The Invisible Binoculars

Random Theories #1

If you wear spectacles you might find yourself relating to this, if not ask a friend or a relative if they do. I am quite a bit curious about this, naturally since I have been wearing specs for at least eleven years now.
This is the part where I tell you what I am talking about it seems? Right it is.. I felt like fooling around a bit but nah I am excited to share this so here I go!
When I am not wearing my specs and I'm in a situation where I have to look at something, I find myself curling my fingers into a circle and holding my hands around my eyes. I look like I am holding invisible binoculars really. And what this does is that it helps my sight ever so slightly and makes things a bit clearer.
I also found that I wasn't the only person who did it. The majority of my friends who wear specs.. lets call them my "spectacles community", do the exact same thing.
The natural thing to do is to dismiss the probability of sight enhancement and say that our mind is playing tricks on us, making us imagine if we had "glasses like" things around our eyes we would see better.
But I think otherwise. Because I really do notice a difference. Let me explain..
People narrow their eyes when they want to see better right? Making them focus their power on the thing they want to see. I think its likewise with the circle fingers action. Our sights are generally bad and the power is distributed across the distance of whatever our eyes are facing. But if you do the finger circle action you will only see whats right in front of you, completely shutting our the unnecessary scenery on the sides of your sight. Making you focus your vision on the thing you want to see. So instead of having your eye power distributed on a large area it would be focus on the little area you want to see. Enhancing your sight ever so slightly.
I have not searched about this for I wanted to write down my own uninfluenced thoughts, but I am excited to search if others have theories or maybe answers about this... what to call it..? The invisible binoculars thing! I guess I will discover others opinions once I post this.

Mind and Body Connection.

I was watching a show called "I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant" the other day, here is a quick synopsis of the show. The show tells the stories of some ladies who for medical reasons would get pregnant and wouldn't figure it out until they are in labor.  You can watch the show or read about these women if you're interested, but the point is that the show got me thinking… how can we be so unaware of major changes in our bodies? How unfamiliar are we with the only thing that has stuck with us since birth? What causes this disconnection, and is it possible to be more accustomed towards our bodies? 

This isn’t a post for me to explain a theory or answer my questions. I was introducing the thoughts that got me to decide what I will be doing for the next two weeks, and that is mediation and any other thing that could strengthen my mind and body connection. After I gain a little bit of experience on how it feels like to be aware of my body, I will then attempt to find answers for my questions.

Aaand mediation starts NOW

The Stockholm Syndrome

        Let's talk creepy. The Stockholm syndrome has always been something I heard of here and there.  But my first time being really introduced to its concept was while reading a book called Stolen a Letter to My Captor. Which Stolen is a phenomenal novel, I do recommend you check out. The author of the novel, Lucy Christopher, succeeds not only in portraying the idea of the syndrome, but in making the readers experience it as well. Now I will stop talking about the book before this post turns into a book review.

       This syndrome has been named after the Norrmalmstorg bank robbery that occurred in Stockholm Sweden 1973. A little background on the events, several bank workers were held hostage for some time while the criminals negotiated with the police. When the police came to the employee's rescue, they were shocked to find that the hostages accumulated emotional attachment towards the robbers. The workers were defending their captors and did not wish to be freed.

        So, what exactly is this syndrome? The Stockholm syndrome is a complicated psychological case, where a victim of some sort possesses emotional empathy or connection towards their abuser.  This case is quite common in hostages; hostages might eventually have some positive feelings towards their captors, they might think of their lack of physical abuse as kindness. This emotional connection is very strong; it could lead the victim to actually defend the criminal. The emotional attachment is called "traumatic bonding".

         Does this syndrome occur in every traumatic case?
Not at all. 73% percent of kidnap, hostage victims and others feel absolutely no attachment towards their criminals.The slim percentage that does however, still manages to blow off the minds of common people, but it has become a normal maybe even an expected case for psychologists and police. So, what exactly triggers this syndrome? And how does it happen?
Well, after dealing with these cases for a while, psychologists have been able to notice a pattern; some particular events or aspects that happened to each of the victims. And those aspects are the following:

• The victim's abuser must have shown some sort of kindness at one time or the other.
• The captor would feed the hostage and care for their wellbeing. 
• The captor would not hurt them physically.
• The captor might share his past or emotions etc…
• A relatively long period of time must have passed.
• The victim must have acknowledged their inability of escape.  

Of course we can always be more specific, but we are speaking in general here.
With those aspects, its very well expected of the victim to gather some sort of connection with the captor.
Other victims also prone to this syndrome would be:

• Abused Children
• Battered/Abused Women
• Prisoners of War
• Cult Members
• Incest Victims
• Concentration Camp Prisoners
• Controlling/Intimidating Relationships   

     Why do victims feel this way though? Why would any person in their right mind sympathize with a criminal?
The answer for those questions doesn't quite exist sadly. Psychologists could guess, policemen could guess but sometimes no one can know for certain why our minds function in the way they do.
I on the other hand, have allowed myself a guess and it is as follows.
It is easier to live not hating the people around you.
If a victim truly needs to acknowledge their inability of escape in order to develop this syndrome, doesn't it mean that they are kind of working with what they have?
Maybe the victims are trying to increase their survival chances by accepting their situation and trying to live with it. Resulting in not hating the criminals then maybe understanding them, then loving them?
That’s my guess, I mean if I were to live in a certain situation forever… I might as well make the best of it, right?

