The Confounding World: Feral Children

 Forget Tarzan. Forget Mowgli. 

Those stories of lore are malarky. 

Romulus & Remus

Echoes of feral children or, in times long past, feral peoples, have succeeded in permeating cultural traditions in perhaps every generation of storytellers. The idea balloons in our minds as something oddly romantic. How kind of those apes to raise that needy little boy. 'Gee-golly, what an opportunity that boy has had! He gets to see the world like no one else, and now we will dutifully acclimate him to the ways of modern man so he can share his learned wisdom with the myriads.'

We have only a handful of documented cases where a child either learned to live in the wild, or was enslaved by an upbringer who deprived the child of sensory interaction with the world. The results from such cases are much less happy-go-lucky than our imaginations would lay siege for.

The most famous case was perhaps one which sprung up from 19th century France in the form of a young boy named Victor. Victor was eleven or twelve when he was spotted on the outskirts of town by a woman who promptly reported the likes of the crazy child to local authorities. Using dogs, the boy was caught, and then plopped into the age of man. The story from this point forward is immortalized by Francois Truffaut's film, The Wild Child. His take on the situation peels out more with the same The Elephant Man-esque ode to the human spirit fervor that Lynch's later film mastered. The cause of Victor is taken up by Dr. Jean Itard (played by Truffaut) himself, the unsinkable doctor who successfully rehabilitates the boy to french society. The film is noted for its ending, in which the good doctor has finished his work with the child, and we watch Victor ascending a spiral staircase with his new foster mother. The idea from this, of course, is that now that the hard work of assimilation into culture was completed for Victor, 'the sky's the limit!' Huzzah!

Reality tells a bleaker tale. Dr. Itard was able to make a good deal of progress with Victor, but language never came. For some reason, when it came to speaking and reading, language simply didn't stick.

In modern times in America, we have the story of Genie. Genie was a little girl who was found to be locked in a room her whole life. When she was found, the adolescent girl was wearing a diaper. Upon being found out, Genie's father shot himself. Her mother claimed her and her daughter were both enslaved by the now dead man. An insightful doctor admitted that when Genie was discovered by doctors and scientists, "She had a personal quality that seemed to illicit rescue fantasies." Here was a girl who was going to be put through the ringer of every test imaginable.

The scientific trick of feral children is that you can't easily test for such environments. No person will isolate a child from society for years just to see what happens to their brain. So, when little Genie showed up in 1970 -- studying her was an opportunity that couldn't be overlooked.

With her, also -- the same results as Victor.

She could learn many things, but language was an insurmountable hurdle. A brain-scan of Genie showed that significant parts of her brain revealed 'sleeping-packed neurons'; packets of neurons that are bundled together and unused.

Watch a Nova special about Genie HERE.

Why is this perplexing? Why do feral children get quick access into my wonderful list of enigmas? It's the 'what-ifs'!

Why can't these children learn to talk? As of now, the evidence shows that if a child is not around a language speaking society by ages five or six, well then, it's too late. The brain hard-wires itself down, and then it's to be no more. The limits have been established. The caps are in place. The sky isn't the limit after all.

Remember that time during The Matrix when Morpheus apologizes to Neo -- he tells him he broke his own rule -- that people can't handle the switch out of the matrix after a certain age? Is there authentic truth to that? If we can't handle language acquisition after a certain age, what else do we hard-wire ourselves against?

Is there anything we are missing out on? Is there something that we would understand better, if only we encountered it during our formulative years? And what of telling a child about God? What happens to the brain of a child that is taught to believe in God from toddler age on upwards, and what of the child that is deprived of such ideas? If a child is brought to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, is he more apt then to beliefism over skepticism?

A bit further down that rabbit-hole before I finish -- what of speaking in tongues? If tongues can be some sort of angelic language that is bestowed from above, are we hardwired to never be able to comprehend it on our own because we missed out during the growing years? Okay, that one's a stretch. But logically, it seems theoretically possible that the parent can greatly affect what hardwiring goes on due to what one's child is exposed to. If you raise a child only on logic and mathematics, trying your best to leave out the arts, do you create a creature that is more akin to a computer than to an emo-rockstar? Conversely, if the world of the senses is denied, and in its stead only the fantastic is pushed in -- what happens then?

Perhaps it is due to classic Disney movie indoctrination and the American spirit, but my instinct is to want to believe that anything we put our minds to we can accomplish. Sadly, the failures of language acquisition in the lives of these feral kids shows otherwise. As it turns out, when you wish upon a star, you better be younger five for it to work.

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As long as I'm touching on this topic I would be chagrin not to mention the great Werner Herzog's contribution to the conversation. His 1974 film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser covered this very subject matter.

All that anyone really need know of the film is this: the title of this Herzogian film in German directly translates to, "Every man for himself and God against them all." Yep. That's the title.

The Confounding World: Hypnosis

On Hypnosis  
(Visual Cues taken from the film The Manchurian Candidate, 1962, directed by John Frankenheimer)
Here I start a new series (we'll see how long it lasts) in which I intend to raise questions about those things in this God ordained world of which I just can't quite wrangle my mind around. 

