have a firm grounding in basic science at the school level.

Dancing Lady

Thanks are due to the naughtiest guy in class for this. It's not spectacularly amazing or anything, but just pure fun, and really, really, time consuming.

Which direction is this lady dancing in? She is definitely spinning, and she is spinning backwards (for herself). But is she going clockwise or counterclockwise?

There are probably hundreds of such trick images circulating the internet, each one perhaps equally interesting, because each probably presents a different trick, or a different way in which our mind plays tricks on us. Of course this particular one has no answer, because depending on how you see it, she can be moving in either direction. If you try hard enough, you can see both types of spin, and you can even train yourself to make her change direction at will. It's actually really simple: you just have to figure out that critical point of her spin, from where your brain starts to pick up on the direction of her motion. If you happen to start looking at her only from that critical point onwards (achieved easily and simply by a quick shutting and opening of the eyes), you can make her change direction. It's important not to preserve the image of her motion in the mind as you're trying this.

If you received this in a chain mail or forwarded message over the internet, you probably also got a lot of text about left brain and right brain and their relative abilities and so on and so forth. While all of that is probably very interesting, it is perhaps best left to the explanatory capabilities of Wikipedia or some other reliable encyclopedia. For the moment, concentration on enjoying the illusion. This is magic at its best -  the magic of the human mind.

(Image courtesy http://www.nicholasroussos.com/ who're hosting it up there for people to link to)

In A Mood To Experiment

Experimentation is an awesome thing. I'm not talking about huge things like going on a bungee-jumping adventure or something wild like that. I'm talking about simple everyday things, mundane things, things that you would never think twice about in the normal course of life, things that don't count way up there on the Bucket List or anything. Simple experiments with how you live and what you do in your daily life. They enrich life, spice things up a little, are fun to do, and often end up with rather positive results.

One experiment I did recently was chop off my own hair, rather than go to a hairdresser. Now I confess, I'm no professional. I did a rather bad job of it. I used a pair of scissors which has become a little blunt through years of use (in cutting paper at that). I cut the entire thing very unevenly (it's turned out shorter on one side that on the other, and quite a few locks of hair that should've been cut were left untouched). I cut it shorter than I intended to. And yet, with all that, it's not a huge disaster that I absolutely cannot deal with. Lucky for me, my hair curl and wave a lot, so that covers up the uneven length. Because of the way I cut it, I ended up changing my style entirely, and guess what, the new style is pretty flexible and suits me too. And regular shampooing and conditioning ensures that they stay manageable. I probably couldn't go to a formal party looking like this, but nobody in my daily life seemed to feel there was anything wrong with it, which is a lot more than I ask for.

Another experiment, which effectively occurs twice a week, is my cooking. I have no training of any kind there either, whether by a professional expert, or by an amateur one (by which I mean my mom). Every time I enter the kitchen to cook is a time for a new experiment, a new random choice of vegetables, spices and cooking time. Well, not completely random either, I do try to make things conform to what has been approved already by the experts. But my lack of expertise means it won't always turn out that way, and often there are no preapproved guidelines to follow. So it's effectively an experiment, and quite often, if I don't worry unnecessarily about the results, it turns out pretty decent.

A third, more general experiment, is walking about and negotiating stuff alone. A slightly risky experiment to make, I admit, but this falls more into the realm of exploring. The fact that each human being needs to seek their own way and learn to negotiate the world on their own anyway doesn't make it any less of an experiment. An experiment seems to indicate some sense of underlying choice for most people, the choice of whether to do the experiment or not, in which case, negotiating the world is not an experiment, because you don't have a choice there. I disagree, because an experiment is anything where something new is attempted to gain a result, and you don't have to know that result. You only have to find it. Doing it with someone always makes it easier, simply because you have two thinking minds, so you can have two varying opinions, and some amount of cross critical thinking can get you far ahead. Doing it alone is slightly more of a challenge, because you have to pose questions to yourself and answer them yourself as well. But that makes the challenge only more challenging, doesn't it?

I'm in a mood to experiment. I have been for the past few years in fact, perhaps a little passively, perhaps only in erratically timed spurts. The mood feels good, and a little more active right now. I'm happy.

I Went There. So?

I'm an atheist, or at least I am far on the side of the spectrum that leads towards atheism. I don't believe in gods or in divine or supernatural presences, and I think people who do are kidding themselves in some way. But I still participate in certain religious ceremonies or excursions, when my family or friends have them. In a way, I think it's hypocritical and it is, but blandly saying that I won't be a part of it because I don't believe in it is also a little difficult for me.

The trouble is most of these religious functions are also social functions. I can't refuse to attend my cousin's wedding just because it's a religious ceremony; it's her wedding, she's happy and I'm happy for her, and I should be there to celebrate it with her. The same goes for every wedding ceremony or reception that I've ever attended. I've never gone to a wedding that was simply a court marriage followed by a simple reception or celebration party. Or if there's a festival around or something, and everyone's going to a temple or some kind of celebration, it's not just about going there to worship or pray. There's a kind of social bonding taking place as well, the very act of going out together, cooking together and spending time together. And people just expect you to be there, without asking whether you believe or not: they just assume that you do.

So I go along for the ride, I go to all these temples, I take the offerings that are given, I go through all the rounds of worship rituals. Actually, no, I don't do most of the ritualistic things. I simply stand there while everyone else is doing them, and I look at everyone and feel lost and awkward, because in my heart, I know I should not be there. Then once the ritualistic part is over, the social part starts. The food, the photographs, the talking, the laughing. Apparently it's a package deal; I cannot just avoid the ritual part of it and stay for the social part of it; it's either take it all or leave it all. Even if it doesn't mean anything to me.

I've tried objecting to it, even screaming at times that it doesn't make sense because I don't believe in it at all, but would you believe it, they still want me to go through with it. They think that either I'm being deliberately difficult, or I'm somewhat misguided, or that I should be made to do it for my own good, even when I don't believe. It's even funny in a way: people will be pleased with an outward show even when I openly declare that I do not believe, while the reason that they themselves do it is because they sincerely believe. Apparently, it's also a face-saving exercise in the end.

So now, I just go along for the ride. I still have to deal with the feeling of being lost and awkward, but once that's over, the fun begins. So, I wait for the party to start.

Schrodinger's Rapist

Awesome post. It highlights a lot of things that are not often understood by a lot of people.

Schrodinger's Rapist

Unfortunately, this situation creates problems for me, because of my innate nature. I happen to like being friendly. I like the idea of being able to say good morning to the complete stranger on the bus, without worrying about whether that person is going to take that as a signal of some kind. I like being able to talk to the person behind me in the queue, without worrying about whether he is some kind of threat to me. I like being able to ask a question to the guy sitting next to me in the auditorium, perhaps even have a normal conversation, without that person trying to push his way into my inner circle.

And, unfortunately, that doesn't quite happen. If I behave friendly, even in the slightest way, a guy is going to take that as a signal that I'm interested, and perhaps interested in something more. Rather, he's going to jump ahead to the idea that I'm interested in something more, because of course, most other girls are so aloof, so untrusting, so if this one is being friendly, she must be having different ideas. This is not just speculation. It has actually happened. Of course I have different ideas. I believe in being nice to the people around me, but I expect that niceness to be reciprocated, and I expect that they in turn should not try to be more than nice. I'm trying to not send out any signals to indicate any interest or lack thereof, I'm just trying to be pleasant-mannered, but somehow, that in itself ends up being a signal!

It sucks.