        What is really interesting though, is the switch which flips in those victims. I would like to have the power to bring the victim's former syndrome self to talk to its post syndrome self and see what happens. I would want to know if the former syndrome victim would feel as if they turned into a brainwashed mess or something. This makes me wonder… If people with the Stockholm syndrome don't really know they are experiencing inappropriate feelings… if they don’t know they have the syndrome… what makes me so certain I am not one of those people?  Or...what makes you certain you aren't either?

Do Animals Have Free Will?

I have become very interested in philosophy for quite some time. And one of the most important basic arguments in philosophy is whether human souls exist or not. Now, this post will not be on the topic of souls for I will be doing a separate post concerning that matter.  The reason I brought soul philosophy up, is because of something I heard in one of the philosophy lectures on death in Yale's University. The professor mentioned one of the famous arguments supporting the soul theory, which explains that in order to have free will there must be a soul. The word freewill triggered a spark in my brain. It made me think, do animals have free will? Do animals have souls? 

To answer that, we need to fully understand the meaning of the word "freewill".
Freewill: (adj) the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
In other words, have a mind of your own, choose for yourself, speculate, and think for yourself.

Now, we all know what an innate behavior is. It is the basic sort of program in every creature; humans, plants, animals, and all the little creatures too. It is what a living thing does without having to be told to do or taught how. Examples of this in animals are, eating, flying, crawling, vocalizing, etc…
But we also know that animals have learned behaviors too. Simple example is training dogs some tricks. Moreover animals have the capacity to learn new things that are out of their nature, like the many chimpanzee experiments. Animals also have the capability to be conditioned to certain things, like in the dog experiment done by the psychologist Ivan Pavlov; where he rang a bell every time a dog could smell his food. Initially the dog only drooled in response to the food cent while the bell noise was insignificant to it, but eventually the dog made the connection between the sound and the food smell so whenever Ivan rang the bell, the dog immediately started to drool.   
So as you can see, a dog drooling in result of ringing bells is something unnatural, not a response a dog is born with.
But that does not at all mean that animals (dogs in this matter) can reason and choose for themselves. Meaning even the behaviors which aren’t innate, do not prove free will in 
animals.

To make this a bit clearer, let me give some free will examples in humans that are sort of relatable to animals.
To choose to kill someone, not out of instinct.
To choose to stay up all night staring at the stars.
To choose to end your life. Aka commit suicide.

We know animals kill each other. They can kill for food, pride, territory, mates etc…
But once again it all comes back to instinct. They do not kill because one lion is jealous of how cool the zebra print is. (Not that humans kill for these shallow reasons either, it is just an example.)
So, free will in killing in my opinion is ruled out.

Animals only stay up through their natural sleep time if they have something to do. Hunt, play, and eat and so on. But they certainly don't choose to stay up to watch stars, movies or any of that.
That is also ruled out.

The third example is kind of the soul reason of this entire post.
I want to know whether or not animals have free will that allows them to commit suicide.
Till now I am almost convinced that animals live on instinct and not freewill. They are more like a complicated living program. But finding out the answer to animal suicide may change my mind.

In order for a creature to commit suicide they must know that they are mortal. So now, the question is… are animals aware of their mortality?
Well, humans themselves might not have been aware of their own mortality at first until the first human died. Only then did we understand death, or did we? We will leave that for another post, but for now let's think. Animals witness others deaths of their kind. But does that mean they understand what it is? According to a newspaper an 11 year old gorilla named Gana was holding a dead little monkey baby and looked like she was grieving. People argue concerning the article saying that only because animals sometimes act like us doesn't mean that the same complicated reasoning underlies their actions. Well, we can safely look past that argument by reading another incident where a mother elephant was grieving for days for her stillborn baby and trying to wake the baby or get a response. If the elephant was really grieving for her unresponsive baby, it is a good chance that the elephant mother understood that there was no coming back.  Meaning that at least some animals have a gist of what death is.

Now that that is out of the way and we can hypothetically think that animals are aware of their mortality, does it mean they can choose to end their lives?
In some cases, mother gorillas have died right after their children died. Well, that looks like suicide doesn't it? But is it really? The answer is, no. The gorilla mothers did not mean to end their lives. They were in so much sadness that resulted in neglecting one or more of the basic survival actions like sleeping, eating, self-protection etc…
The gorilla mom death might have suspiciously looked like suicide, but it wasn't really; because the mom death was in result of grieving and what accompanies it of neglectance and not the result of intentionally not wanting to go on as a living creature.
Other than the grieving death incidents, no other "suicide like" deaths have been ever 
noticed in any of the animals.

In conclusion, there is no conclusion. This is an ongoing search for answers, what I have is 
only a clue to start looking into the freewill suicide animal matter. Although I am slightly convinced that animals are intelligent instinctive programs, there is hope that they also 
have free will and souls. So I will be clinging to that hope and continuing my search.

Why start a blog?

           I'm simply using this as a medium to write down what I learn. You can consider this dear random reader as "self talk"; a way to keep track and remember some of the things I got to perceive during my lifetime. I see myself doing something important one day, but with me lazing about on my bed watching series all day long, that will sadly only live in my imagination. So, I will unleash my philosophical side of me here, and will keep my nerdy side satisfied. If anyone is reading this, hello! I'm Aisha or "Aicha" Lariani, and you're checking out my learning journey.