It’s easy to become stuck in a rut of thinking. You notice your reflection in a car window and see that your face looks fatter than you remembered so you spend the next half an hour thinking of all the pretty friends you have and how you wished your body was a different shape.
Or maybe you’re sitting on a bus and you overhear someone make a comment that is particularly stupid, so you sit there thinking about how dumb that person is and how much you want to correct them, or maybe you make a Facebook post about it so you can vent your frustration to your friends.
People drive interstate or fly to different countries, to fill their eyes with different sights and their mouths with different food and their ears with different sounds and wash the caked up smog of daily existence away with the sun shower of a new experience. Maybe we can do the same thing for our brains; take a thought holiday, with less cost, without going anywhere.
So in the spirit of cheap armchair travel, here are nine new things to think about:
- The Dancing Plague of 1518
In July of 1518, in the city of Strasbourg, in Alsace, 400 people danced uncontrollably, for no apparent reason, for weeks without stopping.
The outbreak began when a woman known as Mrs. Troffea started dancing wildly in the street and continued in this manner for six days. By the end of the week she had been joined by 34 other dancers, with 400 dancing by the end of the month.
It’s still not clear why these people danced but it’s certain, from historical documents, that they did. Many of them danced to their deaths, from strokes, heart attacks and exhaustion.
The city council believed the dancers would only be released from their rapture if they danced the disease out of their bodies and so encouraged continuous moving, day and night. They constructed a wooden stage for musicians to perform on and opened two guildhalls and a grain market. They believed the afflicted suffered from “hot blood”.
Dancing isn’t the only strange behavioural ailment to have spontaneously afflicted large groups of people throughout history. In 1962 the Tanganyika laughter epidemic saw 95 pupils in a girl’s boarding school laughing uncontrollably for 16 days without rest. In the 1983 West Bank fainting epidemic, mass bouts of extreme dizziness among Palestinian schoolgirls and female Israeli soldiers lead to 943 hospitalisations.
- The town that’s still on fire
A fire has been burning in abandoned coal mines beneath the town of Centralia, in Pennsylvania, since 1962. In its heyday the borough had over 1000 residents. At the last census count it only had ten. Those ten refused to be bought out and relocated by the Government, after a tyre burn off which wasn’t extinguished properly spread to underground coal mines and sparked a mineral blaze that has proven impossible to put out.
The remaining residents have been given special permission to live in Centralia until they die. The borough has four graveyards, one stands on a hilltop overlooking the town with smoke continuously rising from cracks in the ground between the graves. Sink holes open up unannounced in backyards and down the main street; toxic gas leaks are common. If you were to look down on Centralia from a drone it would appear as a large, rambling field with overgrown, paved streets running haphazardly across it.
Centralia is a ghost town now with fire and smoke billowing out of deep ruptures in the ground and the surrounding forests reclaiming the streets. But those 10 people carry on living there, because it’s their home, and they’ve chosen to stay.
- A really, very, rather, exceptionally large number.
Graham’s Number was invented by mathematician Ronald Graham. Maybe invented is the wrong word. The number already existed. Ronald Graham was the first person to point it out, to say “Hey look at this number” and for that he was put in the Guinness Book of records.
Graham’s Number falls into the mathematical study area of “large numbers”. Although to call Graham’s number large seems like an understatement considering it’s so big that to write it out in the usual way, in decimal format, with each digit taking up the smallest possible space of one Planck volume would be impossible, because it would take up more space than actually exists. Meaning there would not be enough space in the known universe to hold a representation of Graham’s Number.
