The tin foil hat has become a mocking meme for those who are paranoid or a conspiracy theorist. The belief that everything is material in nature is one of the tenets of the modern “scientific” picture of the world, so it is not surprising that those who suspect that “there is something wrong with reality” also explain it with materialistic hallucinations. The world government (black helicopters, HAARP, “Swamp”, deep state, etc.) controls society not only from the outside, but also from the inside, penetrating inside - through chemtrails or “radiations”.

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The recently deceased American nonconformist philosopher Adam Parfrey in Apocalypse Culture gave a story about how “aliens” penetrated a paranoid person using special wiring in a more brutal way - through holes in the body and then the victim of the invasion looked for signs of a similar attack from his colleagues, trying to investigate first of all, their bodies - whether there are any wiring there. The topic of aliens implanting some kind of foreign objects into an abductee (a victim abducted by a UFO) is so widespread that from time to time the US Congress hears complaints showing a lot of “evidence”.

The tin foil hat rightfully belongs to this paraphernalia of suspicion and is also justified by the feeling that the influence of the external world powerfully penetrates deep into the human being, invading the brain and forcing it to do something that under other circumstances the person (as it seems to him) would not do. And since a person today, both normal and mentally ill people, is thought of as a fundamentally material being, then the nature of the penetration of the external into the internal is interpreted in material terms - as rays, waves, vibrations, etc. From such “rays”, by analogy with a cell Faraday, which stops magnetic radiation, is what the magic foil hat is designed to protect.

In principle, we are dealing with an ancient archetype, only in its archeomodern version. Of course, observing adults in ridiculous headdresses reminiscent of a children's party is quite unusual, and it is precisely from this contrast between the serious faces of the wearers of tin foil hats and these objects themselves that an acute feeling of idiocy arises, causing laughter and contempt (for those who have worn such a hat themselves will never wear it), as well as some fear (you never know what crazy people might decide to do).

But if we make allowances for materialism, which is the common denominator of both the sick and the healthy in the modern world, then wearers of the tin foil hat can be (partly) rehabilitated.

The fact is that a person’s consciousness does not belong and has never belonged to him as a kind of property. If we only think about where thoughts come into our heads and how our ideas about ourselves and the world are formed, we will be forced to admit that almost everything that we consider ours, we received from the outside - in the process of upbringing, training, education , social interactions, from culture, language, history, science, from communications and the media.

The founder of sociology, E. Durkheim, introduced the term “collective consciousness” to emphasize the social nature of thinking as such. Individual consciousness only reflects the collective. But here the effect of a mirror operates, which, being broken into parts, still continues to reflect the whole in each of them. This is where the illusion of ownership of consciousness arises - that we are dealing with a mind that belongs only to us on an individual basis. We too seriously and uncritically use stable formulas “I think that...”, “I believe that...”, “I am sure that...”, etc., sincerely believing that we are talking about a deeply individual act. But if we step back a little from the hypnotic illusion, from the affect with which we pronounce the personal pronoun of the first person, then we cannot help but notice that any of our statements is based on methods, knowledge and procedures gleaned from the outside, and that it is most often typical and serial (quoting), that is, pronounced with the same pathos by many other individuals.

Truly creative and original is only a failure of the system, when we begin to say something unusual, unpredictable and inarticulate, but then we risk switching to an individual language that is completely incomprehensible to others, spoken by oracles or schizophrenics (and sometimes poets). In any case, our individual thoughts (as well as desires) are fundamentally universal, and in whose body and in whose brain they swarm does not matter in principle. If we continue this observation, we can, together with Heidegger, come to the conclusion that almost always the one who thinks in us is not ourselves, but some impersonal principle, which Heidegger called das Man, starting from the German grammatical construction man denkt, man will ( literally: “they think”, etc.; English they think, French on pense, etc.). In other words, it is not we who actually think, but das Man who thinks through us, laying in us the trajectories of conventional wisdom or deviations from it.

This is where the tin foil hat comes into play. It must be understood not clinically, but philosophically. When does a person make a radical decision to put this misunderstanding on his head? When the suspicion that his thoughts and states are not his own, do not belong to him, but are induced from the outside, becomes so strong that a person, not paying attention to what others think about him, agrees to look like an idiot, just to protect himself from the influence of das Man. Hence, the tin foil hat acquires a philosophical and symbolic meaning: it is a sign that in a person suspicion has overcome the shame of appearing ridiculous, that he is no longer able to remain a technical detail in the recycling of alienated thoughts, desires and feelings and is striving to find himself, his true self. , his “inner man”, hiding behind a “Faraday cage” from the all-piercing rays of das Man.

