Why the Na'vi have long hair

[Seze Mune]

We all know that the Na'vi are a representation of an ancient tribal system.  As I was researching hairstyles in general, I came across some information that made me go, "hmm...".  It seemed so Na'vi I thought I would post it for your comments.  Not being military, but knowing that the military sometimes investigates arcane (meaning hidden, not Wiccan) subjects, I have no reason to believe this would *not* have happened.

The Truth About Hair and Why Indians Would Keep Their Hair Long

United Truth Seekers

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:32 CDT




© Black Elk

This information about hair has been hidden from the public since the Viet Nam War .

Our culture leads people to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hair style is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue. Back in the Vietnam war however, an entirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.

In the early nineties, Sally [name changed to protect privacy] was married to a licensed psychologist who worked at a VA Medical hospital. He worked with combat veterans with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. Most of them had served in Vietnam.

Sally said, "I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor's Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government. He was in shock from the contents. What he read in those documents completely changed his life. From that moment on my conservative middle of the road husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again. What is more, the VA Medical center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example.

As I read the documents, I learned why. It seems that during the Vietnam War special forces in the war department had sent undercover experts to comb American Indian Reservations looking for talented scouts, for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain. They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking abilities. Before being approached, these carefully selected men were extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.

With the usual enticements, the well proven smooth phrases used to enroll new recruits, some of these Indian trackers were then enlisted. Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.

Serious causalities and failures of performance led the government to contract expensive testing of these recruits, and this is what was found.

When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer 'sense' the enemy, they could no longer access a 'sixth sense', their 'intuition' no longer was reliable, they couldn't 'read' subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.

So the testing institute recruited more Indian trackers, let them keep their long hair, and tested them in multiple areas. Then they would pair two men together who had received the same scores on all the tests. They would let one man in the pair keep his hair long, and gave the other man a military haircut. Then the two men retook the tests.

Time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores. Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores.

Here is a Typical Test:

The recruit is sleeping out in the woods. An armed 'enemy' approaches the sleeping man. The long haired man is awakened out of his sleep by a strong sense of danger and gets away long before the enemy is close, long before any sounds from the approaching enemy are audible.

In another version of this test the long haired man senses an approach and somehow intuits that the enemy will perform a physical attack. He follows his 'sixth sense' and stays still, pretending to be sleeping, but quickly grabs the attacker and 'kills' him as the attacker reaches down to strangle him.

This same man, after having passed these and other tests, then received a military haircut and consistently failed these tests, and many other tests that he had previously passed.

So the document recommended that all Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts. In fact, it required that trackers keep their hair long."

Comment:

The mammalian body has evolved over millions of years. Survival skills of human and animal at times seem almost supernatural. Science is constantly coming up with more discoveries about the amazing abilities of man and animal to survive. Each part of the body has highly sensitive work to perform for the survival and well being of the body as a whole.The body has a reason for every part of itself.

Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved 'feelers' or 'antennae' that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex.

Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment. This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut.

When hair is cut, receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment are greatly hampered. This results in numbing-out .

Cutting of hair is a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems. It is also a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds. It contributes to sexual frustration.

Conclusion:

In searching for solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time for us to consider that many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error. It may be that a major part of the solution is looking at us in the face each morning when we see ourselves in the mirror.

The story of Sampson and Delilah in the Bible has a lot of encoded truth to tell us. When Delilah cut Sampson's hair, the once undefeatable Sampson was defeated.

Reported by C. Young

Comment: SOTT can't confirm this story or the research it suggests took place, however, we have wondered on many occasions, what is the use of hair and why so many legends refer to hair as being a source of strength, from Samson, to Nazarenes, to the Long Haired Franks.

[Kamean]

In my opinion, long hair need them to protect tswin.

[Seze Mune]

In my opinion, long hair need them to protect tswin.

Maybe, but perhaps using hair is more ornamental than protective.  Nothing else on Pandora seems to need to protect their neural whip like that.







Pure speculation.

[Reykoveyzä te Werufalä Haflak'ite]

All the neural hips are protected, though. Most animals (for example, look at the pa'li) have their whips encased in a layer of skin, with a larger shape of skin at the end for the loose untwisted nerves to move in. The Na'vi's hair is a replacement of that skin....whose to say it hasn't the same senses?

