03-22-2017, 12:00 AM
How to Become Batman is the title of an Invisibilia podcast episode available to listen to at http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia (You'll have to scroll down through the episodes to find it as I couldn't find a direct link).
This episode focuses on how our beliefs can influence reality. First they look at an experiment in which a group of rats have their cages labelled "smart rat" or "dumb rat". These labels are applied randomly to a group of ordinary rats. Next the rats are given to a bunch of people who are told they are going to run their rats through a maze and time them. The ones whose cages are labelled "smart rat" end up performing much better than the others. They're results end up being twice as good. Scientists, with their bias against the non-physical, explain this as a result of the way the people handle the rats when they think they are smart more gently and find a correlation between more gently handled rats and rats who are good at running mazes. They claim that there are other subconscious things people did as a result of their beliefs which really affected the rats results, but that the beliefs themselves did not. This suggestion is due to nothing other than the scientists' bias, as they did not test for belief-alone results but ruled them out anyway.
Next, the episode begins talking about a man who is able to see without eyes. The man, (Daniel), was born completely blind and yet learned how to click his tongue against the roof of his mouth in order to determine where things were. Being able to see this way, using echolocation, he has gotten the nickname "Batman". He calls what he does "seeing" and complains when people are amazed by it because he says it isn't amazing. He says it's something any blind person could do if they didn't believe they couldn't and weren't surrounded by others who thought they couldn't. When he was little, his mom had the choice between wrapping him in cotton as his grandmother suggested to protect him, or letting him explore the world like a sighted child. She opted for the second choice, even though he liked to climb up bookshelves and do other things that might frighten a blind child's parents.
This attitude on his mom's part caused a lot of concern for their neighbors. The police brought Daniel home once at age 5 or so having "rescued" him from a fence he'd been climbing on. However, Daniel climbed on that fence a lot and never had any accidents as a result. He also started using the neighbor's bike one day. He began by riding it along the fence using one hand to touch the fence the whole time. Eventually, he learned he didn't need to touch it and he could just ride alongside it and be ok. After that, he didn't need the fence at all and soon was riding in the street. He created a game he called divebomb, where he'd ride to the top of a hill and yell "divebomb!" before riding down at full speed and making everyone scatter.
"How can you let him do that!?" the neighbors would ask. "What if he get's hit by a car?" His mom replied that other kids could also get hit by cars, yet they were allowed to ride bikes. He did end up getting in a couple accidents by crashing into lampposts. His mom however would not stop him and instead next Christmas he found a new bike under the tree.
The teacher from his class at school called one day and told her that she needed to tell him to stop clicking as it was "socially unacceptable". "Tough", the woman answered, "He needs to do that to know what's around him and I'm not going to tell him to stop."
Eventually, Daniel met Adam, the first other blind person he'd met. Initially he was quite annoyed by Adam's helplessness. He complained that he, (Adam), couldn't do anything for himself, and that he was always crashing into everything. "I'd hear a crash against a wall and I'd say 'Here comes Adam'" he explained, recalling being irritated by him at that time. Adam on the other hand had experienced a very different childhood from Daniel's. As he explained "Other kids would always help me with my books at school. People were always helping me and I didn't know why." Having been raised this way had taught Adam to be dependent on other people and feel unable to do things on his own. In particular, he had a fear of what he would do if he were lost and no one was around. Daniel didn't understand why he would have that fear. Adam and Daniel ended up getting lumped together as "the blind kids" and people would have some problems distinguishing them. Daniel didn't like this at all so he started making fun of and bullying Adam.
When he grew up, Daniel decided he was going to work in trying to help out blind and handicapped people. While studying for this he came across a book titled "The Making of Blind Men" by Robert Scott which proposes the idea that blindness is actually a social construction. Robert's idea came from originally talking to a blind man who'd wanted a job, and was told by the people there to go to a program that assists blind people with training for work, and come back when he'd completed it. However the man was told by the organization that blind people can't do that job and instead offered to instruct him in other work. This was something that Robert would notice later all over the place. Blind people were being told by various people and organizations what they could not do. Robert, (whose work agreed with a lot of what blind people themselves were saying), wrote that often blind people could do these things, they just needed to find new ways to do them. Reading this book made Daniel think about Adam again, and he started to see him in a kinder light this time. Instead of some kid who'd been too dumb to do things for himself Daniel wondered if he hadn't just been affected by the type of thing Robert had written about. In other words he started to see that he was just someone who'd been convinced by others of his own helplessness and kept back from discovering for himself that he wasn't.
