THE FEAR OF DARKNESS IN MY CHILDHOOD

Peisaj [5]

I was three or four years old. My ‘baba’ (papa) was a military chief at Mardin Nusaybin (Syria border, southeast Turkey). Our Home was the only one built with cement in Nusaybin. It was located outside the village at the top of a small hill. Nusaybin did not have electricity at that time. My mother was a little bit nervous because of my father’s duties. My ‘baba’ had to go out to catch smugglers at nights. A deep darkness would sink over our Home those times… Sometimes would burials take place in the cemetery at distance right in front of our Home… Night burials, according to the local customs. I used to watch them secretly my hair rising… The groups walking in the darkness, candle lights, the dead being carried lying over ladders… Not really understanding what was going on…

Six months later my mother’s efforts succeeded. My father gave up his carrier. He applied for his well deserved retirement. We bought a new house at one of the then suburps of Istanbul. Our new Home had a large garden. We used to have nice evenings at the front-garden in hot summer nights. I remember, every now and then, my father used to send me to the back-garden to fetch some stuff during these night leisures. I was ‘damn’ afraid of going to the back-garden in darkness. Everybody would burst out into laughter and make fun of the situation rather than me and we would have a sweet time in the family about a small secret that belonged to us all.

Although the fear of darkness in my childhood decreased gradually, it followed me for many years. It transformed into a sensitivity and sense of prudence through time. I wonder, if I had not lived the experiences in Nusaybin at the ages of three to four, would I have a fear of darkness? I do not think so. I would not… Nevertheless, many people get nervous about darkness or fear from it. For many justifiable reasons.

OK then, what is the thing that makes darkness such a source of fear? Why is darkness fearsome? Is darkness the fearsome thing itself or is it something in ourselves that makes us afraid?
Is this secret thing located there in the darkness or is it somewhere else? Really, why do we think that something we can not see is located in the darkness, rather than somewhere else for example under the street lamp?

The reason that makes us nervous about darkness is it is not something we could hold in our hands, it is not an absolute object. Just like time… Difficult to understand… Specially difficult for people younger than age 16, who has not developed a concept about abstraction, yet. Darkness is not an object like a door, a table or a wall. Maybe it is rather something like tiredness or sadness…
Its opposite enlightenedness (aydınlık, tr) is rather like happiness, joy… In short is darkness a situation and a mood rather than an object.

Darkness is both a phsical situation and our perception of it. If sunlight falls on the furniture in our house our Home is ‘enlightened(aydınlık, tr)’. The sun light beams that are reflected from the furniture reach our eyes with enough intensity. But in the evening, the intensity of the sun light decreases. First, some colors begin to lose their liveliness and begin to appear as a shade of grey. Then, they become grey in semi-darkness and disappear in the darkness.

Our interaction with darkness in our modern lives is not the same as in the nature. We move from darkness to light and vice versa suddenly during our daily lives for many times. For example, when the child wishes ‘good night’ and goes to her room she has to go into darkness first and then open the light suddenly and then close it again… Or, when you are driving at night, the cars approaching from the other side of the road dazzle your eyes frequently.

Car, airplane or any vehicle drivers abide the night vision priciples. Airplane pilots’ night flying techniques include a different vision technique. “In daylight you have to look directly at the target object. At night, you have to look at slightly one side of the target object. Scanning the target by moving your eye permits “off-center” viewing. You should not look directly at the target object at night unless there is a special reason.”

“The explanation for this lies in the DUAL STRUCTURE OF OUR EYE’[4]. The cones work in day light and the rods at night. The rods are located on the periphary of a circle around the cones.

The cones need a greater intensity of light to function, and stop working in semidarkness.
The rods can function in 1 / 5000 th of light intensity. The cones are 100000 times sensitive in dark as they are in light. So, they work at night.”

The problem is; what do the rods do in the day light? The rods provide a grey scale view, while cones provide coloured… Rods lose their sensitivity after short exposure to light. This means less sensitivity is used only for percieving objects in the peripheral view…

In short, seeing is not as simple as we naturally presume. Our ability to see changes at different levels of light intensity… We can not see with the same quality in all conditions. Our ability to see in darkness is much less than in sun light. If explored, we can easily find that our seeing ability is not limited by only the availability of the sunlight. We have other limits also… The views of fast moving seperate things appear to us as if belonging to a single thing moving continuously, for example.