[Seze Mune]

All the neural hips are protected, though. Most animals (for example, look at the pa'li) have their whips encased in a layer of skin, with a larger shape of skin at the end for the loose untwisted nerves to move in. The Na'vi's hair is a replacement of that skin....whose to say it hasn't the same senses?

Righto.  I suspect if you uncovered a Na'vi's neural whip, it would look exactly like a pa'li's, which is already protected by its skin covering.  I don't think the Na'vi's need anything else, but they like the look and it became traditional.  My best guess.

[Human No More]

This thread again?

That link is hilarious - just look at all the other tinfoil hattery on their site ('September 11 'Truth'', various random rantings about 'psychopaths', 'Secret Space Program', 'John F. Kennedy and the Monolithic and Ruthless Conspiracy', 'Wars, Pestilence and Witches', etc). Enough said - some people just want to be speshul and convince themselves they know something secret, to the point of defying all reality in their efforts to draw lines between everything without ever stopping to consider that maybe there isn't a secret government/alien/illuminati/masonic/jewish/magical conspiracy after all and things might actually be as they seem.



The real truth about long hair is this: For both males and females, it has provided an evolutionary advantage by being a sign of health that an individual can grow and maintain it, as well as attraction providing a positive selectionary pressure. Plus, it looks good

From my last post on this:

Hair is dead. There are no nerves in it - as Raiden said, it is only a protein. If you have longish to long hair, try holding it in the middle (so you can't feel it moving) and then touch the ends past that middle, and you can't feel it. When something touches your hair, what you feel is the touch being transmitted to the root, where there are nerves in the skin. So while yes, technically you can feel things with your hair, it's limited to whether someone's touching it, or what the wind is doing . It also claims that hair 'emits energy', which is clearly false.

Looks like someone has been taking Withnail and I too seriously

I could also point out that I have very long hair, and don't have some kind of magic senses or superpowers or whatever, and I've had it for about 7 years.

All the neural hips are protected, though. Most animals (for example, look at the pa'li) have their whips encased in a layer of skin, with a larger shape of skin at the end for the loose untwisted nerves to move in. The Na'vi's hair is a replacement of that skin....whose to say it hasn't the same senses?

Righto.  I suspect if you uncovered a Na'vi's neural whip, it would look exactly like a pa'li's, which is already protected by its skin covering.  I don't think the Na'vi's need anything else, but they like the look and it became traditional.  My best guess.

Oe mllte. Braiding their hair over it would also provide additional protection, after all, it's so critically important to them.

[Seze Mune]

Hmm.  I get your points.  However, just for the fun of it, I'm gonna start musing here.

If "The electromagnetic force is the one responsible for practically all the phenomena one encounters in daily life above the nuclear scale, with the exception of gravity," and since the following definition (which is true, though reductionistic) demonstrates that we do not know definitively about electromagnetism in all of the 11 postulated dimensions of M-theory, who's to say for sure that there aren't people who may be sensitive to the electromagnetic radiation of others' brainwaves and physical presence?  The brain does emit electromagnetic waves, but our current mechanical instruments have a hard time registering them.  Then again, we have a hard time measuring Shumann waves transmitted by the Earth and most certainly don't understand all their various implications.

Here's one definition which shows that we really don't  understand electromagnetism:  "The fundamental force associated with electric and magnetic fields. The electromagnetic force is carried by the photon and is responsible for atomic structure, chemical reactions, the attractive and repulsive forces associated with electrical charge and magnetism, and all other electromagnetic phenomena. Like gravity, the electromagnetic force has an infinite range and obeys the inverse-square law. The electromagnetic force is weaker than the strong nuclear force but stronger than the weak force and gravity. Some scientists believe that the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force are both aspects of a single force called the electroweak force."

We can speculate that this is a capacity latent within the human race and that there will be some individuals who are in the vanguard of human evolution who have abilities the rest of us don't have and therefore can't really understand. And maybe the Na'vi really are that advanced...   

That said.....where's my hat?!?