Obviously, people who wear a tin foil hat on their head are not very healthy. But they are clearly healthier than those who don’t wear these tin foil hats. Of course, other hats and, moreover, headdresses in general have a similar origin associated with symbolic sacred anatomy. The headdresses of the ancient priests, the hoods of the priests or the fox hats of the Hasidim are traces of symbolic decoration of the head, emphasizing its dignity and its proximity to heaven (Plato believed that the straightforwardness of a person is associated with the attraction of his highest center - the brain - to the heavenly starry ancestral home, from where souls come ).

A crazy tin foil hat is, of course, not a miter or a tiara, but its modern, even somewhat postmodern, surrogate. This is not just a disease - it is the first step towards recovery. I agree that it looks extremely stupid and funny and, naturally, this skull wrap, which evokes associations with dough prepared for the oven, will not protect from das Man. The rays of das Man are too powerful. But the very suspicion of the unfortunate owners of the tin foil hat is worthy of respect. They guessed it. They are in pain. They feel that something has gone wrong in the world. And in this they are absolutely right. Their suspicion is well founded. Yes, something went wrong. And he keeps going. And this is extremely serious. Therefore, you should not offend those who have already made a tin foil hat for themselves. They may be half a step, but they are ahead of us...

A tin foil hat can shield the mind from outside intrusion. So, at least, quite a large number of people seriously think so. Conspiracy theories, world government, tin foil hat - a completely logical chain. Today we will try to trace where this strange invention came from and whether it is as useless as it seems at first glance.

Generally speaking, people's commitment to shielding their minds from invasion by aliens or intelligence agencies is the first signal of progressive paranoid schizophrenia. Patients believe that foil is capable of reflecting control signals (in particular, Russians tend to vigorously defend themselves against the Pentagon).

Science and life

In fact, the legs of the myth about the protective cap grow out of completely scientific facts. Foil can actually significantly reduce the intensity of exposure to high-frequency radiation on the human brain. Protection made from this material will work like a Faraday cage, shielding external radio radiation. A thin, half-millimeter layer is capable of blocking long, medium and ultra-short waves - no cap will help against the ultra-long wave range.

Life and science

In reality, all these scientific calculations are not very applicable. The fact is that for successful blocking, the foil hat needs to be grounded. In fact, a person trying to protect himself in this way will not need a hat, but an actual foil container with a half-meter pin at the base that will go into the ground.

Israeli ingenuity

But the tin foil hat also has its practical uses. Israeli surgeons use a cap to shield infrared radiation - this is how their heads are cooled during operations on premature babies. They cannot yet regulate their own body temperature, so operations are carried out in rooms with additional heaters. The foil hat copes brilliantly with the task of removing excess heat!

She works!

American psychologists from Geoffrey Woodman's group also made a real tin foil hat - only it really works. Woodman noted that weak electromagnetic fields can stimulate the prefrontal zone of the cerebral cortex, which helps improve learning. At the moment, tests of the so-called “foil cap” (in fact, it is more of a rim of electrodes) are still underway.

From all kinds of scans from space, it has long been dispelled. The Internet literally exploded with information about these amazing miracle caps, they say they protect your brain from radio waves. Also, wearing it, you don’t have to be afraid of alien attacks by affecting the brain. It was believed that all negative effects were simply reflected back without causing any harm. However, thanks to a number of studies, it was discovered that foil cannot in any way contribute to the reflection of various signals back into the universe. ToRead and Science wrote about this.

Every person has the right to an opinion and their beliefs. Many of those who feared any kind of tracking from space and all kinds of mind control ardently believed in such an invention as the tin foil hat. It was believed that such a “device” made of foil was a serious invention that would serve as salvation from magnetic waves. Some, by the way, still wear them, believing that they will serve as an excellent weapon that will either send all negative signals back into space or simply suppress them.

A number of experiments were carried out on such caps, the material for which was ordinary aluminum foil, thanks to which it was found that they could not be effective in protecting against control from space.

The research was carried out quite thoroughly. Several varieties of such a hat were used: the classic form, the Fez and the Centurion. Tests were carried out on volunteers. A tin foil hat was put on and receiving antennas were installed. They created certain frequencies, and the Agilent analyzer, which was connected to them, checked the incoming signals. The experiment showed that people's belief that a tin foil hat blocks signals is wrong. And even on the contrary - the signals were strengthened, not weakened.

