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A happy but belated birthday in the memory of the late Pat Collins, who was born May 7th. Pat was one of the most famous stage hypnotists of her time and appeared on several TV programs (including a “What’s My Line?” appearance before she was famous) and had two cable specials. She was also known for helping others with hypnosis, including several major television and film stars of her period.
According to the Facebook page here, the founder of the page is producing a documentary about Pat Collins and I for one am looking forward to seeing it.
Why haven’t I been posting for the past month or more? It was because the blog was cracked and much of the behind-the-scenes operations were unavailable. Add to that, I was too busy with other things to make much of an effort to get it resolved until very recently.
The blog got cracked because of a security issue that I thought was taken care of, one that crackers tried several times to take advantage of in the past, and they finally found the crack sometime after April 1st. What happened then is that a rogue file was added to the main page and other files added to the theme directory, all for the spurious purpose of promoting fake online pharmacies. Removing the files from the front page without removing or replacing the files in the theme directory broke the administration section of the blog, until I replace the theme files with a protected copy.
Now things should be back to normal. I expect to be back on a regular schedule with a new post on schedule next weekend.
The brain is just several ounces of neural tissue, not particularly durable and pretty vulnerable if it were not for the bone shell it resides in. Still, it is the seat of all control operations of any living creature that possesses even the most rudimentary brain and is capable of doing a number of amazing things, several things all at the same time. Yet is also one of the most mysterious organs known, its many and varied functions only sketchily understood, in part because of its complexity and complex internal structure, hidden from view and direct manipulation deep within the skull, accessible for the most part only indirectly and therefore very difficult to investigate directly.
“Incognito: the Secret Lives of the Brain” is a book by a neuroscientist, David Eagleman. which attempts to shed some light on the subject. It is a book primarily destined for the lay person and is designed to show just how the brain is so complex and mysterious, yet understandable if only by a process of observation and deduction.
Commentary: This book mirrors much of what I’ve been thinking regarding the internal processes of the brain, although I was coming to the subject through the “brain as a computer” paradigm. The brain may be just one organ but it comprises many, many separate sections and functions, some of which are complimentary and some of which are even combative. It is a wonder that it even functions at all, and, of course, anyone can come up with examples from personal observation or experience when it doesn’t in one way or another, small or large.
My one biggest annoyance was that it was just a little too superficial for my tastes. It talked a lot about the what of the brain and its functions but not so much on the how and why of it. Granted, this book was intended for the general audience but I would have liked to see a little more meat to the descriptions and more space devoted to contemplation of the causes of how the brain does what it does. There are some flashes of that, as for example the description of how baseball players track fly balls in the outfield, where they do not automatically calculate the trajectory to figure out where to run to to catch the ball: instead, they watch the track of the ball and if it appears to deviate from a straight line, meaning they or the ball are moving away from the path, they change direction to return it to a straight line. But mostly the brain is treated as a black box of many internal devices, left unexplored.
My other annoyance was that it doesn’t mention hypnosis at all in the text, and only once in a footnote, remarking how it can affect the results of a particular type of test results.
Recommendation: For the average reader who wants to understand more about the operation of the brain, this would be a good start. However, it is rather shallow for someone who wants a more in-depth explanation of the various brain functions, and almost worthless for any one who wants to understand the particular subject of hypnosis functions.
A place of crawling spiders and poisonous snakes — where nightmares came true.
That was The Black, where men were punished for challenging minds more powerful and their own. The detective from Earth feared The Black more than any torture his own planet could conceive. But he had to uncover the sinister plot that threatened Earth and all its people.
Description: On Rigan, an alien planet where the society is rigidly structured according to the relative telepathic power to control others, someone is taking advantage of that power to kidnap defenseless humans and possibly the natives as well. Morgan Sellers, an investigator from Earth, is matched with Jael Forty, a native investigator with little experience in this situation as crime on that world of this type is very scarce. Communication between the classes is severely limited, adding to the difficulty. To obviate that, the human investigator is disguised as a Traveler, a native alien without the telepathic power, one that can pass among all of the classes without drawing a challenge, protected from telepathic control by the same rigid class structure.
Jael is a 40, meaning he is of the class that controls 40 telepathically inferior natives, although it is not shown exactly how he does that in practice: however, during the story, he is shown advancing to become a 50, which is also a plot point that will affect the actual resolution of the mystery.
Commentary: “The Mind Traders” is a much more memorable story than “The Flying Eyes” by the same author. The depictions of the rigid class structure sticks in the mind long after the story is over: the way the different classes segregate at parties, the way dress color (Travelers wear red, 40s were green) indicates class, the deferential way subordinate classes must address higher classes, the mental battles that determine rising in classes. It also shows the difficulties involved in having and maintaining that social structure, especially when that society comes into conflict with another society, and the resolution of the plot suggests drastic changes to the society as a result.
Recommendation: Recommended more for the societal depiction than anything else. It shows just how a society comprised of mind controlling telepaths can exist, what limitations came about to preserve the society and the individuals and how it has adapted to maintain itself. As a mystery it is mostly flat, the major mystery being how the society works, not so much the actual crimes involved. It should also be noted that while the Rigans are capable of telepathic mind control, they are not communicating telepaths but they are empaths.
Also of interest is the method of punishment called “The Black”. From the descriptions, it appears to be a total isolation of all outside stimuli, a complete mental cut-off from the outside world, which allows all of the internal nightmares full reign within the consciousness, possibly fostered by the one enforcing The Black. It is the main punishment for transgressions on Rigan other than being Controlled.
Unfortunately the title leaves something to be decided, as it just isn’t as descriptive as “The Flying Eyes”: something like “The Mind Masters” or “The Mind Robbers” would have much more descriptive.
Linc Hosler was sitting in a packed football stadium when the Flying Eyes appeared and cast their hypnotic power over half the crowd. Thousands of people suddenly began marching zombie-like into the woods where they vanished into a black pit.
Linc used every resource of the Space Research Lab and the National Guard to destroy the Eyes. But nothing could stop them, for they proved immune to bullets and bombs.
In desperation, Linc captured an Eye and found a way to communicate with it through his mind. He learned that radiation was fuel for the creatures’ lives. And then they issued their terrible ultimatum. Explode a series of atom bombs to supply them with radiation or they would turn the world’s population into mindless robots!
It gave the world two harrowing choices — self-destruction via fallout from the bombs or annihilation via the sinister Flying Eyes!
Quite a terrifying dilemma: physical death by fallout or mental death by alien mental domination. If only the Flying Eyes possessed some weakness that human science could exploit. But no physical attacks seemed to hurt them. The alien Flying Eyes, or Zines as they called themselves, were not limited to just manifesting eyes as they can also manifest limbs which apparently could pass through solid walls.
But their immunity to bombs and bullets, plus their ability to pass through solid objects and their need for radiation also explains their weakness: they are not truly matter as we know it, but mostly of energy. And as creatures of mostly energy, they require raw energy to survive. Such would allow them to travel across space but they had to be wary when entering the gravity field of a planet, because, as per Einstein, energy can be affected by gravity. By the use of a project to control gravity, the Flying Eyes are subjected to a field of increased gravity that causes the structured energy that comprises their forms to degrade, essentially killing them.
Commentary: Author J (Joan) Hunter Holly wrote a number of short novels starting in the very late 1950’s through the middle 1970’s, including another, “The Mind Traders”, which is also in the Collection. This isn’t a very memorable work, better remembered for the fantastical image of floating alien eyes controlling thousands of people at once than anything else. She also wrote one “Man From U.N.C.L.E.” novel, #10, “The Assassination Affair”, as did a number of other mid-list SF authors of the period.
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