Seeing is not limited with the functions of the eye of course… Our brain first percieves then understands the things that our eyes see. We also have some limits in our brain’s visual perception naturally… We can not percieve the second event if two events happen too quick sequentially… They call this perceptional blink sometimes…

Our seeing abilities, given by the Creator, require a period of adaptation when the conditions of the environment change, the environment that we are temporarily in. When we move into darkness
suddenly, the rod cells in our eyes need some time to get activated. At these instances, give yourself sometime for your brain to get healthy-correct information from your eyes.

During the flow of times, we all experience sudden changes of things we are used to. The problem is not only the change in the conditions that we are accustomed to but also the fact that we, ouselves change. Whether we notice it or not, the way our body and mind work, changes according to the conditions that we are in. A small kid gets red spots on his skin suddenly, a software engineer approaches the end of his project, a pilot lands with his co-pilot in bad climate conditions, or an air traffic controller whose job is to keep airplanes apart from each other loses his radar system which enables him to see the skies…

When you fall into sudden darkness, I believe, there may be a few tricks that you may learn and borrow from an air traffic controller who has lost the view of airplanes on his radar. He at least has strips of papers in his hand that shows the locations and directions of his resumed airplanes... If the lights go off when you are on the stairway, you should have kept certain reference points in your mind beforehand, such as the location of the handrail, your relative position in the current floor stairs…

Darkness is not an object to be afraid of, it is a sitaution, a mental mood. To cope with darkness, you should have reference points that You have created before. We can not control everything in our lives but ‘knowing ourselves’ could make us stronger against the difficulties, at least.


Ali Riza SARAL

Note: The inspirational bases of this article lie in:

1. NIGHT VISION: A PEDAGOGICAL METAPHOR FOR AVIATION
http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2008/01/night-vision-pedagogical-metaphor-for.html

2. Chip HEATH and Dan HEATH, MADE TO STICK – “the curse of knowledge”

3. HOW TO BE A DAMN SEXY MAN– “let the kids turn the page”
http://kristenbrookebeck.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-be-damn-sexy-man.html

4. AVIATION MEDICINE, Night Flight, http://www.pilotfriend.com/aeromed/medical/night_vision.htm
Helicopter Flight, http://meanwhile.com/?domain=helicfi.com

5. Bogdan GAVRUS, Peisaj, http://gavrusphoto.blogspot.com/

NIGHT VISION: A PEDAGOGICAL METAPHOR for AVIATION

Vizual [0]



‘Autokinesis’ is a special visual hazard of night flying. When you look constantly at a small point in a dark night, you feel as if the light is moving, after a while. Otherwise, you may feel as if yourself is moving.

‘Autokinesis’ is only one of the discrepancies that we carry everyday without ever being aware of. Our discrepancies may appear not only at the edges of our abilities, such as night vision, but also in our routine daily activities. The sooner we get aware of them, the better the quality and fulfillment of our lives.

Unfortunately, we are created not to improve our abilities but primarily, to survive with them.
In any form of life comes improvement after survival. Our bodies, namely the embodiment of ourselves [1] is designed so that even if we loss some part of us we should survive.

Even if we lose an arm, after feeling the immediate shock, we should be able to continue our lives, together with a prosthetic device, and even feel as if we still have the lost arm in our minds as in some cases[2]…

I believe, a mental, behavioural discrepancy can and may become a part of ourselves, and our mental embodiment similar to a prosthestic device… A discrepancy may become part of our ‘subjective’ mental body till something happens and brings our attention to it, thus this discrepancy becomes our ‘objective’ mental body.

The problem is that, the transition from the subjective mental body to the objective one may cause pain and also damage the complex relations of choices a person has made to build his/her personality.

“In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "prices are rising"). “ [4] Using metaphors in psychological training of air traffic controllers, engineers and other aviation personnel, could be an effective pedagogical approach. Rather than doing not much while waiting for who is going to fall down…

If we return back to the night vision; ‘night flying requires a different visual technique than day flying’ [5]. In daylight you have to look directly at the target object. At night, you have to look at slightly one side of the target object. Scanning the target by moving your eye permits “off-center” viewing. You should not look directly at the target object at night unless there is a special reason.

