Music Selections

[Joe Mahmood]

MIKE SHINODA - NOTHING MAKES SENSE ANYMORE




THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF MATTER

The law of conservation of matter is one of the fundamental laws in all the natural sciences and was formulated by Antoine Lavoisier (1743 - 1794), considered the father of modern chemistry. Lavoisier studied the chemical reactions and found that the mass (amount of matter) is permanent and indestructible, something that is preserved despite any changes.

Combustion, one of the major problems of 18th- century chemistry, caught the attention of Lavoisier while he was working on an essay on improving the techniques of street lighting in Paris. The chemist found out that heating metals like tin and lead in closed containers with a limited amount of air resulted in the metals being covered with a layer of calcine at a specific time during the warming. Lavoisier showed that the calcination of a metal was not the result of the loss of mysterious "phlogiston" (a substance imagined to eminate from burning materials), but the gain of a portion of air.

In 1774, Antoine Lavoisier conducted an experiment by heating a closed glass vessel containing a sample of tin and air. He found that the mass before heating (glass container + tin + air) and after heating (glass container + heated tin + the remainder of air) was the same. Subsequent experiments showed that the product of the reaction, tin oxide, was the original tin with a part of the air. With these tests, Lavoisier observed that oxygen is essential for combustion and formulated the law f conservation of matter: the total mass of the substances before the reaction. This law is often summarized as follows: matter is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed.

The Greek philosopher Democritus of Abdena (460 BC - 370 BC) had already proposed the indestructible of matter with his atomic theory, contained in his fundamental principle "nothing can arise out of nothing; nothing can be reduced to nothing."


THE CARBON CYCLE

Carbon is a chemical element essential for life that is present in nature in many different forms. All organic molecules-carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, nuclei acids - are formed by linked carbon chains.

The carbon is stored in air, water and soil in the form of a gas called carbon dioxide (CO2). During photosynthesis, plants consume CO2, from the atmosphere that they metabolize, so it becomes part of their molecules. When herbivores feed on these plants, they also assimilate the carbon they contain. The animals release much of this carbon in the form of CO2 during respiration and store the rest in their tissues. Over time, this carbon also returns to the atmosphere by metabolic processes or by the depletion by other animals. During the decomposition of organic matter, bacteria and fungi break down dead plant and animal matter, releasing an amount of CO2 that can be added to that given off in volcanic activity. The carbon dissolved in the atmosphere is again ready to be captured by plant organisms, which take up the renewal cycle of this element.

In the hydrosphere, the carbon cycle is similar. Aquatic plants use dissolved CO2 for photosynthesis and marine animals release it into the water by breathing. When the concentration of carbon into the aquatic environment is greater than that in the atmosphere, a carbon exchange is produced between them. Nature is responsible for regulating the concentrations of carbon, removing a certain amount from its natural cycle. This generated the so-called fossil fuels, like oil, coal and natural gas, which are remnants of organic matter that thousands of years ago were buried without oxygen before breaking down, resulting in incomplete decomposition.

The combustion of fossil fuels, especially since the Industrial Revolution, has caused a release of carbon higher than what nature can handle. The result is the well-known greenhouse effect, which exacerbates climate change with consequences as dire as rising sea levels, changes in precipitation and desertification.

Carbon is the most abundant element in the human body (17.5 percent), after hydrogen and oxygen. It constitutes 0.025 percent of the Earth's crust and is abundant in sedimentary rocks, in the deposits of solid and liquid fuels and in the deposits of certain geological layers.


THE GAIA HYPOTHESIS

The Gaia hypothesis postulates that the biosphere, oceans and crust are closely integrated and are in charge of achieving an optimal physical and chemical environment for life. Gaia is a representation of the planet Earth as a micro-organism formed by living organisms that interact allowing the continuity of life. This superbeing is capable of regulating itself through chemical, biological and geological conditions which create suitable conditions that remain relatively constant through actively controlling the global temperature, atmospheric composition and ocean salinity. The theory was devised by the chemist James Lovelock in 1969 and published in 1979, though it was writer William Golding who suggested the name of Gaia, the Greek goddess of the Earth.

Gaia behaves as a system that tends toward equilibrium. If some environmental change threatens life (such as a massive injection of carbon dioxide after a volcanic eruption), she would act to restore equilibrium (more phytoplankton would appear in the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide in the water).

This hypothesis considers that the many forms of life not only affect their environment collectively for favourable conditions, but rather life caused them to occur. Before life appeared on the Earth 2,500 million years ago, the atmosphere was dominated by carbon dioxide. Life sprang up to absorb the gas, generating nitrogen (bacteria) and oxygen (photosynthesis).

The global temperature has remained unchanged for millions of years, even though solar radiation has been increasing steadily. Therefore, a continual warming of the Earth should be occurring, but this has not happened. In response to greater solar radiation, carbon dioxide (with its heat retention properties) decreased accordingly, as though Gaia were acting through the world's plants to keep it at the optimum temperature to sustain life.

James Lovelock's inspiration for the Gaia hypothesis emerged while he worked for NASA on the Viking project, in which a probe was sent to Mars in order to study the possibility of the existence of life on the "Red Planet."

Extracted from SECRETS OF INFINITY by editor: Antonio Lamua

 

[Joe Mahmood]

SWITCHFOOT - DARE YOU TO MOVE

https://youtu.be/iOTcr9wKC-o


Crossing Over: How Science Is Redefining Life and Death

Can death be reversible? And what are we learning about the gray zone between here and the other side?

BY ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LYNN JOHNSON

PUBLISHED APRIL 2016

AT FIRST IT seemed like nothing more than the worst headache she’d ever had.

So Karla Pérez—22 years old, the mother of three-year-old Genesis, and five months pregnant—went into her mother’s room to lie down, hoping it would pass. But the pain got worse, and as she vomited off the side of the bed, she told her younger brother to call 911.

It was not quite midnight on Sunday, February 8, 2015. The ambulance raced Pérez from her home in Waterloo, Nebraska, to Methodist Women’s Hospital in Omaha. She began to lose consciousness in the emergency room, and doctors put a tube down her throat to keep oxygen flowing to her fetus. They ordered a CT scan, and there it was: a massive brain bleed creating severe pressure in her skull.

She had suffered a stroke, but amazingly her fetus was doing fine, the heartbeat strong and steady as if nothing were wrong. Neurologists did another CT scan at about two in the morning, and their worst fears were confirmed: Pérez’s brain had become so swollen that the whole brain stem had pushed out through a small opening at the base of her skull.

“When they saw that,” says Tifany Somer-Shely, the obstetrician who’d cared for Pérez through her pregnancy with Genesis and with this baby too, “they knew for sure that it wasn’t going to end well.”

Pérez had landed at the ragged border between life and death, with a brain that had ceased functioning and would never recover—in other words, it was dead—and a body that could be sustained mechanically, in this case for one reason only: to nurture her 22-week-old fetus until he was big enough to manage on his own. This borderland is becoming increasingly populated, as scientists explore how our existence is not a toggle—“on” for alive, “off” for dead—but a dimmer switch that can move through various shades between white and black. In the gray zone, death isn’t necessarily permanent, life can be hard to define, and some people cross over that great divide and return—sometimes describing in precise detail what they saw on the other side.

Death is “a process, not a moment,” writes critical-care physician Sam Parnia in his book Erasing Death. It’s a whole-body stroke, in which the heart stops beating but the organs don’t die immediately. In fact, he writes, they might hang on intact for quite a while, which means that “for a significant period of time after death, death is in fact fully reversible.”

How can death, the very essence of forever, be reversible? What is the nature of consciousness during that transition through the gray zone? A growing number of scientists are wrestling with such vexing questions.

In Seattle biologist Mark Roth experiments with putting animals into a chemically induced suspended animation, mixing up solutions to lower heartbeat and metabolism to near-hibernation levels. His goal is to make human patients who are having heart attacks “a little bit immortal” until they can get past the medical crisis that brought them to the brink of death.

In Baltimore and Pittsburgh trauma teams led by surgeon Sam Tisherman are conducting clinical trials in which gunshot and stabbing victims have their body temperature lowered in order to slow bleeding long enough for surgeons to close up their wounds. The medical teams are using supercooling to do what Roth wants to do with chemicals—kill their patients, temporarily, in order to save their lives.

In Arizona cryonics experts maintain more than 130 dead clients in a frozen state that’s another kind of limbo. Their hope is that sometime in the distant future, maybe centuries from now, these clients will be thawed and revived, technology having advanced to the point where they can be cured of whatever killed them.

In India neuroscientist Richard Davidson studies Buddhist monks in a state called thukdam, in which biological signs of life have ceased yet the body appears fresh and intact for a week or more. Davidson’s goal is to see if he can detect any brain activity in these monks, hoping to learn what, if anything, happens to the mind after circulation stops.

And in New York, Parnia spreads the gospel of sustained resuscitation. He says CPR works better than people realize and that under proper conditions—when the body temperature is lowered, chest compression is regulated for depth and tempo, and oxygen is reintroduced slowly to avoid injuring tissue—some patients can be brought back from the dead after hours without a heartbeat, often with no long-term consequences. Now he’s investigating one of the most mysterious aspects of crossing over: why so many people in cardiac arrest report out-of-body or near-death experiences, and what those sensations might reveal about the nature of this limbo zone and about death itself.

Oxygen plays a paradoxical role along the life-death border, according to Roth, of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Ever since oxygen was discovered in the early 1770s, “scientists have recognized it as essential to life,” he says. What the 18th-century scientists didn’t know is that oxygen is essential to life in a surprisingly nonbinary way. “Yes, if you take away oxygen, you can kill the animal,” Roth says. “But if you further reduce the oxygen, the animal is alive again, but it’s suspended.”

He has shown that this works in soil nematodes, which are alive in air with as little as 0.5 percent oxygen and are dead if you reduce the oxygen to 0.1 percent. But if you then proceed quickly to a much lower level of oxygen—0.001 percent or even less—the worms enter a state of suspension where they need significantly less oxygen to survive. It’s their way of preserving themselves during extreme deprivation, a bit like animals hibernating in winter. These oxygen-starved, suspended organisms appear to be dead but not permanently so, like a gas cooktop with only the pilot light on.

Roth is trying to get to this pilot-light state by infusing experimental animals with an “elemental reducing agent,” such as iodide, that greatly decreases their oxygen needs. Soon he’ll try it in humans too. The goal is to minimize the damage that can occur from treatments after heart attacks. If iodide slows oxygen metabolism, the thinking is, it might help avoid the blowout injury that sometimes comes with treatments like balloon angioplasty. At this lower setting the damaged heart can just sip the oxygen coming in through the repaired vessel, rather than get flooded by it.

Life and death are all about motion, according to Roth: In biology the less something moves, the longer it tends to live. Seeds and spores can have life spans of hundreds of thousands of years—in other words, they’re practically immortal. Roth imagines a day when using an agent such as iodide, a technique that will soon be studied in early clinical trials in Australia, can give people that immortality “for a moment”—the moment they most need it, when their heart is in serious trouble.

Such an approach would not have helped Pérez, whose heart never stopped beating. The day after her devastating CT scan, her obstetrician, Somer-Shely, tried to explain to Pérez’s stunned and frightened parents, Berta and Modesto Jimenez, that their beautiful daughter—the lively young woman with sparkly eyes who adored her little girl, had a passel of friends, and loved to dance—was brain-dead.

There was a language barrier. The Jimenezes’ first language is Spanish, and everything the doctor said had to be filtered through a translator. But the real barrier wasn’t language. It was the concept of brain death itself. The term dates to the late 1960s, when two medical developments coincided: high-tech, life-sustaining machinery, which blurred the border between life and death, and organ transplantation, which made clarifying that border especially urgent. No longer could death be defined in the traditional way, as cessation of breath and heartbeat, since ventilators could provide both indefinitely. Is a patient on a ventilator dead or alive? If you remove the ventilator, when can you ethically retrieve the organs to transplant into someone else? If a transplanted heart starts beating again in a new chest, was the heart donor really dead in the first place?

To address such thorny questions, a Harvard panel met in 1968 to define death in two ways: the traditional way, by cardiopulmonary criteria, and a new way, by neurological ones. The neurological criteria, which are now used to determine “brain death,” involved three cardinal benchmarks: coma or unresponsiveness, apnea or the inability to breathe without a ventilator, and the absence of brain-stem reflexes, measured by bedside exams such as flushing the ears with cold water to see if the eyes move, poking the nail bed to see if the face grimaces, or swabbing the throat and suctioning the bronchia to try to stimulate a cough.

It’s all quite straightforward, yet also counterintuitive. “Brain-dead patients do not appear dead,” wrote James Bernat, a neurologist at Dartmouth’s medical school in New Hampshire, in the American Journal of Bioethicsin 2014. “It is contrary to experience to call a patient dead who continues to have heartbeat, circulation, and visceral organ functioning.” His article, meant to clarify and defend the concept of brain death, appeared just as two controversial patients were making headlines: Jahi McMath, a California teenager whose parents refused to accept the diagnosis after the girl experienced a catastrophic loss of oxygen during a tonsillectomy, and Marlise Muñoz, a brain-dead pregnant woman whose case differed from Pérez’s in a significant way. Muñoz’s family didn’t want anything done to sustain her body, but hospital staff overruled them, because they thought Texas law required them to keep the fetus alive. (A judge eventually ruled against the hospital.)