A family tradition within my family clan was to annually visit the Hypnotist show at the San Diego County Fair. Every year we'd go, and every year members plucked from the crowd would answer the phone in their shoe, or discover that they happened to be a singer in Destiny's Child. The shows were always uproariously fun to observe. Uproarious, I say.

The show was always G-rated, but the hypnotist told of a nightclub where performances were done for adult crowds only. I never ventured to such a show, but my mind has wandered... what things would he suggest to the hypnosees? What acts did they do under the cover of an adult show?

I never volunteered to go onstage. I was always too scared. I am still scared. What would it mean if it worked? What does that say about me? Could I crumble under the power of suggestion? Would I do things that my inner flesh desires, but my moral soul denies? Would I do acts against God? Could I steal, rape, kill?

Remember the glitch in The Matrix -- the black cat that shows up twice? If deja vu is the glitch in The Matrix, then perhaps hypnosis is the glitch of our brain circuitry. Wikipedia's article on the subject quotes ol' Ivan Pavlov:

Speech, on account of the whole preceding life of the adult, is connected up with all the internal and external stimuli which can reach the cortex, signaling all of them and replacing all of them, and therefore it can call forth all those reactions of the organism which are normally determined by the actual stimuli themselves. We can, therefore, regard ‘suggestion’ as the most simple form of a typical reflex in man.

There's the rub: words. What are they? Signals. Symbols. Not essence; no, not that. The things behind the words -- those unquantifiable essences -- the things that words point to -- those are the hidden units of control. Perhaps hypnosis simply momentarily hotwires our brains to action rather than to signals. Maybe it forgoes the interpretation of symbols and signals. Perhaps the symbol becomes the essence.

Let's get scarier. 

Do you control yourself? To a degree, of course. But I don't regulate my heartbeat. I can control my breathing if I will myself to, but if I fill my brain with thoughts, my body knows enough to breathe on its own. A thousand wars are being fought inside of me as I write this; white blood cells slay foreign enemies from abroad. My autonomic nervous system -- it itself is a creature I can't control. 

Ernest Hilgard was an American Psychologist who taught at Stanford. He spoke of a theory that sounds like something out of Dexter or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He believed in a, "Hidden Observer." 
 

Who is this dark companion? According to Hilgard's experiments, he is our dissociated self. Hilgard suggested to a hypnotized blind man that he could no longer hear. The patient remembers ceasing to hear anything at that point, so he began working out a statistical problem in his head to fill in the void. The next thing the patient recalls is his finger involuntarily lifting. This frightens the man and he asks to be freed. When he awakes from this realm of cognitive dissonance, he asks Hilgard what happened. Although he supposedly couldn't hear anything, Hilgard questioned the patient, asking that if any part of the brain still could hear, that the body was to raise his finger. In another instance, patients that were taking a bath in ice under hypnosis, when asked if they were cold, cheerfully said they felt fine, but when told to raise their finger if any part of their body felt coldness, the involuntary finger arose once more. I ask again, who is this inner puppeteer?

If the subconscious of every individual has its own understanding, its own ability to interpret and respond to its surroundings, if in fact we accept this theory, where does that leave us? For the Christian soul, can we say this is the keen eye of the Holy Ghost? That suggestion feels off-kilter to me, as if to proclaim that it is the third member of the Trinity that is actively orchestrating each heart pump and palpitation. Do we also really make claim as such that when we use the nomenclature of God coming into our hearts, that this, in some manner, is anatomically accurate? Furthermore, what is to be said of the inner being within the constructs of the man who has not asked for God to enter into his life? Who is the inner master there? Nevertheless, we do see in Scripture that a position of the Holy Spirit is to transcend the symbols of language -- to speak in essences rather than signals;

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.  And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. Romans 8:26-27 NIV

All this is talk of hypnosis within the sole person, the lone dualist. What of the masses? People are capable of horrendous acts of villainy. In the thirties, how was it possible for an entire nation to blindly follow such a lunatic as Hitler. Yes, the German people were coming out of an awful twenty years since the end of WWI. Yes, they were vulnerable. Yes, they needed hope. But how could such evil be so seductive? Is there something to be said for a form of mass-hypnosis? 

David Redles, in his book "Hitler's Millenial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation" delved into the issue of Hitler and hypnosis. He quotes Kurt Ludecke's account of his first time intaking a Hitler speech:

Presently my critical faculty was swept away. Leaning from the tribune as if he were trying to impel his inner self into the consciousness of all these thousands he was holding the masses and me with them, under a hypnotic spell... His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth. He seemed another Luther... I experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to religious conversion... I had found myself, my leader, and my cause. 

