From: seanc130@hotmail.com   
      
    wrote   
      
   > That wasn't too clear. Because if there was nothing special in the   
   > displays, that would mean that everyone had more or less the same   
   > hallucination. It's true that the *content* of the messages were   
   > specific for each person, but they all imagined they were seeing   
   > some violent message on a digital display.   
   >   
   > That doesn't make much sense to me - if there were a chemical exposure   
   > causing certain anxiety-prone people to become totally paranoid and   
   > psychotic, wouldn't they have different symptoms? Even if they all   
   > hallucinated (assuming the chemical had psychedelic properties),   
   > they'd each have *different* hallucinations at least, wouldn't you   
   > think? One person might see distortions in people's faces, another   
   > might see bugs swarming everywhere, and another might see messages in   
   > digital displays. But could a chemical cause everyone to imagine the   
   > same thing? I wouldn't expect that, so that's why I thought there was   
   > also a transmission in the displays, along with the spraying.   
      
   Nice. That's an argument I didn't think of for the 'deliberate messages'   
   hypothesis. Seems like there's less and less justification for the   
   'hallucination' hypothesis.   
      
   OTOH, I just thought of something else -- that scene where Ed is in the   
   mall, in front of a big display of TVs, and all of a sudden they all start   
   showing violent images of riots and Charlie Manson and such, before fading   
   out and giving him the usual verbal message. The fact that it tells him to   
   look 'behind you', to get a gun, would be consistent with the 'deliberate   
   messages' -- how could he hallucinate being told about something that was   
   behind him, something that he never saw and would have had no way of knowing   
   it was there? But, conversely, if all those TVs really were going crazy like   
   that, why didn't anyone else seem to notice? It looks an awful lot like a   
   psychotic (or psychedelic) hallucination to me.   
      
   Maybe there's a way it could be both. What if they really *were*   
   hallucinations, but the people running the experiment had some kind of super   
   advanced technology that allowed them to systematically manipulate the   
   images being hallucinated, by tapping directly into the victim's brain? This   
   would have the bonus of explaining both the 'why does everyone see the same   
   thing' question *and* the 'how did they get it to show a letter K' question.   
      
   Awesome. I just came up with that out of nowhere! I had no idea when I   
   started typing this post that I would stumble on that explanation, which   
   beautifully fits all the facts and explains all the inconsistencies. Who da   
   man? I da man. I always suspected.   
      
   --   
   --Sean   
   http://spclsd223.livejournal.com   
      
   Kutner: But why did he test positive for syphilis?   
      
   House: Oh, wait, I know this!   
      
   Kutner: Either one, he has syphilis ...   
      
   House: I was gonna say that!   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)