[`Eylan Ayfalulukanä]

If humans have sensors for electromagnetic energy in the radio frequency range (light and heat are also electromagnetic energy, but we have sensors for them), it certainly isn't the hair. It would also be something that has escaped an awful lot of careful scientific inquiry and personal experience. It is very easy to measure just about any wavelength of electromagnetic energy that would be absorbed or emitted by the body.

The hair article may be valid, but if so, it is valid for very different reasons than what we are considering here, and has more to do with psychology than physics.

I am probably exposed to more RF electromagnetic energy than anyone else on this list, and I am not suffering for it!

The first picture of the guy with the tinfoil hat was almost certainly taken during one of my favorite activities-- Amateur Radio Field Day. I'm sure the hat is a joke.

[Seze Mune]

Isochronic tones-Schumann Resonanace 7.83 HZ

Schumann Resonance and Isochronic Tones


Ma 'Eylan, you are probably right.  Then again, I like to remind myself that all the data isn't in yet, and we are still living in the dark ages so far as the future is likely concerned, in a matter of speaking.

[Alyara Arati]

Eltur tìtxen si.  Very interesting.  I can definitively state that, in addition to me just liking the look of the style, and tending to favor guys who think it's pretty:

My long hair is crucial to my electrostatic powers; if it were short, would it throw sparks in the dark when brushed, or could I attract all things knit or flannel?

It also absorbs and holds scents, like a bloodhound's floppy ears funnel smells right to its nose, which might conceivably have some use to a hunter/tracker...

[Human No More]

If humans have sensors for electromagnetic energy in the radio frequency range (light and heat are also electromagnetic energy, but we have sensors for them), it certainly isn't the hair. It would also be something that has escaped an awful lot of careful scientific inquiry and personal experience. It is very easy to measure just about any wavelength of electromagnetic energy that would be absorbed or emitted by the body.

The hair article may be valid, but if so, it is valid for very different reasons than what we are considering here, and has more to do with psychology than physics.

Very true, especially on a psychological point if there is actually any basis in truth in the OP - the entire reason they do it in the first place is to dehumanise people, after all.

[Seze Mune]

I'm sorry, HNM....what's OP?

[Alyara Arati]

Original Post(er).  Also, I considered that there would have to be a heavy psychological component involved; I would feel very alien if swept out of my home environment, and made to conform to one structured essentially to suppress any form of individuality, and my own hair is a lot of my personal self image.

[Lolet]

There's one major disadvantage. Long hair gets caught on stuff. We have screws on the backs of our school desks, and my hair is constantly getting snagged.  Now just imagine jumping off a tree and your hair gets tangled by a branch. There you are, dangling in mid-air. 

Not to mention people are always touching long hair. Especially boys. If you like flowing locks so much, get a wig. 

[Vur’evenge]

I had to snicker at the rapid foil headgear rebuttal to Seze's original post.  End of discussion is it?    Lunatic fringe! Tinfoil hattery! Thinly-veiled loaded language... variations on an ad hominem theme...   (snicker becomes guffaw.)  Galileo was considered a crank, fringe nut-job in his day.   It always feels like I'm breathing rareified air when such barbs are flung in my direction.   I hope there's comfort to be had in such profound certainty.  My preference is to remain uncertain and curious about all things called "incredible".

Just sayin'...

Onward! Irayo ma Seze for the fascinating link.  It has me thinking about the few times in my adult life when somebody, AKA my mother, talked me into cutting my hair short... and how completely wrong it felt when I did.  I felt unwell. It went beyond simple "like" of long hair.  It was a whole-being response. Also was thinking about the biblical Samson. And then I've read that our measurable personal energetic fields extend beyond our physical bodies.  I can't recall the distance at the moment.  Will look it up.

You've got me thinking of many things.  I love that. "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Snippet from the original Mickey Mouse Club closing song: "That's your hat! (that's your hat!), What a hat! (what a hat!)"


Edit for typo

[Vur’evenge]

"Hair is one of the most important ways **humans have of presenting themselves, being one of the parts of their body which is easiest to manipulate. Also, having short, cut hair (or a shaven head) is often viewed as being under society's control, such as while in prison or as punishment for a crime, while males having long hair signifies being outside of the mainstream."