Two days after Pérez’s stroke the Jimenez family, along with the father of the unborn baby boy, found themselves in a crowded conference room at Methodist Hospital, still reeling from the tragic twists of Pérez’s pregnancy. There to meet with them were 26 hospital staff members, including neurologists, palliative-care specialists, nurses, chaplains, ethicists, and social workers. The parents listened intently as the translator explained that the doctors’ tests had revealed their daughter’s lack of brain function. They heard the team offer “somatic support” to Pérez until the fetus was at least 24 weeks old, which is when he would have a fifty-fifty chance of surviving outside the womb. If they were lucky, the doctors said, they could keep Pérez’s body functioning even longer, improving the baby’s survival odds with each passing week.

Modesto Jimenez might have been thinking of the conversation he’d had the night before with Somer-Shely—the only physician in the hospital who’d known Pérez as a living, breathing, laughing, loving person—when he’d taken her aside and asked, “¿Será mi hija nunca despertar?”

“No,” she’d said. “Your daughter probably will never wake up.” It was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to say.

“In my clinical mind I knew that brain death is death,” she says. “Clinically speaking, she was dead at that point.” But seeing her patient lying there in the intensive care unit, Somer-Shely found that stark fact almost as difficult to believe as the family did. Pérez looked like someone who’d just come out of surgery: Her skin was warm, her chest was rising and falling, and in her belly a fetus was still moving about, apparently healthy.

In the crowded conference room the Jimenezes nodded gravely, telling the medical team that they understood their daughter was brain-dead and would never wake up. But, they added, they would keep praying for un milagro—a miracle—just in case.

If a miracle is defined as bringing someone back from the dead, sometimes that does happen in medicine.

The Martin family believe they witnessed a miracle after their youngest son, Gardell, died last winter when he fell into an icy stream. He and his mother, father, and six older siblings live on a big rural property in central Pennsylvania that the kids love to explore. On a warm day in March 2015 two of the boys took Gardell, not quite two years old, out to play. The toddler lost his footing and fell into a stream about a hundred yards from his home. His brothers noticed that he was gone and were frantic when they couldn’t find him. By the time emergency rescuers got to Gardell—who’d been pulled out of the water by a neighbor—the boy’s heart had stopped beating for at least 35 minutes. The EMTs began chest compression, but they couldn’t get his heart to start up again. They continued CPR as they sped the ten miles to Evangelical Community, the closest hospital. He had no heartbeat, and his body temperature was 77 degrees Fahrenheit, more than 20 degrees below normal. They prepped Gardell for a helicopter ride to Geisinger Medical Center, 18 miles away in Danville. Still no heartbeat.

“He had no signs of life whatsoever,” recalls Richard Lambert, director of pediatric sedation service and a member of the pediatric critical-care team that awaited the helicopter. “He looked like a child who was … Well, he was dusky, dark colored. His lips were blue …” Lambert’s voice trails off as he remembers that dreadful moment. He knew that children who drown in ice water sometimes recover, but he’d never known of one who’d been dead for as long as Gardell had. Even worse, the boy had a shockingly low blood pH, a sign of imminent organ failure.

An emergency room resident turned to Lambert and his colleague Frank Maffei, director of pediatric critical care for Geisinger’s Janet Weis Children’s Hospital: Maybe it was time to stop trying to revive the boy? Lambert and Maffei both wanted to keep going. All the elements were as favorable as they could be in a brink-of-death story. The water was cold, the child was young, and resuscitation efforts had been started within minutes of the drowning and had continued nonstop ever since. Let’s try just a little longer, they told the team.

So they continued. Another 10 minutes, another 20 minutes, another 25. By this time Gardell had been without pulse or breath for more than an hour and a half. He was “a flaccid, cold corpse showing no signs of life,” as Lambert describes him. But team members kept pumping, pressing, monitoring. The ones doing chest compression rotated on and off every two minutes—it’s exhausting to keep doing it right, even on a tiny chest—and others inserted catheters into his femoral vein, jugular vein, stomach, and bladder, infusing warm fluids to gradually increase his body temperature. None of it seemed to be making any difference.

Rather than call off the resuscitation entirely, Lambert and Maffei decided to bring Gardell into surgery for a cardiopulmonary bypass—the most aggressive form of active rewarming, a last-ditch effort to get his heart beating. After they scrubbed up, they checked for a pulse one more time.

Incredibly, there it was: a heartbeat, faint at first, but steady, without the rhythm abnormalities that sometimes appear after a prolonged cardiac arrest. And just three and a half days later Gardell left the hospital with his prayerful family, a little wobbly on his feet but otherwise perfectly fine.

Gardell is too young to tell us what it was like during the 101 minutes he was dead. But sometimes people who’ve been rescued, thanks to persistent, high-quality resuscitation, come back with stories that are quite clear—and eerily similar. These survivors can be thought of as having crossed over to the other side and returned with stories that offer some insight into how it feels to die. Their tales from the gray zone have been the subject of some scientific scrutiny, most recently in a study called AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), led by Sam Parnia. Beginning in 2008, Parnia, director of resuscitation research at Stony Brook University, and his colleagues looked at 2,060 cases of cardiac arrest at 15 American, British, and Austrian hospitals. Among them were 330 survivors, 140 of whom were interviewed. Fifty-five of the 140 patients said that during the time when they were being resuscitated, they perceived some kind of awareness.

Though most couldn’t quite recall details, others mentioned sensations similar to those found in best-selling books such as Heaven Is for Real: time either speeding up or slowing down (27 people), peacefulness (22), separating from their bodies (13), joy (9), or seeing a bright light or golden flash (7). Some (the exact number wasn’t specified) said they remembered bad sensations: fear, drowning or being dragged through deep water, or in one case, seeing “men in coffins being buried upright.” The study, Parnia and his co-authors wrote in the medical journal Resuscitation, provides “further understanding of the broad mental experience that likely accompanies death after circulatory standstill.” They wrote that the next step would be to study whether and how these episodes—which most investigators call near-death experiences (NDEs), though Parnia prefers “actual death experiences”—affect survivors after recovery, either with positive influences or negative ones, such as cognitive problems and post-traumatic stress. What the AWARE team didn’t explore was a common aftereffect of NDEs: a renewed sense of purpose and meaning to one’s life. That’s the feeling you often hear about from survivors—especially those who go on to write books about it. Mary Neal, an orthopedic surgeon from Wyoming, mentioned that effect to a large audience at a 2013 New York Academy of Sciences panel discussion called Rethinking Mortality. Neal, author of To Heaven and Back, described drowning while kayaking in Chile 14 years earlier. She said she could feel her spirit peeling away from her body and rising out of the river, as her knees bent backward, breaking her bones. She remembered walking down an “incredibly beautiful pathway toward this great domed structure that I knew was the point of no return—and I could hardly wait.” She described thinking how strange the whole experience was, wondering how long she’d been underwater (later she learned it had been at least 30 minutes), finding comfort in the knowledge that her husband and children would be fine without her. Then she felt her body come out of the boat and could see the first responders doing CPR. She heard one of them calling to her, “Come back, come back!”—which she said she found “really very irritating.”

Some patients can be brought back from the dead after hours without a heartbeat, often with no long-term consequences.

Kevin Nelson, a neurologist at the University of Kentucky, was on Neal’s panel, and he was skeptical—not of her memory, which he acknowledged was intense and valid, but of its explanation. “These are not return-from-death experiences,” he said, also contradicting Parnia’s view of what had happened. “During these experiences the brain is very much alive and very much active.” He said that what Neal went through could have been a phenomenon called REM intrusion, when the same brain activity that characterizes dreaming somehow gets turned on during other, nonsleep events, such as a sudden loss of oxygen. To him, near-death and out-of-body experiences are the result not of dying but of hypoxia—a loss of consciousness, not of life itself.

Other studies point to different physiological explanations for NDEs. At the University of Michigan a team led by neuroscientist Jimo Borjigin measured brain waves in nine rats after cardiac arrest. In all of them high-frequency gamma waves (the ones associated with meditation) became more intense after the heart stopped—more coherent and organized, in fact, than they are during ordinary wakefulness. Maybe this is what NDEs are, the investigators wrote, a “heightened conscious processing” that occurs during the limbo period before death becomes permanent.

More questions about the gray zone arise from the phenomenon of thukdam, a rare occurrence in which a monk dies but there is seemingly no physical decomposition for a week or more. Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin, who has spent years studying the neuroscience of meditation, has long been intrigued by this—is the person conscious or not? dead or not?—especially after he saw a monk in thukdam at the Deer Park monastery in Wisconsin in the summer of 2015.

“If I had just casually walked into the room, I would have thought he was sitting in deep meditation,” Davidson says, his voice on the phone still a little awestruck. “His skin looked totally fresh and viable, no decomposition whatsoever.” The sense of the dead man’s presence, even at close range, helped inspire Davidson to study thukdam scientifically. He has assembled some basic medical equipment, such as EEGs and stethoscopes, at two field stations in India and has trained an on-site team of 12 Tibetan physicians to test these monks—preferably beginning while they’re still alive—to see whether any brain activity continues after their death.

“It’s likely that in many of these practitioners, they enter a state of meditation before they die, and there is some kind of maintenance of that state afterward,” Davidson says. “Just how that occurs, and what the explanation might be, eludes our conventional understanding.” His research, though grounded in Western science, aims for a different kind of understanding, a more nuanced one that might clarify what happens not only to monks in thukdam but also to anyone traveling across the border between life and death.

Disintegration usually proceeds swiftly after a person dies. When the brain stops functioning, it loses all ability to keep the other systems in balance. So to allow Karla Pérez to continue nurturing her fetus after her brain stopped working, a team of more than a hundred doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers had to fill in as ad hoc orchestrators. They took readings continuously, around the clock, of Pérez’s blood pressure, kidney function, and electrolytes, all the while adjusting what was going into her tubes and IV lines.

But even as the team members performed the functions of Pérez’s ruined brain, they still had trouble thinking of her as dead. To a person, they treated her as though she were in a deep coma, greeting her by name when they came into the room and saying goodbye when they left.

To some extent these gestures toward Pérez’s personhood were made out of respect for the family, a courtesy to avoid seeming to treat her as an inert baby vessel. But in a way, the gestures went beyond courtesy. They reflected how the people attending to Pérez actually felt.

Todd Lovgren, co-leader of the medical team, knows the anguish of losing a daughter—he lost one too, the oldest of his five children, who would have been 12 years old had she lived. “It would have offended me not to treat Karla like a person,” he told me. “I saw a young woman with painted fingernails, her mom doing her hair, with warm hands and warm toes … Whether her brain was still functional or not, I don’t think her humanity was gone.”

Speaking as a parent rather than a clinician, Lovgren says he thought something of Pérez’s essence was still there in the bed—even though he knew, by the time of her second CT scan, that not only was her brain not functioning but large portions of it were dying off and peeling away. (Despite this, he hadn’t tested for the last of the three criteria of brain death, apnea, fearing that removing Pérez from the ventilator for even a few minutes might harm the fetus.)

On February 18, ten days after Pérez’s stroke, it became clear that her blood wasn’t clotting normally—an indication that dead brain tissue was getting into her bloodstream, one more sign to Lovgren that “she was never going to recover.” By this time the fetus was 24 weeks old, so the team transferred Pérez from the main campus back to Methodist Women’s, the maternity hospital. They managed to correct the clotting problem for the moment. But they were ready to do a C-section as soon as it became clear that it was time to let go, when even the semblance of a living person that their skills and instruments had patched together was beginning to fall apart.

To Sam Parnia, death is potentially reversible. Cells inside our bodies don’t usually die when we die, he says; some cells and organs can remain viable for hours, maybe even days. The timing of the declaration of death is sometimes a matter of personal attitude, he says. When he was in training, he notes, people would stop CPR after just five to ten minutes, assuming that any longer would mean irreparable brain damage.

But resuscitation scientists have learned ways to keep the brain and other organs from dying even after the heart stops. They know that lowering body temperature helps—which happened naturally with Gardell Martin, and which happens deliberately in some ERs that routinely chill patients before doing CPR. They know that persistence helps too, especially in hospitals that use machines to regulate chest compressions or that someday might use drugs such as iodide.

Parnia compares resuscitation science to aeronautics. It never seemed possible for people to fly, yet in 1903 the Wright brothers flew. How incredible, he says, that it took only 66 years from that first, 12-second flight to a moon landing. He thinks such advances can happen in resuscitation science too. When it comes to reversing death, Parnia believes we’re still in the Kitty Hawk era.

Yet doctors are already able to snatch life from death in stunning, inspiring ways. In Nebraska that happened on April 4, 2015, the day before Easter, when a baby boy named Angel Pérez was born by C-section at Methodist Women’s Hospital just before noon. Angel is alive today because doctors were able to keep his brain-dead mother’s body functioning for 54 days, long enough to let him grow into a small yet otherwise perfectly normal newborn, two pounds, 12.6 ounces, miraculous in his ordinariness. A baby who turned out to be the milagro his grandparents had been praying for.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/...-death-brain-dead-body-consciousness-science/

 

[Joe Mahmood]

NICKELBACK - SAVIN ME

https://youtu.be/_JQiEs32SqQ


Atom, Archetype, and the Invention of Synchronicity: How Iconic Psychiatrist Carl Jung and Nobel-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli Bridged Mind and Matter

Two of humanity’s greatest minds explore the parallels between spacetime and the psyche, the atomic nucleus and the self.

