The Science of Stephen King

Common elements of near-death experiences include a tunnel experience, floating above your own body, a feeling of peace, and bright white lights.

Thankfully, we have the fictional world of Stephen King, where astral projection can be a communication between two characters who need companionship, and eventually, help. It’s King’s imagination, a sort of metaphorical astral projection, if you will, in which he creates stories and settings we can all visit. This brings his constant readers back for more. Even after nearly forty years, he lured us back to Danny Torrance, and the site of the burned Overlook Hotel.

Surveys suggest that between 8–20% of people claim to have had something like an out-of-body experience at some point in their lives.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Mr. Mercedes

As Stephen King has aged, his main characters have also become wiser and notably older. Such as in the case of Bill Hodges, a grizzled retired detective who has lost his zest for life. Faced with loneliness and boredom at the beginning of Mr. Mercedes, the divorced Hodges can’t shake his final case before retirement. Somehow, a tech wizard with nefarious intentions used his knowledge to hack into a Mercedes, using the vehicle to kill innocent people at a job fair, including a young mother and infant. Haunted by the unsolved murders, old-school Hodges is faced with a technological world he doesn’t understand. As the villain, Brady Hartsfield, mocks Hodges through untraceable means, the detective seeks help from younger and more tech fluent companions, Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson.

King was inspired to writeMr. Mercedesafter a 2011 incident in which a woman drove into a crowd at a McDonald’s job fair in Cleveland, Ohio. Four people were injured.

Mr. Mercedes is not the first time King has presented a world worsened by technology. In the end, it is the human spirit that prevails, as Holly finds the strength to save thousands of lives from Brady’s bomb plot with the swift, simple swing of a weapon. In true King fashion, though, Brady is not stopped forever, and in the third book of the Mr. Mercedes trilogy, End of Watch (2016), comes back with a vengeance. Inspired to cause chaos, Brady utilizes a game app to send subliminal, suicidal messages to teenagers. Although this may seem far-fetched, subliminal persuasion is a real phenomenon, defined in the Journal of Social Psychology as “any word, image, or sound that is not perceived within the normal range of consciousness, but that makes an impression on the mind.”1 Many studies have been conducted on subliminal messages, particularly in relation to advertising. While there is no proof that extreme behavior such as suicide has occurred due to visual subliminal stimulation, there are examples of it worming into study participants’ minds:

For example, in the study by Naccache, Blandin & Dehaene (2002), subjects were required to decide whether a visually presented digit between the range of one and nine is greater or smaller than the target number five. Before the digits appeared, there was another digit which was presented subliminally. As a result, the decision speed was increased when the subliminally presented digit was congruent to the target stimuli by being greater or smaller than the digit five. The authors concluded that subliminal priming can activate a particular connection in the memory and make responses faster. However, the priming effect disappears if the length of time between priming and target stimulus is greater than one hundred milliseconds. Another very recent priming study was carried out by Friedman et al. (2005), in which males who were subliminally primed with words related to alcohol rated women as more attractive than when they were primed with words not related to alcohol. Priming words were presented for a few milliseconds on the screen before the attractiveness of a woman had to be evaluated in a subsequent picture. Words related to alcohol were, for example, “wine” or “beer,” whereas words such as “coffee” or “milk” were not related to alcohol. Still, the priming effect could be observed only in subjects who preferred alcohol to stimulate their libido.”2

In order to further understand the world of modern technology, we talked to author and cyber expert R. J. Huneke: