A World of Secrets: 2 (The Firewall Trilogy, 2)

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The signal lasted for 72 seconds, the longest period of time it could possibly be measured by the array that Ehman was using. It was loud and appeared to have been transmitted from a place no human has gone before: in the constellation Sagittarius near a star called Tau Sagittarii, 120 light-years away. It’s hard for people to get those secrets off their minds. The same paper showed that people’s minds wander to their secrets far more often than they actively try to conceal their secrets from others. And although the frequency of concealment didn’t seem to have much effect on well-being, the more people’s minds wandered to their secrets, the worse off they were.

Thousands of lichen-covered stone jars from the Iron Age, some standing close to 10 feet tall and weighing several tons, dot the mountainous landscape of northern Laos. Carved largely from sandstone and found in groups ranging from just one to 400, legend holds that giants used them as wine glasses. Many archeologists, on the other hand, believe they served as funerary urns, though much remains unknown about their purpose, about how they were moved into place, and about the civilization that produced them. Recent research dates at least some of the stone jars to as early as 1240 B.C., which would make them far older than the human remains buried nearby. Complicating matters is that many of the jars stand in fields of unexploded munitions, the vestige of a massive U.S. bombing campaign during the Vietnam War, and therefore cannot be safely studied. 3. Guanabara Bay Ancient writers describe a fantastic series of gardens constructed at the ancient city of Babylon in modern-day Iraq. It's not clear when these gardens were built, but some ancient writers were so impressed by the gardens that they called them a "wonder of the world." Around 250 B.C., Philo of Byzantium wrote that the Hanging Gardens had "plants cultivated at a height above ground level, and the roots of the trees are embedded in an upper terrace rather than in the earth." An Egyptian port city on the Mediterranean Sea, Thonis-Heracleion served as a major trading hub prior to the founding of nearby Alexandria around 331 B.C. Mythical hero Heracles and Helen of Troy both supposedly spent time there. Around the second century B.C., however, the city center collapsed due to soil liquification, possibly triggered by earthquakes, tsunamis, or floods. Eventually, all of Thonis-Heracleion sank underwater, where it remained lost to time until being rediscovered in the early 2000s by marine archeologists. Since then, large statues, animal sarcophagi, temple ruins, pottery shards, jewelry, coins, and even 2,400-year-old fruit baskets have been pulled from the waves, thus shining new light on this real-life Atlantis. 2. Plain of JarsThe only clue to their potential whereabouts? The mysterious word CROATOAN carved on a palisdae, and another CRO carved on a tree. White assumed the residents had traveled to Croatoan Island, which is now called Hatteras Island. But a storm blew in and prevented White from reaching the island, and he never raised enough money for another search. During his trial, Kidd wrote a letter claiming he pilfered around 100,000 British pounds and buried it somewhere, offering to trade the location for his life, according to Reuters. However, during the trial it was estimated that the takings from all his time aboard the Adventure Galley likely totaled closer to 400,000 pounds. To his dying breath, Kidd argued he was a legitimate privateer who had only ever plundered targets approved by the crown. But he was hung and his body covered with pitch and squeezed in an iron cage displayed over the Thames. While no serious scholar believes that this story is literally true, some have speculated that the legend could have been inspired, in part, by real events that happened in Greek history. One possibility is that the Minoan civilization (as it's now called), which flourished on the island of Crete until about 1400 B.C., could have inspired the story of Atlantis. Although Crete is in the Mediterranean, and not the Atlantic, Minoan settlements suffered considerable damage during the eruption of Thera, a volcano in Greece. However, if King Arthur did really exist, the reality was likely less magical. The earliest surviving accounts date to the ninth century and tell of a leader (perhaps not even a king) who fought several battles against the Saxons; even the accuracy of these accounts is debatable.

Some of his ongoing research, for example, is exploring the effects of having to keep secrets on behalf of an employer. Early results suggest that work secrets, like personal secrets, can be both good and bad. On the one hand, it can feel good to be entrusted with important information about one’s company. On the other, keeping that secret can feel like a burden. There are no serious scholarly attempts to find the Holy Grail, although it continues to be popular in fiction, being used as a plot device in films like the 1989 movie "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," where it was used to heal Indiana Jones after he was shot by the Nazis. We all keep the same kinds of secrets,” Slepian says. “About 97% of people have a secret in at least one of those categories, and the average person is currently keeping secrets in 13 of those categories.”Ancient writers claim that Cleopatra VII and her lover, Mark Antony, were buried together in a tomb after their deaths in 30 B.C. The writer Plutarch (A.D. 45 to 120) wrote that the tomb was located near a temple of Isis, an ancient Egyptian goddess, and was a "lofty and beautiful" monument containing treasures made of gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony and ivory.

The bad news is that when people share their secrets with us, we feel like we have to guard them. The more people are preoccupied by that secret, or feel they have to hide it on behalf of the confidant, the more burdensome it is,” he says. Digging into the secrecy literature, he found that most existing research focused on the effort involved in keeping a secret. Typical studies looked at interactions between two people while one of them tried to hide something from the other. But he couldn’t find much research on how people thought about secrets outside those conversations. Preliminary results from the research hint that people who score high on neuroticism, for instance, are less likely to confess to immoral activities they’ve engaged in. Ward and Slepian are also finding that particularly polite people may be more reticent to divulge the skeletons in their closets. By holding on to secrets, Ward says, such people “might be missing out on an opportunity to get comfort or relief from other people, which could alleviate their negative emotions.” Many of the pictures of herbs and plants hint that it many have been some kind of textbook for an alchemist. The fact that many diagrams appear to be of astronomical origin, combined with the unidentifiable biological drawings, has even led some fanciful theorists to propose that the book may have an alien origin. Every single new technology that has been made available to archeologists, beginning with carbon-14 dating in the 1950s, has radically pushed the field,” Berlin says. “We can see deeper and smaller and finer, and so there are many more questions we can ask and answer.”Slepian’s next goals include using his research to design possible interventions to help people unburden themselves to improve their well-being. Having a secret can feel exhausting. In fact, it is exhausting. With Nir Halevy, PhD, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Adam Galinsky, PhD, also at Columbia Business School, Slepian performed a series of experiments asking participants to recall either personal information they intended to keep secret or personal information they hadn’t shared but would be willing to discuss if it came up in conversation. The researchers found that people felt both more fatigued and more alone when they recalled their secrets than when they recalled the undisclosed information. One explanation, Slepian says, is that thinking about a secret can create a motivational conflict in which a person’s need to connect with others directly clashes with their desire to keep their secret to themselves ( Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 45, No. 7, 2019). “We want to confide and get the secret off our chests, but we also want to protect ourselves and our relationships. That conflict is what wears us down,” he says. Can I tell you a secret?” The next time someone asks you that question, you may not want to say yes. Being confided in is a double-edged sword, says social psychologist Michael Slepian, PhD, an associate professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School who studies the psychology of secrets. One summer night in 1977, Jerry Ehman, a volunteer for SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, may have become the first man ever to receive an intentional message from an alien world. Ehman was scanning radio waves from deep space, hoping to randomly come across a signal that bore the hallmarks of one that might be sent by intelligent aliens, when he saw his measurements spike. For decades, secrecy research focused on the effects of concealment. But I couldn’t find any studies that systematically looked at what secrets people keep, how they keep them or how they experience secrets on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “So, we started at the beginning, with the most basic questions we could ask.” Secrecy basics