((More to come later))
This episode focuses on how our beliefs can influence reality. First they look at an experiment in which a group of rats have their cages labelled "smart rat" or "dumb rat". These labels are applied randomly to a group of ordinary rats. Next the rats are given to a bunch of people who are told they are going to run their rats through a maze and time them. The ones whose cages are labelled "smart rat" end up performing much better than the others. They're results end up being twice as good. Scientists, with their bias against the non-physical, explain this as a result of the way the people handle the rats when they think they are smart more gently and find a correlation between more gently handled rats and rats who are good at running mazes. They claim that there are other subconscious things people did as a result of their beliefs which really affected the rats results, but that the beliefs themselves did not. This suggestion is due to nothing other than the scientists' bias, as they did not test for belief-alone results but ruled them out anyway.
Next, the episode begins talking about a man who is able to see without eyes. The man, (Daniel), was born completely blind and yet learned how to click his tongue against the roof of his mouth in order to determine where things were. Being able to see this way, using echolocation, he has gotten the nickname "Batman". He calls what he does "seeing" and complains when people are amazed by it because he says it isn't amazing. He says it's something any blind person could do if they didn't believe they couldn't and weren't surrounded by others who thought they couldn't. When he was little, his mom had the choice between wrapping him in cotton as his grandmother suggested to protect him, or letting him explore the world like a sighted child. She opted for the second choice, even though he liked to climb up bookshelves and do other things that might frighten a blind child's parents.
This attitude on his mom's part caused a lot of concern for their neighbors. The police brought Daniel home once at age 5 or so having "rescued" him from a fence he'd been climbing on. However, Daniel climbed on that fence a lot and never had any accidents as a result. He also started using the neighbor's bike one day. He began by riding it along the fence using one hand to touch the fence the whole time. Eventually, he learned he didn't need to touch it and he could just ride alongside it and be ok. After that, he didn't need the fence at all and soon was riding in the street. He created a game he called divebomb, where he'd ride to the top of a hill and yell "divebomb!" before riding down at full speed and making everyone scatter.
"How can you let him do that!?" the neighbors would ask. "What if he get's hit by a car?" His mom replied that other kids could also get hit by cars, yet they were allowed to ride bikes. He did end up getting in a couple accidents by crashing into lampposts. His mom however would not stop him and instead next Christmas he found a new bike under the tree.
The teacher from his class at school called one day and told her that she needed to tell him to stop clicking as it was "socially unacceptable". "Tough", the woman answered, "He needs to do that to know what's around him and I'm not going to tell him to stop."
Eventually, Daniel met Adam, the first other blind person he'd met. Initially he was quite annoyed by Adam's helplessness. He complained that he, (Adam), couldn't do anything for himself, and that he was always crashing into everything. "I'd hear a crash against a wall and I'd say 'Here comes Adam'" he explained, recalling being irritated by him at that time. Adam on the other hand had experienced a very different childhood from Daniel's. As he explained "Other kids would always help me with my books at school. People were always helping me and I didn't know why." Having been raised this way had taught Adam to be dependent on other people and feel unable to do things on his own. In particular, he had a fear of what he would do if he were lost and no one was around. Daniel didn't understand why he would have that fear. Adam and Daniel ended up getting lumped together as "the blind kids" and people would have some problems distinguishing them. Daniel didn't like this at all so he started making fun of and bullying Adam.
When he grew up, Daniel decided he was going to work in trying to help out blind and handicapped people. While studying for this he came across a book titled "The Making of Blind Men" by Robert Scott which proposes the idea that blindness is actually a social construction. Robert's idea came from originally talking to a blind man who'd wanted a job, and was told by the people there to go to a program that assists blind people with training for work, and come back when he'd completed it. However the man was told by the organization that blind people can't do that job and instead offered to instruct him in other work. This was something that Robert would notice later all over the place. Blind people were being told by various people and organizations what they could not do. Robert, (whose work agreed with a lot of what blind people themselves were saying), wrote that often blind people could do these things, they just needed to find new ways to do them. Reading this book made Daniel think about Adam again, and he started to see him in a kinder light this time. Instead of some kid who'd been too dumb to do things for himself Daniel wondered if he hadn't just been affected by the type of thing Robert had written about. In other words he started to see that he was just someone who'd been convinced by others of his own helplessness and kept back from discovering for himself that he wasn't.
((More to come later))