Synnott, Anthony (September 1987), "Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair", The British Journal of Sociology 38 (3): 381–413

**humans!  Intriguing for me to ponder if a sentient species like the Na'vi with group sensibilities and affinities might develop similar cultural/sociological idiosyncrasies about hairstyles.

JSTOR is one of those repository sites for which I always wish I had institutional access. Often this sends me running to the local reference librarian.  I love sitting on the floor between stacks in libraries with piles of books around me.   Footnotes are friends, somebody somewhere knows the answer to any question I care to ask.

[Seze Mune]

I had to snicker at the rapid foil headgear rebuttal to Seze's original post.  End of discussion is it?    Lunatic fringe! Tinfoil hattery! Thinly-veiled loaded language... variations on an ad hominem theme...   (snicker becomes guffaw.)  Galileo was considered a crank, fringe nut-job in his day.   It always feels like I'm breathing rareified air when such barbs are flung in my direction.   I hope there's comfort to be had in such profound certainty.  My preference is to remain uncertain and curious about all things called "incredible".

Just sayin'...

That's my standard operating procedure too, to remain open and curious about things.  Without an open and curious attitude, science itself would never have progressed.  Interestingly, while science seems to have bumped and jolted along a progressive pathway, I do not think humankind itself has kept pace.  The human heart, mind, and culture seem unable to keep up with technology and science is therefore harnessed for far less evolved purposes than anyone cares to admit. That's one of the strongest subplots in Avatar, ironically.

Onward! Irayo ma Seze for the fascinating link.  It has me thinking about the few times in my adult life when somebody, AKA my mother, talked me into cutting my hair short... and how completely wrong it felt when I did.  I felt unwell. It went beyond simple "like" of long hair.  It was a whole-being response. Also was thinking about the biblical Samson. And then I've read that our measurable personal energetic fields extend beyond our physical bodies.  I can't recall the distance at the moment.  Will look it up.

I read that in dreams, hair symbolizes strength and long hair is linked specifically with strength of all kinds, psychological and physical and even intellectual.  Dream symbols are personal though, so while this may be generally true for most, it isn't necessarily true for any given individual.

As for energetic fields, the electromagnetic radiation of the heart is supposed to be detectable up to six feet from one's body. That doesn't mean the field ends there, it means our instruments' sensitivity ends there.

You've got me thinking of many things.  I love that. "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Ah, the White Queen! Lewis Carroll had such a fantastic imagination......and it probably came from doing exactly that!   

Irayo seiyi, ma Vur'evenge - you made my day!!

[Human No More]

There's one major disadvantage. Long hair gets caught on stuff. We have screws on the backs of our school desks, and my hair is constantly getting snagged.  Now just imagine jumping off a tree and your hair gets tangled by a branch. There you are, dangling in mid-air. 

Not to mention people are always touching long hair. Especially boys. If you like flowing locks so much, get a wig. 

That's why they braid it. That's why I keep my hair tied back most of the time, at home, asleep and at work. If it was truly impractical, it wouldn't have been so prominent.

I already have really long hair and like it on people, although I wish mine was longer

I had to snicker at the rapid foil headgear rebuttal to Seze's original post.  End of discussion is it?    Lunatic fringe! Tinfoil hattery! Thinly-veiled loaded language... variations on an ad hominem theme...   (snicker becomes guffaw.)  Galileo was considered a crank, fringe nut-job in his day.   It always feels like I'm breathing rareified air when such barbs are flung in my direction.   I hope there's comfort to be had in such profound certainty.  My preference is to remain uncertain and curious about all things called "incredible".

Just sayin'...

"That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." I'm not even much of a Hitchens fan (hated his politics), but here he's right - bring some evidence to the table and it's a different story; that is how the scientific method works. It's openness to ideas, but not to blindly accept something because someone thought it up and they claim it fits.

"By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out."

I didn't mean to make it ad hominem at all, even if I was perhaps being a little derisive. I think that examining WHY something might be held or be true is critically important though. Galileo was only considered a lunatic due to the church's smear campaign, but regardless of that, the critical part was that he offered something that they didn't - proof to back up his assertion, and as such, he won out while geocentrisicm is a joke of the past. If someone said 'I used magic yesterday but never can again', people would think they're mad. If they said 'I used magic yesterday but can't again, but I did write down the future result of every football game for the next 100 years' that's more likely to be taken semi-seriously and examined, while if they said '...and I used it to make this perpetual motion machine', it is more so again.

