The Truth About Santa

by Gregory Mone

  Yet video analytics has its limits and will probably never be Santa’s primary way of figuring out who has been naughty and who has been nice. Instead, Santa hones in on one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

  Guilt.

  18

  Guilt-Ridden Visions of Sugarplums

  WHY REMOTE EEG DETECTION PROVIDES SANTA WITH A MORE ACCURATE DETERMINATION OF BEHAVIOR

  The aliens must have known about the strong correlation between Christianity and guilt (who doesn’t?) because Santa’s system capitalizes on the link. Somewhere in each child’s room, typically in a lamp or other light fixture, but probably in bedside tables, too, since Santa has long had ties to the home furnishings industry, there is a remote electroencephalogram (EEG) detector.

  These devices measure the brain’s electrical activity; conspiracy theorists suspect that they’re linked to something called remote neural monitoring. They believe that the U.S. National Security Agency can detect all of our thoughts, even over large distances. Today’s researchers profess that this is all but impossible, or at least far out of the reach of modern technology. Not convinced? Try this simple experiment. Look up the name of the current director of the National Security Agency, and picture him or her in a clown suit, then a bikini. Now imagine his wife in the nude. If you are not arrested on suspicious charges within twenty-four hours, or, if you are a woman and he does not contact you and suggest that you, he, and his wife get together and try on some circus costumes, it should be clear to you that remote neural monitoring is not possible.

  Still, this stuff isn’t all science fiction. Scientists have shown that they can pick up brain waves remotely. A group at the University of Sussex in the UK demonstrated that they can read electroencephalograms from more than ten feet away. These brain waves don’t give away your thoughts, but scientists have been able to associate different EEG frequencies with specific emotions and cognitive states. So, they can generally link certain EEG readings to feelings like anger, joy, sorrow, and relaxation.

  The Sussex remote-detection technology, though far too large to store in a bedside table or lamp, is the closest in nature to Santa’s system. Rather than pick out particular memories or thoughts, Santa’s EEG detectors scan for guilt and remorse, which often intensify as Christmas approaches and children begin to wonder if they’ve been good enough during the year. In bed at the end of each day, as the kids mentally review their bad deeds, their guilt readings spike. If a child’s levels continue to grow as the big day approaches and exceed a specific, predetermined guilt threshold, that child is flagged. And if a particular child shows no remorse whatsoever, he or she is assumed to be particularly devilish.

  This is where the video highlights come into play. The elves have a file on each child; they can review them when necessary and then continue to monitor them, compiling more evidence through standard surveillance, including listening devices, satellites, and flying robots.

  And then? If proven guilty, does little Billy get a nice, dusty, lung-wrecking bag of coal to teach him to stop spitting in his classmates’ lunches when they’re not looking? No. The continued association of Santa with coal has been a colossal mistake, for various reasons. It not only reflects poorly on Santa’s environmental awareness; it also creates some troubling questions about Santa’s understanding of child psychology. The truth is that Santa has shifted away from punishment entirely. Thanks to Mrs. Claus, he now practices positive reinforcement.

  19

  Why Santa Ditched Coal

  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT, ADOLESCENT BEHAVIOR, AND A REGRETTABLE PENCHANT FOR UNJUSTIFIED SPANKINGS

  In the early days, when Santa’s operations were confined to Christian homes in the U.S., the task of determining, based on the evidence gathered via surveillance and guilt monitoring, whether a given child was naughty or nice was relatively simple. Behavior was measured against a standard code: the Ten Commandments. Generally, the worthiness of a child would be determined by how closely he or she hewed to the rules of the Christian faith. But then Christmas spread across the globe and across interfaith lines. And for many children, it had more to do with getting new bicycles than trying not to covet their neighbors’ rides.

  As a result, some of Santa’s most influential elves and lieutenants began arguing that the behavior of children should be judged according to the standards of their own religion or culture. Santa detested this idea, dismissing his critics as moral relativists. Santa believed in the Ten Commandments and felt everyone else should, too.

  This seemed like a critical issue, and one that would only become more important as Santa’s reach expanded, but eventually Mrs. Claus proved that it was actually irrelevant. Citing several new trends in child psychology, she demonstrated that the standards question was not as crucial as it appeared. In the 1960s and ’70s, she began making Santa aware of a kind of paradigm shift among child and family psychologists. “Here’s a fresh plate of cookies, dear,” she’d say, “and a very intriguing new paper from a group at Yale.” She stacked his bedside table with research and the complete works of the Harvard child psychologist Robert Coles.

  The gist of this growing body of research was that the kind of negative reinforcement that Santa practiced by filling the stockings of naughty children with coal was useless. It wasn’t just mean. It was ineffective. Positive reinforcement was proving to be far more powerful when it came to altering a child’s behavior. Today this approach is accepted knowledge and has been backed up by numerous studies.

