October 20, 2000

Strange But True!

Q. Do blind people see in their dreams? Does it make a difference if they're born blind or become blind in life?

A. A big difference. People born blind have no visual imagery to play back, though they dream richly in the other senses. People blinded by accident or disease continue to have seeing dreams, which may take on special emotional significance, says State University of New York psychologist Raymond E. Rainville, himself blinded at the age of 25.

A common type is the "undoing" dream, such as one told to Rainville where the dreamer revisited the accident that led to his blindness, but in the dream he threw himself on the car floor in time to avoid serious head injury. From here he safely watched the colliding truck shear off the car roof.

In reminiscence dreams -- most frequent during the first year of blindness -- there is a happy reliving of earlier sight-rich experience, such as a sidewalk stroll where the dreamer watches a procession of beautifully dressed women pass by or visually feasts on a huge piping hot pizza cut into squares. "In my experience, these occur following some emotionally provocative event in waking life."

On some deep level, the dreams may help not only in adjustment to trauma but also information processing: For instance, Rainville says that when his daughter gets her hair cut short, "I will Braille it, appreciate it, comment on it. However, next time I think of her, in my spontaneous waking image she will still have long hair. Once I dream of her in her new hairdo, that is, once I have SEEN her, she will appear to me pretty much consistently from then on."

Q. Do dogs have a role in psychotherapy?

A. Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, certainly felt they do, and kept a chow-chow Jo-Fi in the room during sessions, says psychologist Stanley Coren in "What Do Dogs Know?" As a judge of the human state of mind, the dog would lie down nearby relaxed patients but across the room from those who seemed tense. Freud put a lot of stock in these reads, it was said. Another key Jo-Fi function: Sensing a session's hour was up, the dog would unerringly get up and move toward the office door.

Maybe Freud was on to something, as recent studies have confirmed the relaxing effect of pets, and one even showed dog owners live longer and require less medical attention.

Q. What about ghosts makes them so restless?

A. Start with their immateriality, allowing them to walk through walls, etc. But if immaterial, they shouldn't be able to lift physical objects -- their hands just passing right through, says Lawrence Krauss in "The Physics of Star Trek." The movie "Ghost" got this part right, but then how did the main character -- a ghost -- manage to sit on a chair or couch and keep his butt anchored there? "Matter is matter, and chairs are no different from walls, and as far as I know butts are no more or less solid than hands."

Not a ghost of a chance Hollywood worried over that little discrepancy -- or this one either, from Wake Forest physicist Robert Brehme: If ghosts aren't material beings, how do they follow their particular haunted locale as it rotates at 1,000 mph (equator) with the Earth, which orbits the sun, etc. "The haunted house stays fixed on terra firma because it is a material object, but what could drag a ghost along with the highly varying motions of the Earth?"

Effortless gravity won't do it, meaning our spirited visitors must be ever on the fly -- pallid vagabonds.

Q. When is swallowing a 3-inch metal bar that sits in the stomach collecting junk considered good medicine?

A. When it's a cow "encouraged" to ingest a thumb-sized iron-alloy "cow magnet" placed in her second stomach (she has several) and that stays there attracting junk taken in with her food, says University of Minnesota veterinarian Ralph Farnsworth. Cattle don't chew their grass and hay well -- preferring to chew their cud -- so down the pipe go nails, fence staples, wire, other detritus of barnyard life.

Obviously, these can be "bad moos" a-roaming the digestive tract, causing "hardware disease" -- arched back, grunting, etc. Rx: a $5 junk-anchor magnet that may last years before filling up, and is recyclable post-mortem.

Q. Tennis pro Greg Rusedski's mighty serves clock at over 140 mph. What's the fastest sports ball anyway?

A. The rock-hard rubber jai alai pelota ("merry festival" in the Basque language), slung out of basket-like scoops at 188 mph, says NASA Ames Research Center scientist Rabindra D. Mehta. Next are a golf ball off the tee at 170 mph and a served tennis ball at about 150 mph. Batted baseballs come close to 150, especially off aluminum bats pulling down the line, while thrown balls attain far less, adds physicist Robert K. Adair.

BTW, don't expect much more speed if you could take these games to the Moon, although the multiplied distances in the one-sixth gravity and frictionless space will keep a ball fetcher chasing for a good while.

Q. This powerful mood-altering "drug" will color all you see and do, speeding your decision-making, hoisting your self-image, inflating your ratings of co-workers and friends, giddying your hopes for the future. It'll also pry open your pocketbook to solicitors and beggars, bring out the good samaritan in you, and even make the streets seem safer. Under what influence have you fallen?

A. Happiness, described by the philosopher William James as the "secret motive for all that people do." Not only is happiness a reward itself, remaking the world anew, but happy people tend to have better immune systems, get sick less, even live longer, says University of California's Sonja Lyubomirsky. And the glow obviously shows, so that happy people in general are rated by others as more competent, more social, even more likely to get to Heaven.

Makes being happy an even happier prospect!

Q. Assume the Earth is the size of a pea. Then how big are the rest of the bodies in the solar system relative to Earth, and how far are they from each other?

A. Scaled down to a pea-Earth, the sun shrinks to beach ball size, Mercury is a grain of rice orbiting at 40 human steps from the sun. Venus and Earth are both peas, 70 and 100 steps from the sun. Mars is another (swollen) rice grain at 150 steps, giants Jupiter and Saturn are tennis and golf balls at 500 and 900 steps. Uranus and Neptune are grapes at 1850 and 2900 steps (0.7 and 1.1 miles). Tiny Pluto is a small grain of rice at 3800 steps (1.4 miles).

The moon is another small grain orbiting six inches from pea-Earth.

How sparsely populated is our solar neighborhood!

Previous columns:

• Strange But True!, 10-13-2000
• Strange But True!, 10-06-2000
• Strange But True!, 09-29-2000