That's my standard operating procedure too, to remain open and curious about things.  Without an open and curious attitude, science itself would never have progressed.  Interestingly, while science seems to have bumped and jolted along a progressive pathway, I do not think humankind itself has kept pace.  The human heart, mind, and culture seem unable to keep up with technology and science is therefore harnessed for far less evolved purposes than anyone cares to admit. That's one of the strongest subplots in Avatar, ironically.

According to you - that's the beauty of human minds, people see what they personally want to, where I'd point out that it's more about how it's how it's used and the people behind something that matter, as Jake could haver have stopped the marines without his avatar.

Onward! Irayo ma Seze for the fascinating link.  It has me thinking about the few times in my adult life when somebody, AKA my mother, talked me into cutting my hair short... and how completely wrong it felt when I did.  I felt unwell.

That often happens when someone is forced into something against their will... especially when it's something that affects their perception of themselves, it's to be understood. I haven't had short hair in about 8 years, and I never will. I really understand though, and IF the study in the OP was actually true on any level (unlikely), such an effect may well be in play.

I read that in dreams, hair symbolizes strength and long hair is linked specifically with strength of all kinds, psychological and physical and even intellectual.  Dream symbols are personal though, so while this may be generally true for most, it isn't necessarily true for any given individual.

Makes sense - after all, it's like my earlier post - hair has a definite evolutionary role, it's a symbol of health, of attainment and a positive indicator, like markings or large tails in some other species, and as such, can gain associations much like other such characteristics.

As for energetic fields, the electromagnetic radiation of the heart is supposed to be detectable up to six feet from one's body. That doesn't mean the field ends there, it means our instruments' sensitivity ends there.

Sensors that surpass humans in every manner and even have capabilities humans never have had (e.g. UV/IR radiation. Hair is amazing, but it's dead, the only sense it can do is when something touches it where the hair is physically moved and the touch is registered by the skin of the scalp and head/neck/back.

[Seze Mune]

WTH is HAIR SYNTONY?  While playing around with my browser, I came across an article which not only mentioned hair syntony, but referenced AVATAR!! I'm pasting it here for your commentary:

"HAIR SYMBOLISM IN AVATAR

"In the movie Avatar you can find the most beautiful, meaningful and potent hair symbolism ever depicted and in 3D. The people connect with one another, the earth, and their power animal through their HAIR. They link via their hair. After twenty years of explaining the Hair Balancing concept to people, I can now say watch AVATAR for its hair symbolism. This is what HAIR BALANCING is about!! Balancing and CONNECTING each hair with one another, CONNECTING it with the whole person, or RECONNECTING it to the person's inner self, the person's immediate energy field and CONNECTING it with the larger energy field of the earth. With Hair Balancing, hair is treated as a COSMIC ANTENNA. Its energetic properties are refined as a means of communication on many levels." 

-- Linda Deslauriers

Hair Balancing Practitioner and Trainer

[Seze Mune]

This brings Albert Einstein to mind. I wondered if he ever said WHY he wore his hair long......to channel thoughts from the cosmos perhaps?    Well, in searching for the answer I came across this, supposedly from the Cornell University Library website:

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Einstein Hair

Theodoros Kolyvaris, George Koutsoumbas, Eleftherios Papantonopoulos, George Siopsis
(Submitted on 1 Nov 2011)

   We consider a gravitating system of vanishing cosmological constant consisting of an electromagnetic field and a scalar field coupled to the Einstein tensor. A Reissner-Nordstr{\o}m black hole undergoes a second-order phase transition to a hairy black hole of generally anisotropic hair at a certain critical temperature which we compute. The no-hair theorem is evaded due to the coupling between the scalar field and the Einstein tensor ("Einstein hair"). We calculate explicitly the properties of a hairy black hole configuration near the critical temperature and show that it is energetically favorable over the corresponding Reissner-Nordstr{\o}m black hole.

Obviously, this is Greek to me.