  Yet it took a while for Mrs. Claus to change Santa’s thinking on the subject. He remained doubtful in part because all of this research hasn’t necessarily translated into a healthy crop of youngsters. Psychologists have found that children are more anxious and depressed today than ever before. And not just poor or downtrodden kids, or bullies who live in busted or abusive homes. The mental backpacks of wealthy children are also stuffed with psychological issues. A recent Columbia University study, for example, cited the fact that upper-class children can be more susceptible to depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.

  Santa was also just plain fond of the coal punishment. He liked giving nasty little kids a few chunks of the stuff and imagining how the punks felt when they saw their stockings in the morning. He enjoyed a bit of casual corporal punishment, too. In the 1960s, he was prone to spanking his elves after drinking too greedily from Mrs. Claus’s famously large bowls of eggnog. But the evidence for positive reinforcement was irrefutable, and the elves threatened revolt if the spankings continued, so Santa was eventually forced to adapt.

  These days, instead of punishing children for immoral or unfriendly actions, Santa rewards them for good deeds. When guilt levels picked up by the remote EEG detector fall within the standard or normal range, a note is attached to a child’s wished-for gift that compliments him on his good behavior. If guilt levels are too high or, for reasons explained earlier, suspiciously low, then Santa’s analytics software mines the video captured by school and other security cameras, plus his own flying drones, for examples of good behavior. It picks out nefarious acts, too, in order to confirm that the child has actually acted poorly and isn’t merely subject to a heightened sense of guilt that makes him feel as though even the smallest slight directed at another child is equivalent to a mortal sin. The real point, though, is to identify not those instances in which the bully stole a lunch or tripped an unsuspecting book hound, but instead those when he happened to help another child. Here again, a note is attached: “This is for giving little Timmy Hartwell a hand when he stumbled in gym class.”

  It is still too early to measure the effect of Santa’s tactical shift on the larger population, too premature to see whether he has helped diminish those anxiety and depression numbers through his mission, but one thing is clear: The elves are thrilled that he stopped the spankings.

  PART V

  Transportation

  20

  The Chimney as Wormhole Mouth

  H
OW SANTA’S HELPERS VISIT ALL THOSE HOMES IN A SINGLE NIGHT

  Christmas Eve at the Pole begins with a long, luxurious meal. When the eggnog is served, the OC stands before his lieutenants and delivers a stirring speech about the importance of Christmas, the joy each man will spread through his work, how all their toil will help make the world a better place. Much cheering and singing follow, until the Santas are cut off from the alcohol and served strong coffee brewed from freshly roasted and ground organic beans, often from Yemen. (The aliens must be coffee snobs, too, because the Pole is scattered with numerous top-quality cafés.)

  Then the mood shifts. Revelry gives way to focus. Each lieutenant confers with his elfish handlers, reviewing their plans. If the Santas are astronauts, these elves, back at their workstations, constitute NASA’s mission control. They track the lieutenants throughout the night.

  Finally, at midnight, Eastern Standard Time (because the OC is from Brooklyn, after all), each Santa grabs his sack full of equipment, throws it over his shoulder, walks to his designated departure portal, and dives through.

  I know what you’re thinking. A departure portal? No sleigh? No, not for the lieutenants. So how do they pay all those visits in a single night without a vehicle? In the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street, Sir Richard Attenborough’s Santa character suggests that he accomplishes the seemingly impossible by slowing time down. This isn’t completely off base. Time can flow at different speeds. Near the event horizon of a black hole, for example. The gravitational pull there is so great that time itself gets stretched. Someone resilient enough to survive near the edge of one of these matter-devouring cosmic beasts would age more slowly than someone sitting back on Earth. The same goes for someone moving at an incredibly fast pace. Einstein showed that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down relative to someone who remains stationary.

  But for Santa to make this work, he would have to either pop all of humanity into a light-speed-fast spaceship while he and his lieutenants completed their rounds, or increase the gravitational pull in and around peoples’ homes enough that the added force would stretch seconds into hours. The downside of this tactic, though, is that it would probably cause the homes and all their occupants to implode. Merry Christmas! You’ve been gravitationally squashed down to the size of a tick!

  Aha, but what if Santa sped up? What if he pulled an impersonation of the Flash and raced around the world at light speed? If he were to move that fast, according to Einstein’s ideas, time would flow much more slowly for him than for those sleeping kids. His body’s clock would slow down. Every motion would take a little bit longer. So, even if he could travel from point A to point B in an instant, he wouldn’t actually be able to get much done en route. Wrapping a simple gift would take him forever if he was moving at that speed. So this is not an option.

  No, Santa and his lieutenants always move at a generally human pace. Even if they’re hopped up on performance enhancers, it’s going to take them roughly thirty seconds to scope out a living room, run through their routine, and then exit. And he uses those lieutenants because it would take roughly 190 years, without travel time, for a single Santa to drop off presents in two hundred million homes.

  But we’ve already gone over some of these details. This is the whole reason Santa has lieutenants and doesn’t do the job himself. Yet even when that workload is divided among hundreds of people, it still takes a while. In fact, each Santa spends slightly more than six months delivering presents on Christmas Eve.