- The Postman’s Palace
A French postman born in 1836 named Ferdinand Cheval spent thirty three years building a palace in the French countryside out of pebbles and stones he found on his postal route. Cheval’s Palais Ideal looks, from afar, like a giant sandcastle. Its beautiful cornices, pillars, spiral staircases and intricate decorative features are still standing today, a hundred years later. Cheval was inspired to start building the palace when he stumbled against a stone that was shaped in such an odd way that it awoke a forgotten dream in him, he wrote:
“I was walking very fast when my foot caught on something that sent me stumbling a few meters away, I wanted to know the cause. In a dream I had built a palace, a castle or caves, I cannot express it well… I told no one about it for fear of being ridiculed and I felt ridiculous myself. Then fifteen years later, when I had almost forgotten my dream, when I wasn’t thinking of it at all, my foot reminded me of it. My foot tripped on a stone that almost made me fall. I wanted to know what it was… It was a stone of such a strange shape that I put it in my pocket to admire it at my ease. The next day, I went back to the same place. I found more stones, even more beautiful, I gathered them together on the spot and was overcome with delight… It’s a sandstone shaped by water and hardened by the power of time. It becomes as hard as pebbles. It represents a sculpture so strange that it is impossible for man to imitate, it represents any kind of animal, any kind of caricature.
I said to myself: since Nature is willing to do the sculpture, I will do the masonry and the architecture”
The life sized palace, which stands 18 feet high and holds a multitude of rooms, hallways, staircases and windows is considered an important national art treasure and has been a source of inspiration for Pablo Picasso, among many others in the century since it’s construction.
- Naked snowman protest
In 1511 locals in Brussels built over 100 pornographic and obscene snowmen as a protest against the Belgian government. These snow statues included
“A snownun that was seducing a man; a snowman and a snowwoman having sex in front of the town fountain; and a naked snowboy urinating into the mouth of a drunken snowman. There were also snow unicorns, snow mermaids, a snow dentist” and “snow prostitutes enticing people into the city’s red light district”.
- The most succinct word in the world
The Yaghan word “Mamihlapinatapai” is listed in the Guinness book of records as the most succinct word in the world, the word with the most amount of meaning held in the smallest number of letters. It is defined as “a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that they both desire but which neither wants to begin.” or “that look across the table when two people are sharing an unspoken but private moment. When each knows the other understands and is in agreement with what is being expressed. An expressive and meaningful silence.”
- A life recorded in minute detail
Famous for writing the world’s longest diary, the Reverend Robert Shields was a high school English teacher, a former minister and probably suffered from hypergraphia, an overpowering, compulsive urge to write. His daily journal totalled over 37 million words, filling 94 filing boxes. He chronicled his life, in five minute intervals for over 25 years, from 1972 until 1997. The diary can’t be read in full until 50 years from Shields’ death, as per the instructions given with his donation of the diaries to the Washington State University, but some small excerpts have been published, including the following:
July 25, 1993
7 am: I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin.
7.05 am: Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used five sheets of paper.
- The Schmidt Sting Pain Index
Entomologist Justin O. Schmidt was awarded an Ig Nobel prize in 2015 for his work on a pain index that describes the relative discomfort of being bitten by over 78 species of insect. Schmidt created his pain index by painstakingly researching the effects on his body of stings from bees, wasps, ants and other hymenopteran insects and comparing the effects of the venom. Schmidt wrote descriptions of each encounter, such as:
“Paraponera clavata stings induced immediate, excruciating pain and numbness to pencil-point pressure, as well as trembling in the form of a totally uncontrollable urge to shake the affected part.”
- Visual anosognosi
Anton–Babinski syndrome is a very rare condition among those who suffer from cortical blindness – which is “the total or partial loss of vision in a normal-appearing eye caused by damage to the brain’s occipital cortex” – and presents as an unshakeable belief held by the affected person that they are not blind at all. Even when presented with clear evidence to the contrary. It’s a kind of brain damage that occurs in the occipital lobe and is usually diagnosed when a patient is seen walking in to furniture, colliding with closed doors or falling over small objects. It’s not known why sufferers of Anton-Babinski syndrome deny their blindness, but it can be almost impossible to convince patients that they can’t, in fact, see anything at all.
So perhaps next time I worry about the ugly hair in my belly button, or fume silently at the rudeness of a stranger, or replay the injustice of a customer’s complaint over and over in my head like the title screen of a DVD left as background sound after the end of movie, maybe I can turn off that noise by remembering the man who felt compelled to write down every tiny detail of his life. Or I could wonder about the ten people still living in the fiery ghost town of Centralia or think about the Anton-Babinski-ites who walk into walls, who live without working eyes yet refuse to accept that they’re unable to see.
Small Good Things 