Measurement is a strange concept from the dictionary of Russian Pomors. It denotes an unusual mental illness that can occur in several people. The Eskimos call this state the call of the North Star.
Polar rabies
The first to describe this phenomenon from a medical point of view was the British doctor Watson, who took part in several polar expeditions at the very beginning of the twentieth century. He described people who fell into a strange state, who began to make rhythmic, consistent movements and moved towards the north. Any attempt to hold them back led to active resistance. Watson called this condition expeditionary or polar rabies.
The very word "measuring", or "measuring" comes from the verb "lay". It means to be possessed, to be in a state of madness.
A few years before Watson, the famous polar explorer Amundsen, who at that time was the navigator of the Belgic ship, which was wintering near Antarctica, encountered this strange phenomenon. Several members of the expedition "heard" the call of the North Star. One of them even escaped from the ship into the snowy expanses, and the other tried to kill Amundsen with an ax.
Doctors who took part in subsequent expeditions discovered an interesting pattern. Most of the cases of polar rabies coincided with the activity of the aurora, and mainly with flashes of red. The number of such attacks of expeditionary frenzy increased significantly in the years with recorded peaks of solar activity, when the brightest auroras occurred.
In Nazi Germany, experiments were carried out on the impact of bright flashes on the human psyche. After several experiments, during which representatives of the Nazi elite were injured, these studies were classified.
Curious research
The famous Institute of the Brain was created in Petrograd in 1918, headed by Academician Bekhterev. He took an interest in mental illness in the polar regions. The "measuring" aroused particular curiosity. Bekhterev suspected that it was all about external factors and organized a scientific expedition to the Kola Peninsula. Then the riddle of the call of the North Star could not be solved.
Only in 1957, after large-scale experiments, it turned out that certain forms of auroras pulsate with a frequency that is close to the basic rhythms of the human brain, which causes a kind of malfunction in its work. Along the way, it was found that bright flashes of scarlet color with a frequency close to the rhythms of the brain can cause an exacerbation of chronic diseases and the occurrence of seizures similar to epileptic ones. Some people, under the influence of such outbreaks, developed terrible headaches and malfunctions of the vestibular apparatus. People prone to mental illness are especially susceptible to this type of exposure.
