QUESTION: Why do so many people think their brains are being monitored or stimulated by the CIA?
ANSWER: If you work for a news organization, every few months you get a letter like the one that arrived recently at The Miami Herald:"Dear Sir:
"My head is connected to a satellite in space. I have pencil-beams of radar coming out of each ear which lead up to a satellite in space . . . The satellite has a "footprint" around my body, so it aims actors, broadcasters and singers voices dubbed over music and television programs on TV and radio frequencies. You need to stand near my body with a television or a radio on, to hear it."
Obviously, this person needs help. In general such delusions are symptomatic of schizophrenia, a brain disease that can distort incoming information the same way a fever will.
Dr. Burton Goldstein, a psychiatrist at the University of Miami Medical School, notes that there is usually some element of truth in the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic. They may think they are being watched by authorities because they saw a neighbor look at them one day in an unusual way. A schizophenic person will watch a crime show on TV and think that he or she, not the character on TV, is being pursued by the cops. If the CIA is in the news - as it was for several years after the Watergate-era revelations - that agency may get the blame for some imagined transgression.
Perhaps the man who thinks he's connected to the satellite in space had read an article about the Star Wars nuclear defense.
The real mystery is why schizophenia and paranoia are so often coupled. Dr. Darrell Kirch, chief of the schizophrenia branch of the National Institutes of Health: "If you disrupt the normal functioning of the brain . . . one of the results just happens to be paranoid ideas."
In the spirit of careful journalism we did check with the CIA to see if they've been implanting electrodes in the brains of helpless citizens or anything horrible like that.
"Obviously, that's nonsense," said CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield. "We get calls like that from time to time, and we get letters like that . . . . We had someone call us who claimed that a satellite landed in his living room and what should he do."
One of the CIA's favorite letters came from an 8-year-old, says Mansfield. "He said he knew he'd be a great spy, because he was great at spying on his parents. He offered us his services between 4 and 6 p.m., because that was between school and dinner."
QUESTION: Why don't we have eyes on the sides of our heads so we can see in every direction at once?
ANSWER: Humans are innately nervous, on account of not having eyes in back of their head. You hear a sound behind you . . . is it something innocuous? Or is it a PSYCHOTIC CLEAVER-WIELDING BUTCHER? The evolutionary defect of one-direction vision has a plus side, though: With our eyes close together, we see in stereo. Three-D. This is so we can reach out and grab branches as we swing through the trees. Honest.
QUESTION: Why did the cosmic Big Bang go "bang" in the first place?
ANSWER: Once again we take our readers on a bold journey into the Bigger Picture. When last we checked, the theoretical physicists were fairly certain that the universe was originally compressed into a point of infinite density, which one day about 10 to 20 billion years ago decided to explode, the resulting mess being the cosmos as we know it.
Why did it blow up? What happened before the Big Bang? Was the universe old at that point or did it just pop into existence? Until recently scientists tended to throw up their hands and cede the question to theologians and philosophers. The Big Bang has had an Old Testament feel to it all along: In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth and so forth.
One new idea is that the cosmos is like a huge sea of energy, normally smooth but with a few perturbations that can result in a bubble that rapidly expands - what we call a Big Bang. It's just like a beer. You see those bubbles pop out of nowhere, grow quickly in size, shoot upward, and burst at the surface. That could be us. The whole universe is probably just a bubble inside a limitless vat of Old Milwaukee. As soon as the bubble bursts, another one comes along.
This has the nice aspect of allowing for an infinite cosmos.
Even though the observable universe is almost inconceivably large, it is thought by cosmologists to be of finite mass, and will either collapse eventually in a big crunch or just get so cold and dispersed that everything virtually peters out, with even the atomic particles falling apart.
The first avenue means certain extinction for life in the universe. The second makes eternal life iffy at best. Physicist Freeman Dyson writes rather optimistically in "Infinite In All Directions," "This will be the supreme test of life's adaptability. I do not know whether we can survive without protons. But I do not see any reason even then to declare the situation hopeless."
FROM THE MAILBAG:
Bonnie P. of Corte Madera, Calif. asks, "Why do humans and animals have such predictable hair coloring? In other words, why isn't my hair green and my cat's purple?"
The reason humans come in a fairly boring color scheme is that there's no purpose in being, say, green or purple. Evolution isn't funky in that way, it's deadly serious.
The primary pigment in humans is melanin, which happens to be brown, and serves the essential function of screening out harmful ultraviolet light and preventing sunburn (which, in its worst form, can cause blistering, and thus infection, the main killer of people in pre-antibiotic times). Thus, through Natural Selection humans come in varying shades of brown (which we perceive as from white-to-black), depending on how far from the equator their ancestors lived. Some animals use coloration as a communication device, which explains the peacocks and parrot fish and so forth.
Send questions to Joel Achenbach, care of Tropic Magazine, The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132.