‘The explanation for this lies in the DUAL STRUCTURE OF OUR EYE’[5]. The cones work in day light and the rods at night. The rods are located on the periphary of a circle around the cones.

The cones need a greater intensity of light to function, and stop working in semidarkness.
The rods can function in 1 / 5000 th of light intensity. The rods are 100000 times sensitive in dark as they are in light. So, they work at night.

The problem is; what do the rods do in the day light? The rods provide a grey scale view, while cones provide coloured… Rods lose their sensitivity after short exposure to light. This means less sensitivity is used only for percieving objects in the peripheral view…

My point is, the night vision metaphor may be used for teaching Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) awareness for aviators. OCD is a common problem among people working with risk.
It may be just a behavioural nuisance that can not be noticed or an increasing mental risk towards more serious situations. You have to be aware of what the people around you are doing, in order to warn them and not get affected by them.

Henry Szechtman and Erik Woody ‘s article “Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder as a Disturbance of Security Motivation” describes OCD as:
“We hypothesize that the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), despite their apparent non-rationality, have what might be termed an “epistemic” origin – that is, they stem from an inability to generate the normal “feeling of knowing” that would otherwise signal task completion and terminate the expression of a security motivational system.[7]”

Similar to the Night Vision mechanism of the eye, Security Motivation System is ‘hardwired’. It is highly tuned to certain kinds of input like the cones and rods working on different light intensities.
Probably much more complex than eye’s night vision mechanism, is the Security Motivation System also “automatic and autonomous, and “encapsulated,” or relatively isolated from information developed by other systems.”

The Night Vision metaphor provides a good example for teaching:
1. There are seperate resources in our mind and brain for different tasks.
2. There has to be an activation and stopping mechanism (homeostatic) for any resource.
3. There may be a switching mechanism which manages the processes related to different and competing tasks.

Moods, emotions, thinking speed in different situations may effect the switching mechanism and activation – deactivation mechanism of our minds and brains[8]. Selecting the right mood and time frame helps the team make the right decisions with the right mental resources.

Ali Riza SARAL

[1] “Phenomenological theorists distinguish between the subjective body(as lived and experienced) and the objective body (as observed and scientifically investigated). My lived body is an EMBODIED CONSCIOUSNESS which fluidly and pre-reflectively engages the world. As we engage in our daily activities, we tend not to be conscious of our bodies and we take them granted – body that is passed-by-in-silence (Jean-Paul SARTRE, 1943, Being and Nothingness)”.

[2] “Prothestic devices stretch the boundaries of the body. They create a continuity beyond the limits of the skin”(Carolien HERMANS, 2002, Embodiment: the flesh and bones of my body). “A body schema works on a subconscious level. It registers shape and posture of the body(without coming to awareness). It makes a record of the momentary relative disposition of one’s own body parts”. “Prothestic devices can be absorbed in the body schema. Just as a hammer in the carpenter’s hand is incorporated into his body schema, any virtual body part or interface(keyboard, mouse, joystick) can become part of the schema in a temporary or longlasting way…”

[3] For further reading: Embodiment and Man-Machine Interaction
http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2007/07/embodiment-and-man-machine-interaction.html

