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"Dating from centuries before an Internet became available, the “legend trip” is a ritualized quest in which participants explore legends of supernatural events and test their truth by trying to make them come alive in the here and now.
How? By rehearsing the rituals by, for example, visiting sites of legends of the supernatural, and engaging there in the incantations, invocations, or other hocus-pocus that will supposedly conjure up some esoteric spirit or force.
Legend trips are, then, collective dares—trips to haunted houses, barns, or abandoned asylums, say—that often frighten the daylights out of participants, who usually are teenagers eager for the thrill, and thus prone to credulity."
"I suspect that what’s happening is that people are more averse to disorder now than they were then. The demand for marches to be repressed is part of the same mindset as bansturbation - even against things that don't exist - and the taking of offence at any slight to our sensibilities.
But why has this mood emerged so much since the 80s? Here are a few possibilities:"
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These are purely physical systems, but the brain has much in common with them. Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability - "avalanches" of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable.
It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems. "Lying at the critical point allows the brain to rapidly adapt to new circumstances," says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg from the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.
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The neuronal avalanches that Beggs investigated, for example, are perfect for transmitting information across the brain. If the brain was in a more stable state, these avalanches would die out before the message had been transmitted. If it was chaotic, each avalanche could swamp the brain.
At the critical point, however, you get maximum transmission with minimum risk of descending into chaos. "One of the advantages of self-organised criticality is that the avalanches can propagate over many links," says Beggs. "You can have very long chains that won't blow up on you."
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Flight 1073 shows how easy it is for a situation to go from bad to worse, especially when carriers operate with little, no slack
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