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

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The story of King Arthur has been told and retold numerous times over more than 1,000 years. Camelot, the knights of the round table, the wizard Merlin and the sword Excalibur are all famous parts of the Arthurian tales. Discover more traditional places in Japan. First stop is a good view of the Gassho-zukuri farmhouses in Shirakawa-go and Gokayama, Japan. Get historic with these traditional guest houses. The 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.

President John F. Kennedy riding in the presidential motorcade near Dealey Plaza in Dallas just before he was shot. (Image credit: Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) A digital rendering of the Ark of the Covenant. The bible has detailed descriptions of this holy object, but it was lost millennia ago and will likely never be recovered. (Image credit: jgroup via Getty Images) 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 Not everyone is inclined to confide in others. Slepian and postdoctoral researcher Sarah Ward, PhD, are studying how personality differences might make people more or less likely to share secrets. “Sharing secrets is often a way to build trust or closeness. Knowing which people tend to share can help to identify who is likely to build close relationships, and who might be missing opportunities to foster closeness and trust,” Ward says.Ehman wrote the words "Wow!" on the original printout of the signal, thus its title as the "Wow! Signal." 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. Some secrets are harder to put out of our minds than others. Slepian and his colleagues James Kirby, PhD, at the University of Queensland, and Elise Kalokerinos, PhD, now at the University of Melbourne, explored the negative emotions that often surround secrecy. They surveyed a diverse sample of 1,000 people on Mechanical Turk about more than 6,000 of their secrets and found that people dwelled more on secrets that made them feel ashamed than on those that made them feel guilty ( Emotion, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2020). “Shame, but not guilt, is associated with ruminating on secrets,” Slepian says. 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." The Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus drank from at his last supper with his disciples before his crucifixion, has never been found and almost certainly never will be. In fact, it wasn’t until the Middle Ages that there was much interest in it, after those writing some of the King Arthur stories described the search for the Holy Grail as a quest that King Arthur and his knights took on. 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.” 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.

Before his ignominious death, Kidd captured and plundered many ships. But the one of that got him in hot water was the Quedagh Merchant, a Moorish trading ship laden with gold, silver, silks, satins and other treasures from India. Kidd claimed it was a legitimate target, given it was controlled by the French. But it had an English captain and Indian merchandise, and the Moghul emperor at the time threatened to close off trade routes for the East India Company in response, Reuters reported.

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. Being situated in a business school has practical perks: For one, the school fully funds his lab, so he doesn’t have to seek outside grants. He advises one primary graduate student, but he also co-advises graduate students and mentors postdoctoral fellows across the division. The multidisciplinary business perspective also means that Slepian keeps one eye turned toward the practical applications of his research. Here is strip 11 of the Copper Scroll, which describes a vast hoard of hidden gold and silver that likely is imaginary. (Image credit: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC By 4.0) In Berlin’s experience, professional archeologists tend to eschew the role of popular sleuth, especially as it pertains to things like Noah’s Ark and treasure-laden tombs. Nevertheless, she recognizes the sense of wonder such mysteries inspire.

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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. 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 Jars Slepian’s next goals include using his research to design possible interventions to help people unburden themselves to improve their well-being. Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa went missing in 1975. The FBI is once again on the hunt for his body in a former New jersey landfill. (Image credit: Getty Images) This illustration, "Captain William Kidd in New York Harbour, 1696," by Jean Leone Gerome Ferris, shows the infamous Scottish privateer charming women onboard his ship, the Adventure Galley. (Image credit: PhotoQuest/Getty)

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. 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. Slepian’s lab is housed in the management division of Columbia University’s business school, where researchers in fields such as psychology, sociology, economics and political science explore various ways that individual, interpersonal and institutional forces drive behavior. 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.Although new research will provide more insight, scholars think it's unlikely they will ever fully know what Jesus was really like. 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. In an extension of that work, he’s beginning to explore how to reduce shame around secrets. “We know the secrets people feel ashamed of hurt them the most. So how can we reduce the shame? Talking to another person might make all the difference,” he says. The burden of secrecy