Ludecke seems to be suggesting that Hitler's words were crossing the realm of mere symbol and signal. He was speaking through feeling, through some brand of osmosis even. He was able to roam around in the German mind in such an authentic matter that there could be no question as to his moral authority. This creature of rhetoric somehow kept his turpitude an unexposable secret beneath the construct of his hypnotic pulse.  Another intaker of Hitler's power quoted in Redles' book remarked,

The susceptibility of the Chancellor's mind to psychic influences is shown in his public oratory. At the outset of a speech his delivery is sometimes slow and halting. Only as the spiritual atmosphere engendered by a great audience takes possession of his mind does he develop that eloquence which acts on the German nation like a spell. For he responds to this metaphysical contact in such a way that each member of the multitude feels bound to him by an individual link of sympathy.

What is this power that breaks down our internal security system? What is physically happening in the mind amidst such a cacophony? Reading these interviews of the myriads that were led astray by Hitler causes me to wonder: is this all feeling and instinct that controls people in such circumstances? What part of the brain takes hold of the steering wheel in such cases? Could this happen to me? Has it already? 

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There seems to me to be ample evidence that hypnotism is something greater than merely a great placebo. I've seen too many Fair-Goers turn into clucking chickens to doubt its reality. What bothers me is not just its existence in our reality, and the questions that raises as to how our minds really work, but that it is a topic that very few folks seem interested in. Who amongst the Christian intellectia is focused on understanding hypnotism, and its ramifications on history and perhaps theology? 

Hypnosis: that really creepy thing that unnerves me whenever I think about, but really know nothing about... if you have any wisdom on the subject, lend me your knowledge, so as to ease my unsettledness. 

Made to commit acts too unspeakable to be cited here by an enemy who had captured his mind and his soul. He freed himself at last and in the end, heroically and unhesitatingly gave his life to save his country. Raymond Shaw... Hell... Hell.

Gamechangers

Happy Feet.

Happy Feet.

Happy Feet.

It all seemed so natural, so rudimentary, so everyday.

It was so simple, so easy to surmise the premise, so effortless to outline the details.

It was all so normal.

This was Happy Feet for about 70 minutes. Just another day at the kids' shop. I threw it atop the massive pile of swell animated critter films that help us teach our kids tolerance.

And then BLAMMO!  Suddenly the rock below my feet can't be trusted. Where's my footing? What am I standing on? The world twisted itself into a sincerely confounding shred of surreally undefinable existence.

Just like that I've become a man without a past, because all my preconceptions of the reality I've been dwelling in are being ruthlessly torn asunder. Asunder!!

ASUNDER!!

Now!  A subtle little memory arises. A warning from the past.

Long ago my brother had foretold of such third act devastation from the Feet. He was unable to articulate it, only managing to blurt out some strange doctrine.  He recklessly cajoled that the film was some form of Jedi Communism. Yes, yes, he knew about this. He had witnessed it before. He came out of it alive. We can too. We can too. We can live through this dammit!

When the curtain finally, mercifully fell, all that was left in me was laughter. My brother saw something evil in Happy Feet's manipulated plot that was vitriolly against the very core of our souldom.   I, for one, found the subversive denouement as something so jarring that I couldn't help but appreciate it.  And so my response was laughter.  I could do nothing more.  There is no other response to the strangeness of life.

Happy Feet!  Well done you little devil, you.

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Last night, as a seasonal treat, I destined myself to undertake a watching of all The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes.

As I watched the Simpson quintet get levitated up into a spaceship, my thoughts became far too serious.  Far too serious, indeed.

Certain thoughts drove my brains to contemplate The Matrix, and the ominous words of Morpheus as he tells Neo that they have a policy of not 'unplugging' people after they pass a certain age.  Our feeble minds get so accustomed to our way o' life that gamechanging realities don't help us, they break us. The age-ed mind can only bend so far.

It's not that the spoon can't be bent, it's that our brains can't handle such bendation.

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Gamechanger: that which completely alters how you view and function in the world. An event/reality that comes to be known in a sudden way so that one's conception of existence significantly metamorphs.


Sidenote: Three cheers for Animorphs!

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The first time I was introduced to the concept of 'the Gamechanger' was in the preceding weeks to the Season 3 finale of Lost. 

The teasers kept shouting at me, "EVERYTHING IS ABOUT TO CHANGE!"

I miss Lost.  I miss that relationship.  Boy was that a humpty-dumpty of an ending.
My heart hasn't been the same since.

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I tried to think of any gamechangers in my life.

Being raised in a Christian household all my days, it would be a bit disingenuous to say that my acceptance of God's gift was a gamechanger. Giving my life to Jesus Christ is a lifesaver, no doubt, but since I never avidly lived under another banner of reality, I can't say it resculpted my life palette.

What does seem valid is the 911 attacks.  That changed America's sense of supremacy and invincibility.

For Slovenians, I would imagine the disintegration of Yugoslavia would count.

But both of those aren't as cool as the Alien Card.

Aliens seem like the biggest gamechanger possible (aside from the coming of Jesus -- Come Now, Lord!).

And the best thing about gamechangers is you can never predict quite how they'll change the game.

Just look at how wrong Dustin Hoffman's Dr. Norman Goodman's predictions were in the Michael Crichton adaptation of Sphere.  He was ill prepared for that gamechanger, I say, I say.

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ill prepared.