  Now, that’s six months of their time, of course. To us, only a night passes. To complete all that work before the first kids wake up, hoping to get a glimpse under the tree, the Santas have to time-travel. It’s absolutely essential. As they move from house to house, they move from one spot in space to another, but they also shift from one point in time to another.

  So, how do they manage this feat? There are some things we still don’t know, but it is fairly clear that the mode of transport/time-travel they use is based on astrophysical oddities called wormholes. These strange passageways consist of three basic parts: two mouths, one of which is an entrance, the other an exit, and a tunnel, or throat, that connects them. Wormholes may be able to link distant, or even not-so-distant, parts of the universe via relatively short paths. Scientists think they might offer shortcuts through space and time.

  The idea that the universe might allow for something like a wormhole was first proposed by Einstein and a pair of collaborators, but its potential use as a time machine wasn’t explored in any real detail until Caltech astrophysicist Kip Thorne decided to devote some brain power to the topic. In 1988, by managing to get their first paper on the subject published in a prestigious journal, Physical Review Letters, Thorne and his colleagues effectively legitimized wormholes as a topic for serious thinkers.

  One of the common ways of explaining how wormholes work involves a sheet of paper. Imagine this paper represents our entire universe. On one end, mark point A; on the far side, point B. Now let’s say that you are a little dot on that paper, a citizen of this tremendously thin world. You’re at a party at point A, but you’re a little bored, and your friend texts you about a much cooler gathering at point B. One with celebrities. Unfortunately, this second party is getting crowded, so you need to get there soon, before the hosts close the doors. If this paper universe is lying flat, then the shortest distance between A and B is a straight line. You just need to start running.

  But if this paper world happens to be folded over so that points A and B are nearly touching, and you happen to be aware of the fact that your universe, this piece of paper, is actually floating in a higher-dimensional plane that allows it to be bent, folded, dropped, or transformed into an airplane, then you have another option. There is a shorter path. Forget sticking to the paper; you could move through that higher space. If you could punch two holes in the paper, one next to A and the other next to B, and then find a drinking straw that slips into those two gaps, you wouldn’t have to travel all that way across the paper, around the fold. You could just slip through the straw, like a slide, and get to the party in a fraction of the time.

  The straw, in this case, is the wormhole. These tunnels, by dipping into a different kind of space, offer shortcuts through space-time. Does that make sense? No? Fine; forget the paper. Imagine that first party is in a third-story apartment. The other one is downstairs, right below it. Convention suggests that the only way to get from one apartment to the other is to exit through the door, descend the stairs, and head down the hall to the second apartment. In the wormhole version, though, you’d get a jackhammer, bust a hole through the floor, drop right down into the other apartment, and grab yourself a drink.

  Still no? Okay, take that piece of paper again, flatten it out, and make those two holes large enough for your hands to fit through, but not so big that you end up ripping the paper. Carefully stick each hand through, and extend them out in front of you. This might not help you understand wormholes, but now you know what it’s like to be a painter in a post-canvas art world, handcuffed to a dying medium.

  The truth is that the paper example, which normally doesn’t involve drinking straws or parties, is one of those tricky analogies that make people feel like they understand a concept even though they really don’t. It offers a two-to-three-dimensional example of what is really a three-to-four-dimensional phenomenon. We’re better off admitting that we can’t fully visualize these things and going from there. Wormholes equal shortcuts through space and time. Good. Let’s move on.

  Picturing wormholes may be difficult, but it’s easy to imagine their effects. Let’s say your front door is one wormhole mouth and the other is located at your neighbor’s front door. Your doorbell rings. You open the door, and there’s a singing telegram outside. The courier is kind of funny looking, but she appears to be trustworthy, and it’s your birthday, too, so you invite her in. When she steps forward through the door frame and into the mouth of the wormhole, however, she
disappears.

  If the tunnel between the two mouths is short—say, a foot in length—she’ll immediately re-emerge from your neighbor’s front door and step into his foyer instead of your own. (That is, assuming you both have foyers.) What would happen next depends on whether you and your neighbor have the same birthday, and whether he or she has a history of drug use and/or marital infidelity, but you get the point. The telegram singer walks into one home and finds herself in a completely different one.

  There have been advances in the research since Thorne and his colleagues first published their paper, but wormholes are not going to put the airlines out of business anytime soon. Constructing one, holding the two mouths open, and putting everything together in such a way that a person, or a spaceship, could travel through the tunnel to the other end without having every molecule in their body torn apart is really, really difficult.

  Yet scientists continue to study the idea. Francisco Lobo of the University of Lisbon, in Portugal, has suggested in a number of recent papers that new work in astrophysics may provide a clue to the potential workings of wormholes. In the last decade or so, astronomers have become increasingly convinced that the universe is expanding under the pressure of a mysterious force. This so-called dark energy acts as a kind of antigravity, pushing the cosmos apart while gravity works to pull all those planets, stars, and galaxies closer together. How does it work? Nobody’s quite sure yet, which is why they call it “dark” energy. That’s code for “we don’t know.”