This signal was analyzed by Agilent, and the result showed that frequency amplification occurs in literally any region of the brain. Therefore, a tin foil hat is not only ineffective, but also harmful. And during the war with aliens, she will not help humanity, but enemies from outer space.

Nick Pope, widely known in narrow circles as the head of the UFO research project of the British Ministry of Defense, said that our planet is completely open to invasion by extraterrestrial civilizations. After all, since the time when the UFO research department was closed, no one has been observing. He also noted that everything, as it was before, is not noted anywhere and is completely ignored. If suddenly someone reports that they saw something inexplicable, the Ministry will not react in any way.

Pope was the project manager from 1991 to 1994. Over all these years of work, he has identified a lot of various signs of the presence of alien creatures. According to him, the Earth is in no way protected from attack from space. However, an extraterrestrial civilization has never shown signs of hostility, so there are no significant reasons for alarm. However, you should not believe that if a war of the worlds suddenly breaks out, humanity will be saved by tinfoil hats.

A hookah cap has been an accessory that has accompanied smoking for several centuries. Today it has somewhat lost its relevance, although its functions allow for better temperature control. Why is this item used and how to make it yourself?

What is the cap for: overview of functions

Its first use was related to the living conditions of smokers. In the desert, during sandstorms and strong gusts of wind, it was almost impossible to cook shisha: the coals instantly smoldered from the wind, they were covered with dust. To protect chilim from negative influences, a cap was invented.

Naturally, there was no foil at that time; the walls were cast from metal alloys. These still exist today; they are made of stainless steel or aluminum. Some manufacturers (usually Turkish and Syrian) supply the accessory complete with the smoking device. Can also be purchased separately. The price ranges from 300 to 1,500 rubles, depending on the size, brand and material.

Another purpose is to control fever. The high walls covering the coal were a kind of progenitor of colauda. The additional side made it possible to create a hot environment around the coals, thereby making the process of smoldering uniform and prolonged. This is also transferred to the tobacco, so the mixture warms up better and smokes a little longer.

Later, caps with a lid appeared. The advantage is that the coals are completely isolated; if you close the lid, an air layer of very hot air is created inside, which allows the coals to smolder more slowly, transferring all the heat into the bowl.

In the East, the use of this accessory is still an integral part of hookah smoking. In Russia, few people use the device.

There is also a mesh hood. Its functionality is much less - it is able to protect the coal from falling if the device suddenly loses its balance. It is useless for smoking.

Although the cost of the device is not too high, we still suggest saving money and doing handicrafts :)

How to make a foil hat with your own hands

If you are not yet sure about the need to purchase, try making it yourself and holding a session. Of course, foil is not such a reliable assistant, but if you follow the instructions, you can make a pretty decent analogue of a professional product.

All you need is foil, the higher its density, the better. Let's get down to business:

1. Unwind the sheet about 1.5 meters from the roll. Portion foil is supplied in the form of square pieces - this is more convenient, but more expensive.
2. The sheet needs to be folded several times, the result should be a square-shaped piece. Bend as evenly as possible, avoiding creases.
3. Now we fold the corners diagonally (to make an isosceles triangle), knowledge from labor lessons in elementary school will come in handy 😉
4. We also connect the corners of the base of the resulting triangle. The result is a right triangle.
5. We adjust its size to fit your bowl by tucking the narrow part into a “tube”.
6. We hammer the bowl, install it, cover it with a cover sheet and put on our improvised cap. Place hot coals inside.
7. To create an ideal environment for smoldering, divide the upper edge of the homemade product into two parts and cover the bowl with one of them.

The whole process is shown in detail in the video:

You don’t have to worry too much and just make a regular cone. If desired, cover it with an additional sheet. But the appearance of such a device also loses.

How to use a hookah cap

To maintain or increase the temperature in the cup, you should cover it. If you feel that the tobacco may overheat (or this has already happened), remove it and let the mixture cool slightly.

Don't forget to shake off the ash from the coal, it worsens the heat transfer to the tobacco.

The monolithic cap will be most useful to those who like to smoke outdoors. Wind or moisture will prevent you from enjoying the taste and will reduce the amount of smoke (due to large heat loss). A cap will solve these problems, so when going outdoors with a hookah, don’t forget to take some foil.

Once you get acquainted with all the advantages of the device, you will definitely want to buy a professional device. We recommend the following brands:

In addition to preserving the heat and controlling the thermal regime, accessories give the hookah a traditional look and remind us of the long history of narghile. Therefore, the product will certainly please your aesthetic impulses.