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist,” Einstein wrote as he contemplated the human passion for comprehension in the final years of his life. He may well have been thinking about the great Austrian-Swiss theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (April 25, 1900–December 15, 1958), who first postulated the neutrino and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the Pauli exclusion principle — a monumental leap in our understanding of the structure of matter. Decades earlier, 21-year-old Pauli had published a critique of Einstein’s groundbreaking theory of general relativity. It greatly impressed the elder physicist, who wrote in astonishment:

No one studying this mature, grandly conceived work could believe that the author is a man of 21. One wonders what to admire most, the psychological understanding for the development of ideas, the sureness of mathematical deduction, the profound physical insight, the capacity for lucid systematic presentation, the complete treatment of the subject matter, or the sureness of critical appraisal.

Indeed, this uncommon fusion of psychological acumen and scientific rigor only intensified as Pauli grew older. Around the time he wrote the paper that spurred Einstein’s praise, Pauli became enchanted with the work of pioneering psychologist William James. After a three-decade immersion in it, and several years after he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, Pauli met the great psychiatrist Carl Jung (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961), who in turn was deeply influenced by Einstein’s ideas about space and time.

Jung and Pauli struck an unusual friendship, which lasted a quarter century until Pauli’s death and resulted in the invention of synchronicity — acausally connected events, which the observer experiences as having a meaningful connection on the basis of his or her subjective situation, a meeting point of internal and external reality.

Although rooted in Pauli’s interest in dream analysis, their conversations and correspondence went on to explore fundamental questions regarding the nature of reality through the dual lens of physics and psychology. Each used the tools of his expertise to shift the shoreline between the known and the unknown, and together they found common ground in the analogy between the atom, with its nucleus and orbiting electrons, and the self, with its central conscious ego and its ambient unconscious.

Both men were deeply imprinted by this intellectual cross-pollination. In his posthumously published final work, Jung would write:

We do not know whether what we on the empirical plane regard as physical may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the border we distinguish from the physical as psychic. Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this relationship consists or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psychic and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience, though this certainly does not justify the arbitrary hypothesis of either materialism or spiritualism.

Pauli’s parallel curiosity about mind and matter is perhaps best articulated in by his friend and collaborator Werner Heisenberg — he of uncertainty principle fame — who would later write:

Behind [Pauli’s] outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli’s analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists.

In their conceptually daring correspondence, collected in Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932–1958 (public library), the two delve into these parallels between the physical and psychic dimensions of reality. In one of his early letters, Jung considers the analogy Pauli had proposed between the atomic nucleus and the self. He writes in the autumn of 1935:

Generally speaking, the unconscious is thought of as psychic matter in an individual. However, the self-representation drawn up by the unconscious of its central structure does not accord with this view, for everything points to the fact that the central structure of the collective unconscious cannot be fixed locally but is an ubiquitous existence identical to itself; it must not be seen in spatial terms and consequently, when projected onto space, is to be found everywhere in that space. I even have the feeling that this peculiarity applies to time as well as space… A biological analogy would be the functional structure of a termite colony, possessing only unconscious performing organs, whereas the center, to which all the functions of the parts are related, is invisible and not empirically demonstrable.

The radioactive nucleus is an excellent symbol for the source of energy of the collective unconscious, the ultimate external stratum of which appears an individual consciousness. As a symbol, it indicates that consciousness does not grow out of any activity that is inherent to it; rather, it is constantly being produced by an energy that comes from the depths of the unconscious and has thus been depicted in the form of rays since time immemorial.

[…]

The center, or the nucleus, has always been for me a symbol of the totality of the psychic, as the conscious plus the unconscious, the center of which does not coincide with the ego as the center of consciousness, and consequently has always been perceived as being external.

Over the following few years, their correspondence focuses primarily on dream analysis — which both Jung and Pauli saw as a means of illuminating scientific motifs in Pauli’s work — but again and again they return to the symmetry of mind and matter. In a letter to Jung from the summer of 1937, Pauli jeers at the narrow materialism of his own field and calls for an openness to other forms of knowing:

Most modern physics also lends itself to the symbolic representation of psychic processes, even down to the last detail. Of course, nothing is further from the thoughts of modern man than the idea of penetrating the secrets of matter in this way … since it seems to him that, relatively speaking, less research has been done on the soul, and it is less familiar than matter.

The following summer, 38-year-old Pauli writes:

After a careful and critical appraisal of the many experiences and arguments, I have come to accept the existence of deeper spiritual layers that cannot be adequately defined by the conventional concept of time.

In 1947, when Jung decided to found an institute dedicated to this field of research, he asked Pauli — who had received the Nobel Prize a year and a half earlier — to be among its sponsors. The physicist gladly agreed. In a letter to Jung from that December, he noted that the parallels between their interests provide “serious evidence that what is developing is indicative of a close fusion of psychology with the scientific experience of the processes in the material physical world.” He peers into that shared future:

It is probably a long journey, one we are only just setting out on, and it will especially entail, as a modifying factor, constant criticism of the space-time concept.

Space and time were virtually turned by Newton into God’s right hand (oddly enough, the position made vacant when he expelled the Son of God from there), and it needed an extraordinary mental effort to bring time and space back down from these Olympian heights. Going hand in hand with this, apparently, is the criticism of the basic idea of classical natural science, according to which it describes objective facts to such an extent that there is absolutely no link between them and the researcher (objectifiability of the phenomena independently of the way in which they are observed.

Four decades before the revered physicist John Archibald Wheeler (who coined the term “black hole”) made his influential assertion that “this is a participatory universe [and] observer-participancy gives rise to information,” Pauli plants the seed of a grand question:

Modern microphysics turns the observer once again into a little lord of creation in his microcosm, with the ability (at least partially) of freedom of choice and fundamentally uncontrollable effects on that which is being observed. But if these phenomena are dependent on how (with what experimental system) they are observed, then is it not possible that they are also phenomena (extra corpus) that depend on who observes them (i.e., on the nature of the psyche of the observer)? And if natural science, in pursuit of the ideal of determinism since Newton, has finally arrived at the stage of the fundamental “perhaps” of the statistical character of natural laws … then should there not be enough room for all those oddities that ultimately rob the distinction between “physics” and “psyche” of all its meaning…?

If you turn Pauli’s words over in your mind for a few moments, you’d realize just how radical and enormous a proposition this is. Indeed, it was this letter that catalyzed the series of conversations in which Pauli and Jung came up with the concept of synchronicity — the ultimate dependency between the observer and the observed. By the fall of 1948, they were using the term regularly in their correspondence. In a letter from mid-1949, Jung writes to Pauli, enclosing a manuscript of his first paper on the subject:

Quite a while ago, you encouraged me to write down my thoughts on synchronicity… Nowadays, physicists are the only people who are paying serious attention to such ideas.

A few days later, Pauli echoes this faith in interdisciplinary thinking by sharing with Jung one of his great intellectual influences:

The idea of meaningful coincidence — i.e., simultaneous events not causally connected — was expressed very clearly by Schopenhauer in his essay “On the Apparent Design in the Fate of the Individual.”

[…]

This essay of Schopenhauer’s had a lasting and fascinating effect on me and seemed to be pointing the way to a new trend in natural sciences. But whereas [he] wanted at all costs to cling to the rigid determinism along the lines of the classical physics of his day, we have now acknowledged that in the nuclear world, physical events cannot be followed in causal chains through time and space. Thus, the readiness to adopt the idea on which your work is based, that of the “meaning as an ordering factor,” is probably considerably greater among physicists than it was in Schopenhauer’s day.

In a subsequent letter from the autumn of 1950, Pauli — who preferred the term “meaning-correspondence” over “synchronicity” as a way of placing greater emphasis on the meaning of events than on their simultaneity — adds:

In truth, nature is so fashioned that — analogous to Bohr’s “Complementarity” in physics — any contradiction between causality and synchronically can never be ascertained…. How do the facts that make up modern quantum physics relate to those other phenomena explained by you with the aid of the new principle of synchronicity? First of all, what is certain is that both types of phenomenon go beyond the framework of “classical” determinism.

[…]

I nevertheless, as a physicist, have the impression that the “statistical correspondence” of quantum physics, seen from the point of view of synchronicity, is a very weak generalization of the old causality… Although microphysics allows for an acausal form of observation, it actually has no use for the concept of “meaning.”

In the letter, Pauli diagrams the concepts discussed:

Six days later, Jung picks up the thread and crystallizes the definition of synchronicity:

Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which “similar” things coincide, without there being any apparent cause.

With an eye to Pauli’s diagram, he considers the role of space and time in synchronicity:

Modern physics, having advanced into another world beyond conceivability, cannot dispense with the concept of a space-time continuum. Insofar as psychology penetrates into the unconscious, it probably has no alternative but to acknowledge the “indistinctness” or the impossibility of distinguishing between time and space, as well as their psychic relativity. The world of classical physics has not ceased to exist, and by the same token, the world of consciousness has not lost its validity against the unconscious… “Causality” is a psychologem (and originally a magic virtus) that formulates the connection between events and illustrates them as cause and effect. Another (incommensurable) approach that does the same thing in a different way is synchronicity. Both are identical in the higher sense of the term “connection” or “attachment.” But on the empirical and practical level (i.e., in the real world), they are incommensurable and antithetical, like space and time.

[…]

I would now like to propose that instead of “causality” we have “(relatively) constant connection through effect,” and instead of synchronicity we have (relatively) constant connection through contingency, equivalence, or “meaning.”

He illustrates this proposition with his own variation on Pauli’s diagram:

In a letter sent twelve days later, Pauli responds by introducing the crucial concept of scale into these considerations of synchronicity:

Synchronicity should be defined in a narrower sense so as to comprise effects that only appear when there is a small number of individual cases but disappear when there is a larger number… In quantum physics, there are not just effects that appear with large numbers instead of with small ones, and not only is the term “meaning” not the right one here (which you have written about at great length) but also the concept of the (psychic or psychoid) archetype cannot be used so lightly in the acausalities of microphysics.

In a letter from October of 1953, more than twenty years into their correspondence and a decade into their shared obsession with synchronicity, Jung writes to Pauli:

It means a lot to me to see how our points of view are getting closer, for if you feel isolated from your contemporaries when grappling with the unconscious, it is also the same with me, in fact more so, since I am actually standing in the isolated area, striving somehow to bridge the gap that separates me from the others. After all, it is no pleasure for me always to be regarded as esoteric. Oddly enough, the problem is still the same 2,000-year-old one: How does one get from Three to Four?

Jung and Pauli unfurl many more fascinating parallels between psychology and physics in the remainder of Atom and Archetype. Complement it with Jung on human nature, then revisit physicist, novelist, and poet Alan Lightman on science and transcendence.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/03/09/atom-and-archetype-pauli-jung/

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19th March 2021

Spirituality is an important trigger in coincidence experiences, because it is exactly that kind of subjective response that brings converging events to meaningful life. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer saw coincidences as a reflection of the 'wonderful pre-established harmony' of the universe. Writing in 1850, he expressed the idea that we were not just motivated by physical causality. He said coincidences constituted a ' subjective connection' to the environment. They were important because they were tailor-made to fit individuals, and only relevant to those who experienced them.

So there is nothing new about the idea that all things in the universe have some kind of correspondence and sympathy one with the other. In fact Hippocrates got there way before Schopenhauer, in the 5th century BC. He believed affinities held the universe together. 'There is one common flow,' he said, 'one common breathing, all things are in sympathy. The whole organism and each one of its parts are working in conjunction for the same purpose...the great principle extends to the extremest part, and from the extremest part it returns to the great principle, to the one nature, being and not-being.' Or, as the astronomer Carl Sagan put it: 'In order to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe.'

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was influenced by Schopenhauer and Kammerer, and also by Eastern religions and philosophies, which have similar ideas about the universal inter-connectedness of things, and which see the material world as maya, an illusion. True contentment in life can only come by shedding the prison of the ego and surrendering unconditionally to the great flow. For many years Jung had been intrigued by the coincidences related to him by his patients, though the word 'coincidence' seemed increasingly inappropriate as many of them were 'connected so meaningfully that their "chance" concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure'. Like Kammerer and Schopenhauer, he too saw them as a reflection of universal connectedness: 'The universal principle is found even in the smallest particle, which therefore corresponds to the whole.'

Jung was discontented with what he called the 'Godless, meaningless, clockwork universe of modern science', though a series of dinners with Albert Einstein, at which the great scientist revealed the latest insights into the wondeful, mysterious realms of relativity and quantum mechanics, inspired him to devise a philosophical framework which could explain the significance of coincidences and the force that generated them in the first place. Quantum mechanics for Jung was proof that at a fundamental level the universe didn't behave like a machine at all. Jung didn't want to dethrone classical science, just show there might be more to it. He believed, too, that science and spirituality should walk hand in hand, a belief shared by Einstein.

One of Jung's most useful legacied is the word 'synchronicity', which goes beyond the strict meaning of coincidence to include our subjective human experience of chance events. Synchronicity refers to coincidences that are meaningful to the percipient, in which something other than the probability of chance is involved. This meaningfulness can only be judged subjectively and is therefore open to interpretation - a constraint analogous to that of the modern sub-atomic physicist pondering whether a particle is a particle or really a wave, and what he might have done to change it from one to the other.

In 1952 Jung teamed up with another brilliant visionary, physicist Wolfgang Pauli, to publish Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle. Jung defined synchronicity as: 'The coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same meaning.' The Jung/Pauli relationship was it itself like a synchronicity correlation: two unrelated spirits from ostensibly incompatible disciplines, one a philosopher/psychologist, the other a quantum physicist, together finding a deeper meaning than either of their disciplines allowed, a new reality they called the unus mundus (unified world), in which mind and matter were united. Both men experienced vivid dreams.