[4] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
[5] “Night flying requires a different visual technique than day flying. You can see an object best during daylight by looking directly at it. At night, however, a scanning procedure is more effective - to permit "off center" viewing of the target. In other the words, you will find after some practice that you can see things more clearly and definitely at night by looking slightly to one side of them, rather than straight at them.
The explanation for this lies in the dual structure of your eye. There are two kinds of light-sensitive nerve endings at the back of your eye: (1) the cones, which distinguish colour and require considerable light to function, and (2) the rods, which detect objects only in shades of grey but can operate in very dim light.
The cones, because they need greater intensity of light to function, are used in day vision. In fact, the cones stop working altogether in semi darkness. Millions of these tiny structures are clustered at the back of the eyeball, directly behind the pupil. Not only do they distinguish colours, they pick up distant objects.
The rods are concentrated in a ring around the cones. Being colour-blind, they see only in greys and are used in peripheral vision during the day - that is, to perceive objects in motion out of the corner of the eye. Because the rods can still function in light of 1/5,000 the intensity at which the cones cease to function, they are used for night vision. These structures are 100,000 times as sensitive in the dark as they are in sunlight. However, they do need more time to adjust to darkness than the cones do to bright light. Your eyes become adapted to sunlight in 10 seconds, whereas they need 30 minutes to fully adjust to a dark night.
The fact that the rods are distributed in a band around the cones, and, therefore, do not lie directly behind the pupils, makes "off centre" viewing important to the pilot during night flight. If, in your attempts to practice the scanning procedures mentioned previously, you find that your eyes have a tendency to swing directly toward the target, force them to swing just past it so that the rods on the opposite side of the eyeball pick up the object.
Rods lose their sensitivity after short exposure to a light source, but regain it quickly after a moment of "rest." Consequently, a prolonged blink may be enough to renew the effectiveness of your vision if you are simply using the "off centre" technique, without scanning. Remember, too, that rods do not perceive objects while your eyes are in motion, only during the pauses.”
AVIATION MEDICINE, Night Flight, http://www.pilotfriend.com/aeromed/medical/night_vision.htm
Helicopter Flight, http://meanwhile.com/?domain=helicfi.com

[6] Ali Riza SARAL,
Kapanmayışlar, http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2007/01/kapanmayilar.html
Kapanışlar, http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2006/11/kapanilar.html

[7] “The psychological experience of compulsion is not well defined (Reed, 1985, p. 119), but nevertheless one can conceive of two broad mechanisms that would produce the intrusiveness and urgency characteristic of OCD symptoms. One is a pathological intensity of excitation of the particular thoughts, ideas or actions. The other is a relative failure of the systems that normally terminate such thoughts, ideas or actions.”

“Security Motivation System - … Such modular systems are innately specified and hardwired, highly tuned to certain kinds of input, comparatively automatic and autonomous, and “encapsulated,” or relatively isolated from information developed by other systems.“

“2. The system is readily activated, responding to even a slight chance of danger, and once activated, it has a long half-life, being slow to deactivate despite changes in the environment that feed into the appraisal process (Curio, 1993; Marks & Nesse, 1994; Masterson & Crawford, 1982). This easy-to-turn-on, hard-to-turn-off quality makes sense evolutionarily, because repeated false alarms are much less costly than even a single failure to prepare for upcoming danger.”

“Similarly, we hypothesize that an internally generated feeling of knowing provides not only a
phenomenological sign of goal-attainment but is also the physiological mechanism that actually
shuts-down security motivation.”

“An internally generated “feeling of knowing” (termed “yedasentience”) provides a phenomenological sign of goal-attainment and has as its consequence the termination of thoughts, ideas or actions motivated by concerns of harm to self or others. Failure to generate or experience this feeling produces symptoms characteristic of OCD.”

“Instead, according to the present model, the underlying problem is lack of closure -- the inability to turn off security motivation, which drives security-related thoughts, through the normal route of performing specific security-related behaviors.”

Henry Szechtman, McMaster University, Erik Woody, University of Waterloo, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder as a Disturbance of Security Motivation, http://inabis98.mcmaster.ca/reprints/MS02-082.pdf

[8] “The mechanics of the thinking process is affected by our emotions. Switching from one context to another, the rate of changing subjects, the amount of concentration, the depth of thinking through different abstraction levels, getting obsessed to solve the problem, thinking speed are dramatically affected by the affective situation we are in while thinking… “The various glands of the endocrine system release hormones into the bloodstream that have effects on specific sites in the brain, including those involved in emotion” says Cornelius [5] . A careful observer can notice that there are different working speeds of thinking in our brains. Our brains work in a slow mode when we are doing something related with safety or security(but not related to emergency) where as our ideas fly when we are doing something sentimental or dreaming… Thinking speed helps us to switch from one processor to another in our multiprocessor brain. Feelings and selecting the right mood help us to choose the right processor (or combination of processors) to do the ‘thinking’.”

Ali Riza SARAL, “Do Computers Feel?”,
http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2007/12/do-computers-feel-1500words.html

[9] Gavrus BOGDAN, Vizual, http://gavrusphoto.blogspot.com