Naked logic without expert opinion does not deserve any trust, the author of “Maximum Repost” Borislav Kozlovsky is convinced

Fake news and pseudoscientific facts on social networks have already become a part of everyday life and sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish them from real news. Surprisingly, the main consumers and distributors of information about events that did not happen are quite literate people whose hobbies are reading popular science books, listening to lectures on Coursera, and generally expanding their horizons of knowledge.Programmer and science journalist Borislav Kozlovsky studied this phenomenon and wrote a book about it, “Maximum Repost. How social networks make us believe fake news,” which is published by Alpina Publisher. Ideonomics is publishing an excerpt from this book on how people perceive conspiracy theories and why they believe them.

A persistent symbol of conspiracy theories is tin foil hats. They were invented by a biologist, Julian Huxley, the future first head of UNESCO, the author of the term “transhumanism” and the older brother of Aldous Huxley, the author of the dystopia “Brave New World.” In 1927, Julian published a science fiction novel in which the main character, a scientist, learned to illuminate someone else's brain with telepathic beams, and the only way to escape the scanning was to wrap his head in foil.

What is conspiracy theory associated with today? With a small number of freaks somewhere on the periphery of society, who fight the world government of reptilians, suspect the authorities of hiding the truth about UFOs and protect the brain from psychotronic radiation with those very caps.

Psychologist Rob Brotherton from Goldsmiths University of London, author of the book “Untrusting Minds” published in November 2015 in the US and UK, primarily argues with the stereotype of a handful of freaks.

Conspiracy theories are like religion in the Middle Ages: they are about the sincere and literal belief of hundreds of millions of people. The performances of David Icke, who came up with the idea of ​​a secret world government of reptilian archons, attract a full 90,000-seat Wembley Stadium - the same one where the football matches of the London Olympics were played. More than half of Americans suspect that President Kennedy could not have been killed by a lone psychopath (and the government is hiding the truth). Between 10 and 30% believe the 1969 moon landing was staged. It would be nice if we were talking about the most conservative and illiterate, but the “Committee to Study the Kennedy Assassination” (which took it as an axiom that the killer Lee Harvey Oswald was a puppet, and the official investigation was a cover operation) was founded by none other than Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, one of the fathers of modern mathematical logic and analytical philosophy. Nowadays, conspiracy theories are defended by people of the caliber of linguist professor Noam Chomsky and director Oliver Stone (three Oscars)—the RT channel especially likes to quote them as independent American intellectuals. Therefore, in order to study conspiracy theories as a phenomenon of mass consciousness, the definition “picture of the world of urban madmen” is no longer sufficient.

To begin with, what “conspiracies” are we talking about? Typically, a conspiracy theory deals not with some story about conspirators, but with a conspiracy-right-now, which aims to hide something from us. CIA agents killed Kennedy half a century ago, but the government still does not want to make this fact public. Doctors conspire to hide that vaccines cause autism. Virologists invented AIDS, but they still pretend that the virus exists. The airliner MH370, which disappeared over the ocean, is hidden in a NASA hangar, and secret scientists are conducting experiments on its passengers. Brotherton is confident that the common denominator for all these statements is not some kind of cross-cutting plot, but the same set of cognitive errors combined with a sincere desire to reason logically.

There are different needs of the brain that conspiracy theories help to cope with. Therefore, for a psychologist, conspiracy theory is not a set of specific judgments (“the twin towers were blown up by the CIA,” “the world is ruled by Freemasons”), but a state of mind that creates the need for them. For example, the fear of chaos: we are more comfortable attributing various disasters - from car accidents to a psychopath shooting at children at school - to the evil will of some powerful force (“the Freemasons want to remove witnesses”, “the CIA wants to turn citizens against owning personal weapons”), which acts according to a plan rather than a blind chance that can destroy us for no reason at all.

This hypothesis - about the fear of chaos - was found to be tested in an elegant way experimentally. Some volunteers filled out questionnaires at computers in a sterile environment, while others were seated at cluttered office desks with piles of other people's things. The latter were much more willing to check the “I’d rather believe it than not” box under some statement like this: “the world is run by influential non-public people, and politicians simply carry out their orders.” The same connection was found between belief in conspiracy theories and uncertainty about the future: the lower your social security, the higher your trust in conspiracy theories.