Jung was one of the first modern thinkers to take dreams and symbols seriously. He introduced the idea of the collective unconscious - the distilled memory of the human species from its primitive beginnings to the present day - to which he believed we all have intuitive access and which has important transforming effects on us in times of dramatic import in our lives. It communicates with us through dreams, visions and meaningful coincidences, which may range from a truly unexpected correlation to a simple throw of the I Ching yarrow stalks. Jung was a rare thing in the modern age - a philosopher who allowed for and even explained the paranormal.

The collective unconscious is a psychological substratum built into the inherited brain structure, consisting of cultural metaphors common to all humanity, expressed in stories, myths, symbols and ideas. Jung called them archetypes. They are not things we can consciously understand; rather they are manifestations of psychic energy. We don't necessarily think about archetypes, yet they are immensely evocative themes lurking subliminally in our minds. For example, water is a metaphor for life; fighting a dragon is a struggle between good and evil. Other examples among many archetypes are the mother, the hero, the maiden, the trickster and the hermaphrodite. Jung believed we all have access to this common source of resonant ideas, in the same way that sub-atomic particles share their bundles of energy and information - think of it as a sort of cosmic computer.

Our access to these common archetypes has nothing to do with conscious control. Sometimes we may even fear them. Given the paramount importance modern society places on rational self-control, Jung said, we have a tendency to repress them and deny their existence. Despite this, in certain circumstances they will synchronistically manifest themselves in both matter and mind simultaneously. When this happens it delivers to us a sense of numinosity, or deep spiritual significance, often overwhelming, of participating in one of Jung's 'acts of creation in time'; a sense of absolute cosmic authority.

The most famous example of this archetypal synchronicity is the scarab beetle which appeared at the window of Jung's study during a consultation. This must be the least private consultation ever held, since it has been repeated so many times. Nevertheless it serves to illuminate a complicated idea.

The patient was a woman who up until that point had refused to believe that anything could help her condition, which was complex and refractory. Jung was the third doctor she had seen and up to this point no progress had been made. "Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my powers to produce', he said.

The woman was in middle of recounting a dream to Jung in which she had been given a golden scarab, when a tapping at the window distracted them both. Jung opened the window and in flew a scarabaeid beetle, the local version of the insect in the patient's dream. In Ancient Egypt the scarab was a symbol of rebirth. 'Contrary to its usual babits,' said Jung, 'it had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.'

This symbolic event shocked the patient into the realisation that she could control her condition. 'Now she understood how all kinds of connections might exist and how they would explain a great many things if they did. She recovered quickly.'

In his early work Jung thought archetypes were exclusive to the human mind. Later he suggested that they shaped matter as well as mind. In other words, archetypes were elemental forces that played a vital role in the creation of both the world and the human mind. Synchronicities were events in which the inner and outer worlds, the subjective and the objective, the psychic and the physical, briefly united.

Jung wrote: 'We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than about a "metaphysical" mind or spirit, and so we overestimate material causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind.'

You don't have to believe it, of course, and many don't. Jung was a psychologist and psychologist have a long tradition of being criticised by those in the more rarified zones of science for their metaphysical theorising and predilection for unprovable anecdotes. Such wierd notions as thought patterns affecting matter are out of bounds in classical science.

Excerpts extracted from the book 'BEYOND COINCIDENCE" by Martin Plimmer & Brian King

 

[Joe Mahmood]

ROB THOMAS - LITTLE WONDERS

https://youtu.be/q6wZhd8M848


Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence – An Interview with Dr. Kirby Surprise

The experience of meaningful coincidences is universal. They are reported by people of every culture, every belief system, and time period. Traditionally these synchronistic events are made acceptable by ascribing them to outside supernatural forces such as divinities, or in modern times, impersonal archetypal influences.

Dr. Kirby Surprise demonstrates that synchronistic events, based on the activity of the mind, are actually caused by the person who perceives them, and reflect many levels of their consciousness.

His research reveals that what we believe and the way we look for patterns in the world generates synchronistic events that mirror our own assumptions. By decoding the science of synchronicity, Dr. Kirby uncovered how we actually create events and how we co‐create our reality.

A licensed psychologist who makes his living assessing, diagnosing and treating delusions and thought disorders, Dr. Kirby Surprise is certainly qualified to untangle the web of reflected meanings and false assumptions about synchronistic events.

His groundbreaking new book is titled Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Change, and Unlocking Your Mind (New Page Books, 2012).

New Dawn recently spoke to Dr. Surprise.

NEW DAWN (ND): Dr. Surprise, doesn’t it seen strange for someone named Surprise to be writing a book on coincidences?

DR. KIRBY SURPRISE (KS): Yes, Surprise is actually my family name, and I am a licensed psychologist. It’s definitely a meaningful coincidence that I wound up writing a book on synchronicity. Having a name like Surprise is probably one of the reasons the book seems to have had a charmed life in the publication process. The name and the book itself are their own synchronistic event.

ND: What exactly are synchronistic events?

KS: Synchronistic events (SE) are coincidences in which a meaning or message seems to be conveyed by the events to the observer. They happen when the inner and outer worlds become synchronised. Here’s an example from the book that helped fuel my own fascination with SE:

One cool autumn day I was sitting in my car waiting to pick up a friend. I was listening to the radio to pass the time. During a commercial break an ad for the movie Carrie was played. The movie is about a teenager who discovers she has the ability to move objects at a distance. I started having fantasies about what it would actually be like to experience moving an object this way. I had seen the film; during its climax, Carrie uses her power to crush her family’s home. I looked across the street and saw an old cottage. Focusing on the house, I fantasised about what being able to move an object that large would be like. I was remembering a National Inquirer headline about a house that supposedly was turned over on its side by some psychic force. I was wondering what effect such a power would have on a person, how it might feel to move a house.

As I stared at the house the entire cottage shuddered violently. The house started to move. It rolled over onto its side. The roof was now facing me. I was astonished and felt panicky. I stared at the overturned house and wondered, could I have really done this? I wondered if this was just a vivid dream. I decided I was awake and the event was real.

“OK,” I said to myself. “If I just did that, then I want to see the house crushed like in the movie.”

As I stared, awestruck, the house again began to shudder. The roof started to collapse inward as if the centre of the house were slowly imploding. Beams burst through walls and windows shattered as the house began to tear itself apart. A moment later, I saw a flash of yellow paint above the house, then the largest bulldozer I’d ever seen climbed lazily over the centre of the house, crushing the structure into rubble in a few moments. It then started to load the debris into waiting dump trucks. The house had obscured the demolition equipment from sight. With the radio on and windows up, I couldn’t hear the tractor engine. My fantasy had come to pass, my wish fulfilled through a series of synchronistic events.

ND: You’re claiming that not only are these events real, but that we all create them every day. But isn’t it possible that we are just interpreting what we experience wrong, that synchronistic events are a trick of the mind?

KS: Many SE are based solely on the way we interpret events around us. SE can seem like miracles, violating the laws of time and space. You are the actual miracle. You have billions of sensory neurons pointed out into the environment. Each neuron is literally a digital biological computer operating like a binary circuit sending signals to the brain. Your brain is the known universe’s most powerful supercomputer. Your brain has a hundred billion neurons, each as powerful as a small desktop computer, each networked to as many as two hundred thousand others.

One of the things you’re doing with all that computing power is taking trillions of bits of digital sensory information, and constructing, in areas of memory, the universe as you are experiencing it as you read these words. You, the conscious executive functioning in the frontal lobes, is about the size of a walnut. You have no direct contact with the outside world. You experience a neurological representation of the world constructed for you on a stage of the brain’s memory. You are, in effect, your own “Matrix” computer.

The automated systems of the brain that construct this reality for you make vast changes to the information before you experience the data as the reality around you. The brain evolved to match patterns. It looks over vast rivers of sensory information, and memory, to find the patterns you, the executive function, has been interested in.

We evolved as grassland hunters. Our task was to look out over the miles of waving patterns in the savannah, and see through the camouflage of other creatures. We survived by looking at all that data, and deleting the patterns that had no meaning, and completing the partial patterns that meant dinner, or predator. We do this because there is millions of times more information in the environment than we could consciously process.

So, the brain evolved automated systems to do the editing for us. The brain deletes most of the sensory data from the reality you’re experiencing right now. Patterns you have looked for in the past get enhanced, missing pieces added, until patterns with some meaning emerge.

Consider this: the typical reader reads only the first three or four letters of each word in a sentence. The brain deletes the rest of the word, and then fills in the meaning by using the context of the sentence and subject matter. This speeds up pattern recognition while reading. As you read, you have been hallucinating parts of this very sentence. So, when you say we are “just” interpreting events, you’re describing a miraculously complex process.

SE do not appear as “tricks of the mind.” They partially result from the automated systems of the brain searching out and enhancing patterns in your environment. The patterns are always there, but unless they have some emotional relevance to you, what psychologists call “Emotional Valence,” they are deleted and no memory of them is created. SE often appear because you have been consciously, or unconsciously, thinking about something, and the automated pattern recognition systems in your bio-supercomputer highlight matching patterns in the environment for you.

Even more amazingly, you are also altering the randomness of events in the external world as well based on your thoughts and emotions. You are not just altering sensory data, you actually change the probabilities in the outside world as well.

ND: So, you’re saying that we create our own reality?

KS: Only in the sense that I believe some well meaning people often mistake our brain’s creation and editing of our neurological representation of reality for creating objective external reality. Clearly, none of us creates actual reality. We do have some influence over the randomness of events around us though. We create SE that mirror our thoughts and emotions. This happens with all thought processes, conscious, unconscious and transpersonal. We don’t create or change the physical matter and energy around us, but we do influence the relationships between events to create SE.

ND: How much influence do we have over the events around us?

KS: Research is telling us that we do change the randomness of events around us by around 3-5%. The best experimental designs are called “Double Blind Experiments.” In this design the subjects have been randomly selected, and subjects don’t know what the experiment is actually about. The person performing the experiment does not know what the expected outcome of the experiment is either. The experimenter and subjects are both “Blind” to the expected outcome. The core problem this method is meant to help eliminate is a basic, hard-to-swallow, scientific fact: the expectations of the researcher change the outcome of the events in the experiment just by the act of observation and expectation.

The estimation of SE influence being 3-5% comes from Dr. J.B. Rhine. He was a psychologist and researcher. Back in the 1930s a man came to his office with a strange claim. He said he was a gambler, and he could control dice rolls with his mind. Not all the time, but enough so that it was a noticeable effect that turned the odds in his favour. Rather than dismiss this claim, Rhine did what a good scientist does. He said “show me.” They took six pairs of dice; the gambler’s task was to have more dice come up with the number six than could be expected by chance. They tossed the dice. Again, and again, and again. It works. The amount of change over random hovered at about 3-5% above chance. The effect was real. Rhine spent decades doing rigorous experiments on the ability of subjects to change random events. He was having people produce SE on demand. The research, reproduced and confirmed by peers, states the odds are millions to one in favour of us being the cause of this effect.

Rhine concluded events could be changed in the direction of the subject’s desire and attention. These random events included series of coin tosses, die throws, the position objects landed in when dropped in a random manner, the values of randomly generated electrical currents, and the rate of particle release from a radioactive source, among others. In each instance, he found that the probability of these physical events was changed by the psychological expectation and attention of the observers, even though no physical force was detected.

Rhine’s work went beyond proof of personal causation. He found emotional states, such as interest or boredom, affected the subjects’ ability to influence SE. Boredom and anxiety decreased the ability to change the randomness of events in their desired direction. Focused attention and positive expectation increased the occurrence of the targeted events. He found alcohol or caffeine lowered or raised scores respectively. He found emotions and personal physiological states can facilitate or inhibit SE. My book shows people that not only do they do this all the time, but that very complex ideas and emotions can be reflected by SE as well.

ND: If this is the way our reality works, then why aren’t more people aware of doing this?

KS: There is a measure of self-awareness called “The Mirror Test” developed by biopsychologist Gordon Gallup. Animals are shown their own reflection in a mirror. If they recognise the reflection in the glass as their own, it is taken as an indication it is a self-aware being. Humans, some great apes, elephants, and dolphins generally recognise their own reflections; a few birds do as well. Interestingly, some birds and dogs that can’t initially recognise their own reflections can be trained to do so.

Synchronicity is a form of mirror test. People see in the mirror of events around them the image of their own inner life. They see what they think, feel and believe. They even see their fantasies about what causes these reflections. Everyone has experienced meaningful coincidences. They are explained by supernatural and religious beliefs, archetypal influences, or more exotic personal mythologies. SE mirrors these beliefs back to the observer. SE often are mistaken for confirmations of the objective reality of personal beliefs. Most people are looking into the mirror of SE every day. They don’t realise the images they see are their own thoughts.

You have an amazing ability. Your thoughts and feelings, your memories and experiences, are reproduced in the events around you as coincidences. The world presents you with meaningful coincidences based on your inner life. Everyone creates their own SE, constantly. The ability is innate to the way our brains process information into meaning. This seemingly magical ability goes largely unnoticed, unexplained and misunderstood, until it presents itself in spectacular form, simply because people never question the everyday SE in their mirror.

ND: In the book you state religion has nothing to do with spirituality. What did you mean by that?

