Hairy Stuff - Quareness Series (14th "Lecture").
I gather that many Native American Indians were recruited by the US Army as experts in tracking and survival during the Vietnam War era. This was done after prolonged obsveration of their abilities on Indian Reservations. However, once enlisted, it seems whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the Reservation mysteriously disappeared, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field. When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer "sense" the enemy - they could no longer access a "sixth sense" or their "intuition" was no longer reliable and they couldn't "read" subtle signs so well or access subtle extrasensory information.
In follow up testing to try to establish what was going on, those Indians with long hair kept making high scores and those with the shorn/short hair failed the tests in which they had previously scored high scores. The final result was a recommendation that all Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts and that trackers be required to keep their hair long.
The mammalian body has evolved over millions of years and the amazing abilitiies of humans and animals to survive can at times seem almost supernatural. Each part of the body appears to have highly sensitive work to perform for the survival and well being of the body as a whole i.e. the body has a reason for every part of itself.
Now hair as an extension of the nervous system can be regarded as exteriorized nerves - highly evolved 'feelers' or 'antennae' that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brainstem, the limbic system, and the neocortex. Not only does the hair on people, including facial hair on men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, but it's also a conduit for the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment, as apparently can be seen in Kirlian photography.
When our hair is shorn, receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment is greatly hampered, resulting in a kind of "numbing-out". This suggests that cutting of the hair for humans may be a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems. It may even be a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds.
In searching for solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time to seriously consider whether many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error. It may be that a major part of the solution is staring us in the face whenever we look in the mirror.
Come to think of it, there may be a surprising amount of truth in that story of Sampson and Delilah.
On the subject of hair - here's another quare one......
Hangovers seem to be a global problem and of the many "folk" cures touted, one would seem to have a sound basis for hope. The Hungarian phrase "kutya harapast szorevel" meaning "you may cure a dog's bite with its fur" tells us how/why. This "translates" in English into "the hair of the dog that bit you" or in Danish to "you should get up next to the tree where you fell" or even in French to "relight the boiler".
Our balance depends on sense organs in the inner ear which are thrown out of kilter as the level of alcohol in our blood rises. The organs of balance are three semicircular canals roughly at right angles to each other and filled with fluid. One canal detects rotation of the head around a vertical axis, another detects "nodding" movements and the third detects the rotation of the head around an axis from the nose to the back of the head. In "normal" life, the density of the fluid in the canals is similar to that of the blood - as you move your head the fluid flows back and forth in the canals and pushes against pressure sensors, which send signals to the brain. The combined messages from all three canals form an ever changing "GPS" signal allowing us to know where the head is in space at any time.
However, for accurate sense messages to flow from the organs of balance to the brain, the density of the fluid in the canals should be the same as the density of the blood - if these relative densities change, the system makes the wrong judgment about the position of the head which is contradicted by the message we receive from our eyes. Drinking alcohol changes the relative density of the fluids inside and outside the semicircular canals leading to conflicting messages and a sense of confusion.
As alcohol levels rise, the blood becomes diluted relative to the fluid in the inner ear because alcohol is less dense than blood. This difference causes the first phase of dizziness and nausea. Then the alcohol seeps into the semicircular canals and corrects the imbalance, so we experience a period when we feel normal again. After we stop drinking the alcohol in the blood is gradually broken down by the liver and the blood density rises to its normal level. However, now because the fluid in the inner ear still contains alcohol which has not been broken down, so the blood is now denser compared with the fluid in the canals. Just as there was a time lag before the alcohol seeped into the organs of balance, there is now another time lag before the alcohol seeps out and the fluid is back to normal density. And it's this latter time lag which houses the hangover.
With our understanding that it's the imbalance between the density of the blood and the density of the fluid in the inner ear which causes the vertigo and nausea typical of yer hangover, we can see why "the hair of the dog" would work - when the blood is back to normal but the inner ear fluid is still diluted by alcohol, if we take another drink the blood becomes diluted too and the balance between the two fluids is restored.
Slainte!
Sean.
Dean Of Quareness.
December 2011.