Seven researchers from Italy and one from the USA decided to find out the limits of gullibility. They began to monitor the fate of outright parodies of conspiracy theories launched online by trolls. Do the white trails that trail planes in the sky contain the active ingredient in Viagra because the government wants to control our sexuality? Does lemon juice help you avoid hypnosis? This latest news was reposted by 45 thousand users. Scientists were interested in finding out who all these people were. 78% of commenters and 80% of those who liked it turned out to be regular consumers of other conspiracy stories. If you don’t believe that the Americans flew to the moon, and you think that the Boeing shot down over the Donbass was stuffed with corpses by Western intelligence agencies in advance, you may consider yourself a radical skeptic, but you’ll be much more willing to fall for any implausible nonsense about lemons and hypnosis, as long as it poses as hidden knowledge rejected by official science.

How paradoxical conspiracy theorists think was demonstrated in 2012 by psychologists from the University of Kent. Let's take two groups of people. Some are convinced that the British Princess Diana, who died in a car accident in 1997, actually faked her death and now lives under a false name somewhere in Argentina. Others are satisfied with the official version. Another conspiracy theory says that the death of Princess Diana was orchestrated by the royal family. Try to guess where this version has more supporters - in the first group or in the second? Oddly enough, those who believe that she is alive and that there was no accident are more willing to believe in the organized murder of the princess. The law of the excluded middle (“the princess is either alive or dead”) does not work for conspiracy theorists.

At the same time, conspiracy theorists claim that their main tool is naked logic, because expert knowledge from the outside (“imposed by interested parties”), of course, is not trustworthy. “Rather than being opposed to rationalism, conspiracy thinking actually fits surprisingly well with Enlightenment ideals,” write Chris Fleming and Emma Jane, conspiracy theory researchers at the University of Western Sydney and the University of New South Wales in Australia. “Doubt everything” is the famous principle of methodological doubt proclaimed by Descartes. Criticism of unconditional authorities is what allowed science to overcome thousands of years of misconceptions and develop to its current state: previously it was not customary to argue with the classics, and if Aristotle claimed that the mayfly insect has four legs, then you should have believed him and not your own eyes (the all insects have six legs).

Buyers of the book about rational thinking “Superbrain. Think like Sherlock Holmes” by Maria Konnikova, a columnist for the respectable New Yorker magazine, and fans of independent investigations about the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination and the bombing of the Twin Towers on September 11 are often the same people. “The dog that didn’t bark” from “The Notes on Sherlock Holmes” is a stock metaphor among conspiracy theorists: pay attention, they say, not to those details that are there, but to those that are not. It's never cloudy on the moon, but in the photo of Neil Armstrong, when he sticks the American flag into the lunar soil, there is not a single star in the sky - what is this, if not proof that the moon landing was filmed on a pavilion?

With this last example, it’s easy to understand why logic without expert opinion is a pretty useless thing. The knowledge that stars are too weak a source of light and leave at least some trace on photographic film in no less than a few seconds comes to every professional astronomer even during astrophotography practice at the university.

According to Brotherton, the most popular cognitive error is to overestimate the degree of one's understanding of even familiar things (in relation to which the concept of “expert” would seem to have no meaning at all). For example, a bicycle, which we have been taught all our lives “not to reinvent” - it is such a simple design. Psychologist Rebecca Lawson from the University of Liverpool gave her subjects a sketch of a bicycle - rear wheel, front wheel, seat, top bar, handlebars - and asked them to complete it. It was necessary to complete the missing details - schematically, without details.
Before drawing, everyone filled out a questionnaire. To the question “How would you rate your familiarity with bicycles (on a 7-point scale)?”, the majority of respondents gave themselves a rating of 4 to 5, reasonably assuming that they might not know some of the subtleties. But for 40% of those who completed the test, the drawn bicycle simply did not have a chance to ride. The subjects connected the front and rear wheels with a frame (and then the steering wheel could not be turned), placed pedals on the axle of one of the wheels, or connected the wheels with a chain. According to the results, the experiment participants admitted with surprise, “I didn’t know that I didn’t know that.”

History, medicine, climate science, and moon rocket science offer far more possibilities than bicycle mechanics for not knowing that you don't know something in particular. The best way to discover this is to tell the story as specifically as possible, but conspiracy theories are different in that they allow for as many unknowns as desired. Therefore, it is especially difficult to find errors in reasoning. This is how conspiracy theories gracefully satisfy our need to think logically without creating the discomfort and cognitive dissonance that is inevitable when solving real-world puzzles.

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August 20, 2018