KS: Many religious doctrines were created to keep people under control and to maintain civil order. You can spot them pretty easily: they consist mainly of behavioural instructions and commands. Jared Diamond describes in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies the evolution of the concept of a single, all-powerful God. When we lived in tribal groups without fixed laws, we generally had social communities of about 60 people. We can’t keep track of everyone in larger groups. This makes it impossible to make good pattern matches about everyone, so we break up into smaller groups. We answered this problem by creating a social technology that allowed many more people to live together. Tribal groups came under the law of a single king, whose authority came from the Gods we created and the punishments imposed on heretics.

Alternately, some spiritual doctrines don’t focus on behaviour; they focus on achieving states of consciousness. They change the frame of reference to creating experiences of connectedness. Christian Gnosticism, Islamic Sufism, Zen Buddhism, and the shamanism of our ancestors, often focused on creating states of ecstatic union. In these states of consciousness, the practitioner experiences existence without boundaries. The subject/object relationship we experience as separateness ceases to exist. You become one with everything. SE demonstrates this connectedness. This connection is not something you earn; it is what you already are. SEs are not something you learn to create, you learn to recognise you are already creating them.

I have heard people ask if someone was “enlightened,” as if it were a possession that enhanced their value. Enlightenment is the recognition of your essential unity and connection with existence. You don’t have to earn it, you are it. Spirituality is connectedness. The stock and trade of most religion is having people trade that natural connection for a code of behaviour.

ND: You’re saying that we all see a reality created by the meanings we look for, and that we do this naturally and unconsciously?

KS: Absolutely. All of us have known decent, rational, people who have what we would consider extreme religious, political or philosophical views. You may wonder, “How could they possibly believe that?” It’s because beliefs are patterns of thought that become reflected in the world around us. People mistake their reflected SE for confirmation of their version of the nature of reality, when in fact they have just come to believe what they think.

As a psychologist, I see people replaying the patterns of past traumas and relationships in their lives over and over. The unconscious recreates these patterns in our lives as a way of trying to process them. SE work the same way. Researchers have commented that one of the most consistent types of SE patterns that manifest around people are reflections of either traumatic or spiritual experiences. The commonality in both is the emotional valence around the events that seems to directly drive the SE.

ND: What are the implications for the way people experience their spiritual life?

KS: Most of us live in what Joseph Campbell would call a “Personal Mythology.” A Christian looks for help from Jesus, and SE appear that seem to be from their deity. Muslims look for Allah, and find the pattern of their thoughts reflected back to them. Pagans look for the mother Goddess, and are answered by however they believe their deity to be. I love to study mythology, what Campbell would call “Other people’s Religion.” I have several dictionaries of Gods and Goddesses. They contain descriptions of thousands of Deities, all of which were the centre of people’s spiritual life and belief, and all, but for a very few, are now considered mere myths of our ancestors.

What has endured are the shamanic and mystical traditions, most of which have a strikingly similar teaching: there is only one being, one consciousness, and we are it. Again, as Campbell would say, “You are, in your deepest identity, God.” The implication here is that when you create SE, you are not altering an external environment. You are seeing a demonstration that your thoughts are not separate from the environment. You are experiencing an aspect of yourself that is not limited to the cause and effect of time and space. There is much more to you than meets the eye, you are connected to everything.

ND: You claim that modern science and String theory support the idea that we are all navigating in many realities at once – can you say more about that?

KS: I am offering an explanatory fiction of SE that fits the facts of String theory, as we now understand them. I have read, I believe in your magazine, articles by people who have come to understand that the Planes of consciousness described by our traditional mystics are actually the newly speculated on dimensions of reality String theory has given us. This is a great step forward, to realise that all matter and dimensions have their own flavours of consciousness.

In String theory our universe has 11 dimensions, all particles being extensions of dimensions linked to other dimensions in various patterns. But beyond even that, it appears our universe is projected onto what’s being called a “Membrane.” It’s as if we exist as Flatlanders on the surface of a thin bubble in what is being called M space. We are not the only bubble universe out there. The separation between membranes is probably as small as the smallest quantum state. This means a virtually infinite number of alternate physical universes in the space around you right now. It used to be a joke when someone said Elvis is performing on stage in Vegas in a parallel probability. It’s not a joke anymore; it’s the standard model of physics.

In the book I’m saying we don’t just live in one probability. We don’t jump from one to another, we live in an almost infinite range of them simultaneously. I believe our experience of the passage of time itself is the result of our movement, at the speed of light, as described in the Special and General theory, through these probability membranes. Our trajectory through these probabilities is altered by our thoughts and emotions because, as our not so ignorant mystics have told us, thought and emotion are dimensions that underlie the physical reality.

Whether this explanation proves to be accurate or not, it is useful. If you believe it, it allows you to navigate probability just a bit, 3-5%, by choosing your thoughts and emotions, to create SE. The problem with explaining SE has always been a kind of “flat earth” thinking that mandated something to “cause” SE. It appears as if the entire structure of the universe would have to be altered to create SE. With an infinite number of probability membranes being travelled through, you do not alter anything: your mental patterns move you through probabilities in which events around you reflect your internal processes. You are already a multidimensional being.

ND: If I wanted to try to prove to myself that my thoughts are being mirrored in the environment around me, exactly how would I go about it?

KS: The best way, as self-serving as it sounds, is to first read the book so that you have a safe context to start with. SE are so responsive that people sometimes get trapped in the house of mirrors of their own thoughts. The book was created to ground people and give them a working context. It also contains a series of exercises that starts at the creation of simple SE, and progresses to creating more complex full personal mythologies. The easiest way to create SE is to simply regularly think about them, then look out into the world as if it is a single, responsive being trying to communicate with you through SE. Expect a response SE, and eventually they will appear. Just don’t forget you are seeing your thoughts mirrored in external events.

ND: What advice do you have for people who are experiencing synchronistic events and might be scared or confused by them?

KS: Relax. SE are not dangerous. The meanings they convey are just thoughts, and only have the reality you chose to give them. They are not even paranormal. They are extremely normal. Everyone is creating SE. You were born creating SE, you have been doing it all your life. SE are part of the natural survival skills you evolved to help you through your life. The best way to use them is as a form of communication with other parts of yourself, to teach yourself connectedness. Choose the patterns you want to look for and expect them to appear as SE. If you become scared or anxious, ask yourself why you are choosing to scare yourself, then move on to creating something fun with SE. Because SE are driven by the attention you put into them, any pattern of SE you don’t want can be extinguished by either looking for a different pattern, or ignoring them until they fade away. If you signal the brain you’re not interested in them, it will gradually stop presenting them.

https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/art...incidence-an-interview-with-dr-kirby-surprise

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14th November 2020

WHO ARE YOU?

https://youtu.be/GWGbOjlJDkU

 

[Joe Mahmood]

OF MONSTERS AND MEN - HUMAN

https://youtu.be/0EnrFe3Zb6k


IT'S A SMALL MULTIDIMENSIONAL UNIVERSE - COINCIDENCE AND SCIENCE

In the early 1900s Paul Kammerer kept journals in which he faithfully recorded every coincidence he experienced, from the incredible to the downright mundane. Kammerer was interested in the fact that coincidence tended to cluster in groups. In 1919 he introduced The Law of Seriality, in which he conjectured that these clusters were evidence of some deeper force at work that we do not see. Coincidence clusters were like ripples on the surface of a pond, the only observable evidence of a general connecting principle of nature, a major force in the universe similar to gravity. But whereas gravity works only on objects with mass, seriality affects both objects and consciousness, bringing things together by affinity. Kammerer thought the peaks the we call coincidences are glimpses of a hyper-connected universe whose web-like workings we are only vaguely aware of and nowhere near understanding. 'Seriality is ubiquitous in life, nature and cosmos', he said. 'It is the umbilical cord which connects thought, feeling, science and art with the son of the universe which gave birth to them.'

He concluded: 'We thus arrive at the image of a world mosaic or cosmic kaleidoscope, which, in spite of constant shufflings and rearrangements, also takes care of bringing like and like together.'

Kammerer lived at a time when the classical laws of physics were starting to groan under the strain of startling new discoveries and ideas. The clockwork universe had been ticking along reliably since 17th century, when Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton and others established it's rational basis in human thought. In the 19th century matter was held to be the fundamental and final reality. Scientists saw the universe as a grand machine governed by immutable laws, every part interacting with every other part in a logical and predictable fashion. Time ticked reliably along from past to present - you could set your watch by it. Effect followed cause in reassuringly strict sequence. You could ascertain the cause of something by examining the effect, and the laws affecting one part of the machine applied to all parts of the machine. It was a reductionist approach: you could analyse anything by breaking it down and examining its parts.

The spanner in the works was human consciousness, which stubbornly refused to be broken down. Where did sentience, self-awareness and free will fit in to a purely material universe? Just how the mind works and what thinking is are two of the profoundest mysteries. The attempt by classical science to explain the human mind away as a sort of fancy computer, quite apart from being intrinsically unattractive, was unconvincing.

The 20th century brought with it new ways of looking outward into space and inward into the atom. Both directions offered astonishing revelations that confounded classical realities. We learned that energy and matter were two different expressions of the same thing ('a somewhat unfamiliar concept for the average mind', said Einstein with understatement), that light was deflected by gravity, and that time, which previously had waited for no man, was prepared to make an exception if he was travelling at the speed of light. Light itself was revealed as contrary, behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a stream of particles, depending on how it was observed. Out in deep space, unthinkable dense black holes gyred and roiled, hoovering up starts and light, distorting space and time around their circumferences and emitting the deepest roar in the universe.

Inside the atom, formerly thought to be an indivisible ball (hence the name, from Greek atomos, meaning uncuttable), there was revealed a miniature universe in which things happened that contradicted the classical laws pertaining to the big world. Here gravity held no sway because atoms were held together by their own, vastly stronger special forces, cause and effect didn't seem to apply and the exact states of the particles could never be predicted. The behaviour of a light photon encountering a sunglass lens is impossible to predict. We know the probability of them going straight through, but it is impossible to predict what any individual photon will do or know why it has chosen that behaviour. Science, with its dependency on hard measurable facts, found itself treading water in a probabilistic universe that confounded the old certainties.

Electrons, those tiny particles that exist in orbits around an atom's nucleus, exhibited the same wave/particle duality as light, suggesting that in a microscopic sense, all matter is wave-like. Electrons were very mysterious; Einstein called them 'spooky'. They appeared able to exist in twenty places at once (quantum superposition), they would suddenly change their behaviour for no causal reason, and if a pair of linked particles were separated they exactly mirrored each other thereafter (quantum entanglement), whether they were two feet or a billion miles apart. An experiment which changed the state of one would be instantly reflected by a corresponding change in the state of the other, the information having passed between them across any distance instantaneously. Each particle seemed to 'know' what the other was doing. The phenomenon is very difficult to explain as it violates Einstein's law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Scientists have used the word 'telepathy' to describe it and have even speculated that the particles' separation may be an illusion.

Most alarming for traditional scientists was how personal the study of the atoms' interior parts was becoming. As soon as a subatomic particle such as an electron was measured (i.e. observed) it changed its behaviour. If you tried to measure a particle you found something that looked like a particle, otherwise it behaved as a wave. Things changed when you looked at them so you could never know what they looked like before you looked. Interpretation was necessary. Scientists were forced to be subjective - that intimate adjective that also defines the essence of consciousness and coincidence.

Excerpts from BEYOND COINCIDENCE by Martin Plummer and Brian King

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13th February 2021

The particle physics of you

11/03/15 By Ali Sundermier

Not only are we made of fundamental particles, we also produce them and are constantly bombarded by them throughout the day.

Fourteen billion years ago, when the hot, dense speck that was our universe quickly expanded, all of the matter and antimatter that existed should have annihilated and left us nothing but energy. And yet, a small amount of matter survived.

We ended up with a world filled with particles. And not just any particles—particles whose masses and charges were just precise enough to allow human life. Here are a few facts about the particle physics of you that will get your electrons jumping.

The particles we’re made of

About 99 percent of your body is made up of atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. You also contain much smaller amounts of the other elements that are essential for life.

While most of the cells in your body regenerate every seven to 15 years, many of the particles that make up those cells have actually existed for millions of millennia. The hydrogen atoms in you were produced in the big bang, and the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms were made in burning stars. The very heavy elements in you were made in exploding stars.

The size of an atom is governed by the average location of its electrons. Nuclei are around 100,000 times smaller than the atoms they’re housed in. If the nucleus were the size of a peanut, the atom would be about the size of a baseball stadium. If we lost all the dead space inside our atoms, we would each be able to fit into a particle of lead dust, and the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.

As you might guess, these spaced-out particles make up only a tiny portion of your mass. The protons and neutrons inside of an atom’s nucleus are each made up of three quarks. The mass of the quarks, which comes from their interaction with the Higgs field, accounts for just a few percent of the mass of a proton or neutron. Gluons, carriers of the strong nuclear force that holds these quarks together, are completely massless.

If your mass doesn’t come from the masses of these particles, where does it come from? Energy. Scientists believe that almost all of your body’s mass comes from the kinetic energy of the quarks and the binding energy of the gluons.

The particles we make

Your body is a small-scale mine of radioactive particles. You receive an annual 40-millirem dose from the natural radioactivity originating inside of you. That’s the same amount of radiation you’d be exposed to from having four chest X-rays. Your radiation dose level can go up by one or two millirem for every eight hours you spend sleeping next to your similarly radioactive loved one.

You emit radiation because many of the foods you eat, the beverages you drink and even the air you breathe contain radionuclides such as Potassium-40 and Carbon-14. They are incorporated into your molecules and eventually decay and produce radiation in your body.

When Potassium-40 decays, it releases a positron, the electron’s antimatter twin, so you also contain a small amount of antimatter. The average human produces more than 4000 positrons per day, about 180 per hour. But it’s not long before these positrons bump into your electrons and annihilate into radiation in the form of gamma rays.

The particles we meet

The radioactivity born inside your body is only a fraction of the radiation you naturally (and harmlessly) come in contact with on an everyday basis. The average American receives a radiation dose of about 620 millirem every year. The food you eat, the house you live in and the rocks and soil you walk on all expose you to low levels of radioactivity. Just eating a Brazil nut or going to the dentist can up your radiation dose level by a few millirem. Smoking cigarettes can increase it up to 16,000 millirem.

Cosmic rays, high-energy radiation from outer space, constantly smack into our atmosphere. There, they collide with other nuclei and produce mesons, many of which decay into particles such as muons and neutrinos. All of these shower down on the surface of the Earth and pass through you at a rate of about 10 per second. They add about 27 millirem to your yearly dose of radiation. These cosmic particles can sometimes disrupt our genetics, causing subtle mutations, and may be a contributing factor in evolution.

In addition to bombarding us with photons that dictate the way we see the world around us, our sun also releases an onslaught of particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are constant visitors in your body, zipping through at a rate of nearly 100 trillion every second. Aside from the sun, neutrinos stream out from other sources, including nuclear reactions in other stars and on our own planet.

Many neutrinos have been around since the first few seconds of the early universe, outdating even your own atoms. But these particles are so weakly interacting that they pass right through you, leaving no sign of their visit.

You are also likely facing a constant shower of particles of dark matter. Dark matter doesn’t emit, reflect or absorb light, making it quite hard to detect, yet scientists think it makes up about 80 percent of the matter in the universe.

Looking at the density of dark matter throughout the universe, scientists calculate that hundreds of thousands of these particles might be passing through you every second, colliding with your atoms about once a minute. But dark matter doesn’t interact very strongly with the matter you’re made of, so they are unlikely to have any noticeable effects on your body.

The next time you’re wondering how particle physics applies to your life, just take a look inside yourself.

https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-particle-physics-of-you

 

[Joe Mahmood]

THOUSAND FOOT KRUTCH - BE SOMEBODY

https://youtu.be/3L3R0o3PEyQ


Why The Mind Is Not the Brain

Markus Gabriel on why the ‘mind’ is meaningless

Markus Gabriel | Author of I Am Not A Brain and Why The World Does Not Exist, Director of the International Centre for Philosophy at the University of Bonn

Paula Erizanu | Interviewer


Let’s start with the title of your latest book. Why is the mind not the brain?

The shortest argument goes something like this: there’s what philosophers call a mereological fallacy. Mereology is the discipline which studies the relation between wholes and parts.

So imagine someone tells you that David Beckham didn’t score a goal, it was his foot. That would be an odd thing to say because Beckham couldn’t shoot for the goal without his foot, but it was the whole beast, so to speak, which shot the goal.

So, mental states like consciousness are states of an entire animal and not states of its parts. So it’s not true that the brain alone is conscious. You couldn’t be conscious without a brain, but that doesn’t mean that the brain and consciousness are identical.

But the mainstream biological view is that as the central nervous system, the brain dictates to the rest of the body. So the foot just executes what the brain dictates.

That’s what you might think. The brain is not a conscious control centre. All the parts are connected in complicated ways.

So, for instance, the mental state in which I am right now is that I’m trying to answer a question. I couldn’t answer a question without you asking me a question. The fact that you ask me a question is part of the mental state that I’m in. But this is nowhere in my body. It’s represented in my body – I need to have a working memory, but this conversation is nowhere in my body; it actually expands a much larger spacetime. Currently that’s England, Germany, as well as the communications networks – Skype etc. So my mental state is part of a larger network, it’s not just in my head.

What you call ‘mind’ in English does not exist. The ‘mind’ is a historical artefact of misguided philosophical theorising in English. As a term, it does not refer to anything. Philosophers made it up as a technical term. But no one ever tells you what that means. If you look into any standard textbook, ever since John Locke, no one will tell you what it is. It’s not like philosophers have settled the term ‘mind’ and now they’re talking about the mind-brain problem. No two analytical philosophers share the same understanding of the most important term of their discipline.

In German, we have this helpful term – ‘geist’, which roughly means ‘the bearer of mental states’. The brain alone cannot bear mental states.

‘Geist’ to me seems closer to the term ‘culture’.

It’s much closer to the term ‘culture’ but I would say geist is the idea of ‘shared meaning’. So for instance you go out for the evening and there’s a certain atmosphere that the restaurant has. That is shared meaning. There’s a kind of food you expect, a certain cost for the wine, an expectation of how much you’ll tip, etc.

What we should be talking about is the relation between ‘shared meaning’ and the fact that we are animals. So we shouldn’t be asking about the relation between the mind and the brain. That’s a pseudo-question, like asking about the relation between God and the universe. It’s meaningless.

Is consciousness a term that you think is better?

‘Consciousness’ is slightly better than ‘the mind’ if we separate between two types of consciousness. There are different ways of drawing this distinction and I have a huge debate with John Searle on this, but here’s my distinction: intentional consciousness and phenomenal consciousness.

Let intentional consciousness be our capacity to think about things that are not necessarily false. For instance, I can think of London, and London is not just a thought. I can think about my hand, and my hand is not just a thought. I can think of things that aren’t me or my thought.

Phenomenal consciousness is the kind of state that you can modify by drinking coffee, taking LSD, and so on. It’s the feeling of being alive. I think there’s no hard problem of it. It’s easy to say what it is. It’s been studied; we know its neural correlates. There’s no single phenomenal consciousness, there are different ones. Feelings, moods, visual and tactile impressions – they are all phenomenal and they have different correlates in the brain. This is where a legitimate brain–consciousness problem exists but this is not a philosophical problem. It’s no more philosophical than any other empirical problem. It’s a straightforward empirical question.

So are you quite close to Andy Clark’s idea of the ‘extended mind’ and do you share his interest in cyborgs?

I do agree that this is a kind of ‘extended mind’ thesis but it has nothing to do with recent technological developments. The biggest extended mind of all time remains the book. The most powerful intellectual device of all time is writing. The internet is nowhere near the book. The smartphone lasts barely more than five years, whereas Plato’s dialogues have lasted for 2,000 years. In fact, the recent technological extension of the mind makes us much weaker as thinkers. It has lessened our capacity to extend our mind.

Given that you think the ‘geist’ encompasses what we are beyond our biology more effectively than the ‘mind’, how does that affect your ideas about identity? Does that bring you to a Buddhist-like view that we are not self-contained beings?

I have no Buddhist worries about identity at all. I think Buddhism is just false. I have no sympathy for the idea of ‘no-self’ it espouses. I think I have a self but my self is just not finished. Personal identity is a four dimensional thing. That means I will have been all the thoughts that I will have had. To be precise, Markus Gabriel, the system that I am, is everything that is true of Markus Gabriel. That includes me currently having two hands, me having died at a certain point and so forth. That is my self. Currently I am not yet identical with myself. Because I’m not finished. Once I’m finished I will have identity. That means that you don’t see the whole me right now. You see a part of me. That’s obviously true because you don’t see my back, you see me through Skype, etc. So of course you can’t see the whole animal. That’s why selves are so mysterious to us, because they are in the process of temporal and historical unfolding. They can change. This is what Buddhists get wrong.

The truth in Buddhism is that there is no substantial being that you find by looking in the mirror. If I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself; I see a part of myself. But Buddhism exaggerates this point and says that there is ‘no self’ and that nothing is identical to itself.

How do your ideas about the mind connect to your ideas about ‘the world’ vs. ‘the universe’?

That’s very important. Basically, the ‘mind’ or ‘geist’ comes into the picture within my philosophy as a consequence of the following question: what am I doing when I philosophise? And my answer is this: I am giving an account of what it is to be human.

Why do I need to give such an account? Because initially I have no clue what it is to be human. Someone will tell you that you have an immortal soul, so don’t worry about it. Then you’ll meet Daniel Dennett, and he will tell you, ‘Oh, don’t worry, you’re just a killer-robot.’ Or a ‘primate with illusions.’ And then I’ll meet the Buddhists and they’ll tell me – ‘Oh, there’s nothing there, you’re not human. The whole thing is just an illusion.’

I think philosophy is an attempt to give a rational answer to that question. One that does not buy any of the options that are already on the market but which instead looks for a rationally controlled investigation of the human into what it is. I call that a higher-order anthropology. That is, an account of what the human is in the light of the fact that we don’t yet know what the human is. Otherwise put, humans are questions.

We are a question concerning what it is to be human. And any answer that we give defines what we are. We are self-determining animals. That is what I call ‘geist’ – the capacity to be a self-determining animal. The universal humanity is just the insight that other humans realise universal humanity in a different way. But the conditions of realisation are the same for all of us.

In this context, we come up with notions such as the world, the universe, the mind, the brain, as an answer to the question of what we are. If I want to know what my position is in the universe, I will find out I’m somewhere in the branch of the Milky Way.

The human is the fundamental starting point of any investigation. I criticise the idea that there is a totality of objects or a reality out there that is fully stable because I believe this is an ideology: a story that humans tell to themselves in order to be less human, to have a definite answer. That’s why I call myself a neo-existentialist.

The idea that you are your brain is in existentialist jargon just as bad propaganda as the idea that you have an immortal soul. Because you identify yourself with an object in reality rather than with the capacity to ask a certain question. It’s a form of alienation, as the existentialist tradition would call it.

So you believe in agency more than neuroscientists and materialists might?

Yes, absolutely. I think that the situation that we think we’re in – participants in the rational game of getting to, and asking for reasons, decision-makers, subjects to Freudian unconscious drives, etc. – the situation that we think we’re in is really the situation that we’re in. I’m against illusions. I think that the idea that human agency is an illusion is currently the most dangerous idea out there.

Why?

Because that is exactly what propaganda leaders, the so-called ‘populists’, use to spread fake news. So if you tell people, ‘Oh, it’s more complicated, things are not what they seem; Brexit might not be such a bad idea, or Erdogan might not be a dictator, or Donald Trump might not be an idiot. Things are probably much more complicated than you think’, you then don’t trust your senses, your sensibilities, because people tell you that you shouldn’t.

‘Don’t trust your rational deliberations, you’re full of biases.’ That is what behavioural economics has shown – that you’re never in control of your rationality. But all this critique of rationality that we have seen for the last two decades serves the same function as Lacan and the French postmodernism that has been criticised by analytical philosophy for undermining reason. However, if philosophy saw anything as bad, that would precisely be the undermining of reason.

But acknowledging and understanding our irrationality is important.

Yes, but understanding irrationality is not irrational. If our biases applied to the study of biases, we couldn’t conduct it. So if behavioural economics and psychoanalysis were subject to the biases they said they discovered, then they wouldn’t be discovering anything. They would be subject to the same illusions. That’s the famous problem wherein the critique of ideology must not itself be ideological. And there’s a simple solution.

We all do struggle with self-application in our everyday lives because we have become aware (thanks to scientific discoveries, of course) that there are all sorts of biases that we were unaware of earlier.

The best thing to do is to accept that they are first order biases in human nature and psychology, economics, sociology, neuroscience etc. help us discover them. It’s a biological truth that we are not born with one of the two genders. A fact that has largely been ignored for thousands of years. Now these are all facts and it’s important to know them.

However, that does not mean we are not rational. Only because we are rational can we know all of these facts about our irrationality. No one in the rationalist tradition has ever ignored that. The rationalist tradition is the discovery of the unconscious. You find the unconscious in Leibniz, Descartes, Plato.

So basically you’re saying that we have both rationality and irrationality in ourselves and that rationality simply helps us deal with our irrationality.

Absolutely. Philosophy is the pure cult of rationality. Philosophy’s enemy is irrationality.

I want to get back to something you said – that there is no totality of things out there. Where do you position yourself in relation to materialists, panpsychists, pluralists?

I think these views – such as materialism, panpsychism etc – are all false because they are metaphysical. And by metaphysics, I mean any theory of absolutely everything.

Fundamentally, it’s a simple argument: we have no reason to believe there is a totality. Even if you think there’s just a material universe, the material universe has not come to an end. And we don’t know everything about it. So we have no empirical reason whatsoever to believe that there is a totality. Everything that we know empirically is limited by our perspective. That’s in the nature of empirical knowledge – that it doesn’t know absolutely everything; it knows what it knows.

Recent developments in meta-mathematics since the 1960s will show to any competent mathematician that there is no formal system such that all truths are theorems of that system. What we know from science and mathematics is that there is no totality. Rather, they tell me that there is no reason to believe that there is a totality. I’ve never seen an argument for there being a totality, only the assumption that there is one.

Philosophers uncritically accept that metaphysics is a good business even if it has been heavily criticised by philosophers. They forgot all the reasons why we stopped doing it and fell back into all the traps that have been criticised for the last four hundred years. Materialism and panpsychism are just versions of metaphysics, and that’s why I think I can easily discard them.

So you’re saying that we can only study parts of the universe from our perspective and we should just accept this limitation and do the most with what we’ve got.

Absolutely. That’s all we can do. It’s in the nature of the universe that all our knowledge is partial. It’s not the deficiency of humans or that we should try harder and get better computers. The microstructure of the universe is not classical. That just means that nothing within the universe can ever know everything about the universe.

https://iai.tv/articles/why-the-mind-is-not-the-brain-auid-1139

 

[Joe Mahmood]

BREAKING BENJAMIN - ASHES OF EDEN

https://youtu.be/d1yTyAh8IA8


Curious Kids: Do butterflies remember being caterpillars?

August 27, 2018 6.12am AEST

Michael F. Braby, Australian National University

This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky! You might also like the podcast Imagine This, a co-production between ABC KIDS listen and The Conversation, based on Curious Kids.

We have caterpillars at home. I would like to know whether they will remember being caterpillars when they are butterflies. – Evan, age 5, Bristol, UK.

Dear Evan,

I think it is highly unlikely that a butterfly or moth remembers being a caterpillar. However, it may well remember some experiences it learned as a caterpillar.

That fact in itself is especially amazing because inside the pupa (or chrysalis), the caterpillar actually turns to liquid as it transforms into a butterfly or moth (the adult stage).

The transformation from the pupa to the adult is the most dramatic change in the life cycle of a butterfly, and scientists refer to this change as metamorphosis. During metamorphosis, the body tissues of the caterpillar are completely reorganised to produce the beautiful adult butterfly that emerges from the pupa.

Scientists have known for a long time that caterpillars can learn and remember things when they are caterpillars, and adult butterflies can do the same when they are butterflies. However, because of metamorphosis, we were not sure if an adult butterfly could remember things it learned as a caterpillar.

This ability to remember caterpillar experiences as an adult was tested in a study by a team of scientists at Georgetown University in the US.

The researchers trained the caterpillars to dislike the smell of ethyl acetate, a chemical often found in nail polish remover.

They did this by giving the caterpillars little electric shocks every time they smelled the chemical. Soon, these caterpillars were trained to avoid that smell because it reminded them of the electric shock.

They let the caterpillars transform into adult moths, and then tested the moths again to see if they still remembered to stay away from the ethyl acetate smell.

And guess what? Most of them did! The scientists had shown that the memories of avoiding the bad smell experienced as a caterpillar had been carried over into the moth stage.

The study showed that memory, and therefore the nervous system, stays during the complex transformation from the caterpillar to the adult moth. So while a moth or butterfly may not remember being a caterpillar, it can remember experiences it learned as a caterpillar.

More weird and wonderful butterfly facts

The main purpose of a caterpillar’s life is to eat food and grow bigger. The adult butterfly or moth, however, is mostly concerned with finding a mate, flying to a new area and searching for suitable plants on which to lay its eggs.

Most caterpillars eat leaves of plants, but some eat other foods like flowers or fruits. Some eat very strange foods, such as ants or insects.

Dr Daniel Rubinoff, a scientist who studies butterflies and moths, recently reported a very unusual diet from Hawaii. The caterpillar of a particular species of moth ate only the soft tissue of a snail!.

Unlike a hungry caterpillar, which grows quickly and increases in size, the adult butterfly never grows. It always stays the same size.

However, for the butterfly to survive and live long enough to mate and lay eggs, it must drink. The favoured drink for butterflies is nectar from flowers, which is rich in sugars to give energy. But some butterflies also drink the moisture from sand, especially along the banks of creeks or rivers.

A few species in the tropics even drink the moisture from rotting fruit or animal poo to extract essential nutrients.

Thank you for sending in this very interesting question.

Yours sincerely,

A/Prof Michael F. Braby

https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-do-butterflies-remember-being-caterpillars-99508

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27th November 2020

When Does Consciousness Arise in Human Babies?

Does sentience appear in the womb, at birth or during early childhood?

By Christof Koch on September 1, 2009


MOTHERS will want to crucify me for this seemingly cruel question, but it needs to be posed: How do we know that a newly born and healthy infant is conscious? There is no question that the baby is awake. Its eyes are wide open, it wriggles and grimaces, and, most important, it cries. But all that is not the same as being conscious, of experiencing pain, seeing red or smelling Mom’s milk.

It is well recognized that infants have no awareness of their own state, emotions and motivations. Even older children who can speak have very limited insight into their own actions. Anybody who has raised a boy is familiar with the blank look on your teenager’s face when you ask him why he did something particularly rash. A shrug and “I dunno—it seemed like a good idea at the time” is the most you’ll hear.

Although a newborn lacks self-awareness, the baby processes complex visual stimuli and attends to sounds and sights in its world, preferentially looking at faces. The infant’s visual acuity permits it to see only blobs, but the basic thalamo-cortical circuitry necessary to support simple visual and other conscious percepts is in place. And linguistic capacities in babies are shaped by the environment they grow up in. Exposure to maternal speech sounds in the muffled confines of the womb enables the fetus to pick up statistical regularities so that the newborn can distinguish its mother’s voice and even her language from others. A more complex behavior is imitation: if Dad sticks out his tongue and waggles it, the infant mimics his gesture by combining visual information with proprioceptive feedback from its own movements. It is therefore likely that the baby has some basic level of unreflective, present-oriented consciousness.

The Road to Awareness

But when does the magical journey of consciousness begin? Consciousness requires a sophisticated network of highly interconnected components, nerve cells. Its physical substrate, the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content, begins to be in place between the 24th and 28th week of gestation. Roughly two months later synchrony of the electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythm across both cortical hemispheres signals the onset of global neuronal integration. Thus, many of the circuit elements necessary for consciousness are in place by the third trimester. By this time, preterm infants can survive outside the womb under proper medical care. And as it is so much easier to observe and interact with a preterm baby than with a fetus of the same gestational age in the womb, the fetus is often considered to be like a preterm baby, like an unborn newborn. But this notion disregards the unique uterine environment: suspended in a warm and dark cave, connected to the placenta that pumps blood, nutrients and hormones into its growing body and brain, the fetus is asleep.

Invasive experiments in rat and lamb pups and observational studies using ultrasound and electrical recordings in humans show that the third-trimester fetus is almost always in one of two sleep states. Called active and quiet sleep, these states can be distinguished using electroencephalography. Their different EEG signatures go hand in hand with distinct behaviors: breathing, swallowing, licking, and moving the eyes but no large-scale body movements in active sleep; no breathing, no eye movements and tonic muscle activity in quiet sleep. These stages correspond to rapid-eye-movement (REM) and slow-wave sleep common to all mammals. In late gestation the fetus is in one of these two sleep states 95 percent of the time, separated by brief transitions.

What is fascinating is the discovery that the fetus is actively sedated by the low oxygen pressure (equivalent to that at the top of Mount Everest), the warm and cushioned uterine environment and a range of neuroinhibitory and sleep-inducing substances produced by the placenta and the fetus itself: adenosine; two steroidal anesthetics, allopregnanolone and pregnanolone; one potent hormone, prostaglandin D2; and others. The role of the placenta in maintaining sedation is revealed when the umbilical cord is closed off while keeping the fetus adequately supplied with oxygen. The lamb embryo now moves and breathes continuously. From all this evidence, neonatologists conclude that the fetus is asleep while its brain matures.

Dreamless Sleep?

One complication ensues. When people awaken during REM sleep, they often report vivid dreams with extensive narratives. Although consciousness during dreams is not the same as during wakefulness—most noticeably insight and self-reflection are absent—dreams are consciously experienced and felt. So does the fetus dream when in REM sleep? This is
not known. But what would it dream of?

After birth, dream content is informed by recent and more remote memories. Longitudinal studies of dreaming in children by retired American psychologist David Foulkes suggest that dreaming is a gradual cognitive development that is tightly linked to the capacity to imagine things visually and to visuospatial skills. Thus, preschoolers’ dreams are often static and plain, with no characters that move or act, hardly any feelings and no memories. What would dreaming be like for an organism that spends its time suspended in a sort of isolation tank, with no memories, and no way to imagine anything at all? I wager that the fetus experiences nothing in utero; that it feels the way we do when we are in a deep, dreamless sleep.

The dramatic events attending delivery by natural (vaginal) means cause the brain to abruptly wake up, however. The fetus is forced from its paradisic existence in the protected, aqueous and warm womb into a hostile, aerial and cold world that assaults its senses with utterly foreign sounds, smells and sights, a highly stressful event.

As Hugo Lagercrantz, a pediatrician at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, discovered two decades ago, a massive surge of norepinephrine—more powerful than during any skydive or exposed climb the fetus may undertake in its adult life—as well as the release from anesthesia and sedation that occurs when the fetus disconnects from the maternal placenta, arouses the baby so that it can deal with its new circumstances. It draws its first breath, wakes up and begins to experience life.

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "When Does Consciousness Arise?"

This article was originally published with the title "Consciousness Redux: When Does Consciousness Arise?" in SA Mind 20, 5, 20-21 (September 2009)
doi:10.1038/scientificamericanmind0909-20

(Further Reading)

The “Stress” of Being Born. Hugo Lagercrantz and Theodore A. Slotkin in Scientific American, Vol. 254, No. 4, pages 100–107 (92–102); April 1986.
The Importance of “Awareness” for Understanding Fetal Pain. David J. Mellor, Tamara J. Diesch, Alistair J. Gunn and Laura Bennet in Brain Research Reviews, Vol. 49, No. 3, pages 455–471; November 2005.
The Emergence of Human Consciousness: From Fetal to Neonatal Life. Hugo Lagercrantz and Jean-Pierre Changeux in Pediatric Research, Vol. 65, No. 3, pages 255–260; March 2009.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

CHRISTOF KOCH is Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biolo*gy at the California Institute of Tech*nology. He serves on Scientific American Mind's board of advisers.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-does-consciousness-arise/

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27th November 2020

Published: March 2009

The Emergence of Human Consciousness: From Fetal to Neonatal Life

Hugo Lagercrantz & Jean-Pierre Changeux


Abstract

A simple definition of consciousness is sensory awareness of the body, the self, and the world. The fetus may be aware of the body, for example by perceiving pain. It reacts to touch, smell, and sound, and shows facial expressions responding to external stimuli. However, these reactions are probably preprogrammed and have a subcortical nonconscious origin. Furthermore, the fetus is almost continuously asleep and unconscious partially due to endogenous sedation. Conversely, the newborn infant can be awake, exhibit sensory awareness, and process memorized mental representations. It is also able to differentiate between self and nonself touch, express emotions, and show signs of shared feelings. Yet, it is unreflective, present oriented, and makes little reference to concept of him/herself. Newborn infants display features characteristic of what may be referred to as basic consciousness and they still have to undergo considerable maturation to reach the level of adult consciousness. The preterm infant, ex utero, may open its eyes and establish minimal eye contact with its mother. It also shows avoidance reactions to harmful stimuli. However, the thalamocortical connections are not yet fully established, which is why it can only reach a minimal level of consciousness.

Main

Consciousness in general and the birth of consciousness in particular remain as key puzzles confronting the scientific worldview (1). According to Searle (2) it can be defined as “inner, qualitative, subjective states, and processes of sentience or awareness.” This includes “one's autobiography and mental time” together with the capacity to introspect and report about one's mental state by verbal and nonverbal means. Consciousness emerges from special neuronal features in the brain or “neuronal correlates” of consciousness according to Koch (1). Tononi and Edelman (3) propose that there is a dynamic core of several neurons distributed across many brain regions. Merker (4) claims that conscious function cannot be confined to the thalamocortical complex alone, but also to lower structures, which is of particular interest from a developmental point of view. We deliberately restrict our discussion to a “global neuronal workspace” (GNW) model (5), or metaphorically “a theater of mind” according to Baars (6). In the GNW, multimodal perceptions, emotions and feelings (present), evoked memories (past), together with anticipations of actions (future) become subjectively integrated in a continuously changing and dynamic “flow of consciousness” (7–9). This then leads to the distinction between the states of consciousness (wakefulness, sleep, coma, general anesthesia) and the content of the conscious experience. The states of consciousness are under vertical control of the brain stem and diencephalic subcortical structures and mediated by the corticothalamic relationships (10). The content of conscious experience (11) is then viewed as being processed through a recurrent horizontal network of cortical pyramidal neurons with long-distance connections assembling thalamocortical regions, particularly prefrontal and higher association areas, parietotemporal and cingulate cortices (12) referred to here as GNW circuits (8,9). This model has been corroborated by neural network simulations and experimental evoked response potentials recordings showing reverberating activity within the GNW circuits as corresponding to consciously reportable states. Our working hypothesis will thus be that such mobilization of the GNW circuits constitutes an objective sign of access to consciousness (8). This is in contrast with the subliminal mobilization of underlying automatic and nonconscious processors (Fig. 1) (5).

The question then becomes as follows: where and when do these objective signs of consciousness appear during development? As presented in this review, analysis of human brain development from early fetal stages in utero up to the adult state offers original insights into the neural bases of the access to consciousness. We argue that consciousness is a progressive, stepwise, structural, and functional evolution of its multiple intricate components (7–9).

DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEURAL CIRCUITS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

At birth, the newborn brain is in a “transitional” stage of development with an almost adult number of neurons (with the exception of adult neurogenesis) but an immature set of connections (13). During the few months after birth, there is an overproduction of synapses accompanied by a process of synaptic elimination and stabilization, which lasts until adolescence (14). Myelination begins prenatally, but is not completed until the third decade in the frontal cortex (15) where the highest executive functions and conscious thoughts take place (1,9).

Thalamic afferents to the cortex develop from approximately 12-16 wk of gestation, reach the cortical subplate, but “wait” until they grow into the cortical plate (16). At this stage, only long depolarization of the deep layers may reach the cortex (17) (Fig. 2). After 24 wk, thalamocortical axons grow into the somatosensory, auditory, visual, and frontal cortices and the pathways mediating pain perception become functional around the 29-30 wk (18). From approximately 34 wk, a synchrony of the EEG rhythm of the two hemispheres becomes detectable at the same time as long-range callosal connections, and thus the GNW circuits, are established (18–20). From the 26th wk, pyramidal neurons in the primary visual cortex of humans develop dendritic spines (19). At birth, the dendritic spines have not reached the adult density, but suffice for the detection of visually evoked potentials. The connectivity of the cerebral cortex particularly in the prefrontal area, mature later than the subcortical structures. However, the fusiform area for face recognition (21) and the left-hemispheric temporal lobe cortices for processing speech stimuli (22) function already in the newborn. Moreover, the main fascicles of myelinated long-range connections such as the corpus callosum, cerebellar peduncles, corticospinal tract, spinothalamic tract are unambiguously identified at the age of 1-4 mo (23). In short, the vertical brain stem, diencephalic, and thalamocortical pathways, which regulate the states of consciousness, become established before their connection with the horizontal GNW cortical circuits yielding, in the newborn, plausibly functional, though still immature, neural dispositions for access to a conscious content.

The neurochemistry of the developing brain reveals that γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is the dominant excitatory neurotransmitter during fetal life (20,24,25). Soon before or around birth depending on the brain area, GABA becomes the main inhibitory neurotransmitter. This is a consequence of the expression of the K+/Cl− cotransporter KCC2 that creates a low intracellular Cl− concentration. Then glutamate and aspartate become the major excitatory amino acids (20,24). In addition, a transient switch in GABA signaling from fetal excitatory to inhibitory is elicited by maternal oxytocin release upon delivery (26).

Neuromodulators, like noradrenaline and acetylcholine which regulate sleep-wakefulness cycles develop progressively before and after birth (24). Also the supply from the mother's blood of neuromodulators like serotonin is probably important for the normal development of the brain (27). The rich dopaminergic innervation of the prefrontal cortex (28) accompanies the cognitive advances in infants between 6 and 12 mo.

Well-defined sleep states appear at approximately 32 gestational weeks in the human fetus (29,30) or preterm infants (31). By ultrasound recordings, active sleep can be identified by rapid eye movements, breathing, swallowing, and atonia, whereas apnea, absence of eye movements and tonic muscle activity occur during quiet or nonrapid eye movement sleep. This spontaneous activity is interpreted as an early “inner stimulation” which could anticipate the sensorimotor experience of the newborn with the outside world and regulate thalamocortical development (32). At approximately 35 wk, spontaneous electrical activity transients become synchronous across hemispheres as callosal connections develop suggesting a possible role in the maturation of the GNW circuits (33).

SENSORY PERCEPTION

The newborn brain is not “blank.” Spontaneous resting activity can be identified in five cortical areas, as revealed by functional MRI (34). The primary visual areas, the somatosensory and auditory cortex are active indicating that sensory auditory and visual impressions are processed in the newborn cortex (Fig. 3).

There are several indications that various sensory modalities are processed in the developing brain befor birth (35–38).

Pain.

Nociceptive reactions such as withdrawal reflexes can be recorded from the 19th wk (35). By the 20th wk, fetuses were found to increase the levels of cortisol, beta-endorphin, and noradrenaline in umbilical blood when a needle was inserted into the abdomen (38). Facial expressions similar to adults experiencing pain can be seen in preterm infants after 28 wk (18). Painful stimulations by either venipuncture or heel lances of preterm infants of 25-45 wk produced an increase in hemodynamic response in the somatosensory cortex revealed by real-time near infrared spectroscopy (39,40) either bilaterally and/or over the contralateral areas. Interestingly, the cortical responses to noxious stimulation were found to be greater in awake than in sleeping infants (39). Moreover, the bilateral activation noticed in the Bartocci et al. (40) study was suggested to include the S2 cortex, anterior insula, ventral premotor area, and anterior cingulate cortex which belong to the GNW circuits.

Olfaction.

The behavior of alert newborn infants appears to be influenced by olfactory cues mainly originating from the intrauterine environment (41,42). For instance, they seem to be more attracted by the smell of amniotic fluid than by other odors. Exposure to amniotic fluid and other maternal odors were found to have a soothing effect in newborns. Clear behavioral responses to smell can be recorded in preterm infants from approximately the 29th wk of gestation and the fetus can probably smell from approximately the 20th, the time at which the epithelial plugs blocking the nostrils disappear (41). Near infrared spectroscopy recordings in the left anterior orbitofrontal gyri of newborns (from 6 to 192 h) in a quiet awake state show increased hemodynamic response during exposure to smells like that of colostrum or of vanilla compared with water (43). Conversely, a decreased response, which was significantly greater in the right than in the left side, was noticed when the babies were exposed to the smell of a disinfectant or of a detergent (44).

Vision.

Visual acuity in the full-term newborn infants is only 1/40 visual acuity in the adult but newborns can process complex visual stimuli, recognize faces, and imitate (21). They have developed preferential looking i.e., they look longer at patterned field stimuli than at gray fields. The ability to recognize different colors, as well as other features of visual perception, develops later.

Infants at birth prefer images of attractive faces, are sensitive to the presence of eyes in a face, and have a preference to look at faces that enjoy them in eye contact (21). Such face detectors preferentially mobilize a subcortical route that seems more developed than the cortical route at birth. In any case, these experiments require the infant not only to be awake and attentive but also to be sensitive to a “social” eye-contact relationship.

Hearing.

Responses to low frequency noise can be recorded from approximately the 16th wk in the fetus brain (45). The cochlea is probably structurally developed from around the 18th gestational week to provide auditory input. However, the auditory cortex does not respond to hearing until around the 26th wk in preterm infants. At this age, brainstem auditory evoked responses can be first observed, although they may not be reliable until the 28th week (46). In a recent study, cortical activation to sound was detected in the fetus from the 33rd wk of gestation (47).

Memory.

If a 22-23 wk human fetus is exposed to a repetitive stimulus, such as the vibration of an electric tooth brush, it reacts by movements; after multiple stimuli it does not react any longer, it habituates (48). Newborn infants remember sounds, melodies, and rhythmic poems they have been exposed to during fetal life (49,50). However, short-term memory is rather limited in newborn infants, retention of visual objects lasts only for a few seconds. A 2-mo-old baby remembers a soother or a face which suddenly disappears (51) but working memory is not fully efficient before 7 mo (49). Long-term memories disappear during early childhood (infant amnesia) and full declarative memory develops only after 3 y (49).

Language.

Infants display elaborate capacities for oral language perception that are rapidly modified by their linguistic environment (52). As early as a few days after birth, babies can discriminate between speech excerpts from language belonging to different rhythmic families, but prefer to listen to their native languages even when speakers are unknown (53,54). Exposure of the mother speech in utero during the last week of fetal life, under sleeping “unconscious” conditions, may explain why neonates react to the maternal voice (52).

The left hemisphere of the newborn brain was found to be more activated than the right during human speech, as shown by an optical topographic study (55). Furthermore in 3-mo-old awake infants, functional MRI recordings reveal an activation of the Broca's area (before the babbling stage) together with an additional activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex by speech stimuli with a significant advantage for the native language (22) thus revealing an active mobilization of a long-distance temporofrontal GNW circuit by speech stimuli (56).

THE FIRST ACCESS TO CONSCIOUSNESS

The fetus is mainly asleep, although it shows vigorous continual activity, including breathing, eye openings, and facial expression (30). Yet, most of these preprogrammed movements are from subcortical origin. Attempts to “wake up” the fetal sheep by noxious stimuli, such as pinching, cause inhibition instead of arousal (57). Furthermore, the fetus is sedated by the low oxygen tension of the fetal blood and the neurosteroid anesthetics pregnanolone and the sleep-inducing prostaglandin D2 provided by the placenta (36). The most parsimonious, yet challenging, interpretation of these data are that in utero the fetus is mostly in a state of “unconsciousness.”

Upon delivery, the newborn baby arouses and stays awake for approximately 2 h. The eyes are wide open with usually large pupils and it may cry. After a couple of hours it usually falls asleep again, being awake the following days for only short periods of time (58). The delivery from the mother's womb thus causes arousal from a “resting,” sleeping, state in utero. After birth, electrophysiological signs on EEG scalp recordings indicate an intense flow of novel sensory stimuli after birth (20). In addition, arousal is enhanced by the release from endogenous analgesia possibly caused by removal of the mentioned placental “suppressors” which in utero selectively inhibit neural activity of the fetus (36). The catecholamine surge triggered by vaginal delivery may also be critical for the arousal at birth (59). In the rat fetus, a 2- to 3-fold increase of noradrenaline turnover has been demonstrated in the newborn rat brain, probably mainly reflecting the activation of the locus coeruleus at birth (60).

During the stress of being born the cholinergic system may be activated as well. Indeed, blocking the activation of the cholinergic system in rodent pups blunts the arousal response to hypoxia and increases mortality (7). Mice missing the β2-containing nicotinic acetylcholine receptors lack the ability to arouse to the same extent as wild-type mice, and a similar phenotype is observed in newborn pups after chronic exposure of the pregnant mother to nicotine (61). These mice may offer useful models of the sudden infant death syndrome.

Birth may also release an inborn “positive emotion,” a “motivation” oriented toward the outside world and in particular toward the feeding mother. It is interesting to note that in many species this first arousal drives the newborn to spontaneously explore the world, in particular to look for food (62). The infant affective display then becomes part of a conscious intercommunication system with the caretaker.

SELF-AWARENESS, CRYING, AND SOCIAL INTERACTIONS IN THE NEWBORN

The newborn infant at birth already reacts differently to tactile stimulation by the mother as compared with a self-stimulation which he/she does not respond to (63). The newborn infant is known to imitate certain body movements. For instance, tongue protrusion by an adult will produce tongue protrusion in a newborn (64), even though this does not actually mean an authentic self-recognition.

An almost unique feature of the human newborn is crying. It produces characteristic sounds and grimaces with vigorous body movements (65) to the extent that crying may be viewed as a distinct state of consciousness interpreted as an “honest signaling of need or vigor” to obtain vital care from his mother (66). Newborns distinguish their own cry from the cry of another newborn. They respond significantly more with crying when hearing another newborn crying than when hearing their own cry (66). As a consequence of affect sharing, emotional contagion is already developed in the newborn. Emotion recognition and sharing emerge in the newborn much earlier than “theory of mind.” EEG brain activity in crying infants reveals a right frontal activation asymmetry already in 1-mo-old infants related to more frequent sad and precry faces (67). Infants who cried in response to maternal separation had greater right frontal asymmetry compared with infants who did not cry during the preceding baseline period (68). Interestingly, the right frontal activation associated with negative emotions was not observed in infants who had received a sucrose solution (69), and may thus be interpreted as an early sign of mobilization of the GNW circuits.

The hunger for air that emerges at birth can be called a primordial emotion (62). This first arousal drives the newborn to spontaneously explore the world, particularly to search for food in the mother's breast. The neural correlates for a “conscious” social communication of the newborn with his/her caretaker through crying become accessible to scientific investigation.

CONCLUSION

A first conclusion of this ongoing research is that the fetus in utero is almost continuously asleep and unconscious partially due to endogenous sedation. In particular, it would not consciously experience nociceptive inputs as pain. Conversely, the newborn infant exhibits in addition to sensory awareness specially to painful stimuli, the ability to differentiate between self and nonself touch, sense that their bodies are separate from the world, to express emotions, and to show signs of shared feelings. Moreover, “objective signs” for the mobilization of the GNW circuits are being detected in awake infants at the level of the prefrontal cortex in sensory processing, in responses to novelty and to speech and in social interaction. Yet, its capacities for internal manipulations in working memory are reduced, it is unreflective, present oriented and makes little reference to concept of him/herself. Newborn infants display features characteristic of what may be referred to as basic or minimal consciousness (7,9,70). They still have to undergo considerable maturation to reach the level of adult consciousness (70).

The preterm infant ex utero may open its eyes and establish a minimal eye contact with its mother. It also shows avoidance reactions to harmful stimuli. The connections with the GNW circuits are not yet fully established. Our view is that it has reached only a lower level of minimal consciousness analogous (though, of course, not identical) to that of a rat/mouse (7,9). A pending question is the status of the preterm fetus born before 26 wk (<700 g) who has closed eyes and seems constantly asleep. The immaturity of its brain networks is such that it may not even reach a level of minimal consciousness. The postnatal maturation of the brain may be delayed (71) and there are indications that the connectivity with the GNW will be suboptimal in some cases (72) as indicated by deficient executive functions (73). Therefore, the timing of the emergence of minimal consciousness has been proposed as an ethical limit of human viability and it might be possible to withhold or withdraw intensive care if these infants are severely brain damaged (74,75).

Abbreviations

fMRI: functional MRI

GNW: global neuronal workspace

REM: rapid eye movement

https://www.nature.com/articles/pr200950#Fig3

 

[Joe Mahmood]

SLEEPING AT LAST - SATURN

https://youtu.be/dzNvk80XY9s


4 Things That Currently Break the Speed of Light Barrier

One frequent question I get is whether we can break the light barrier—because unless we can break the light barrier, the distant stars will always be unreachable.

MICHIO KAKU 09 November, 2010

One frequent question I get is whether we can break the light barrier—because unless we can break the light barrier, the distant stars will always be unreachable.

Most textbooks say that nothing can go faster than light, but that statement actually should be qualified: The answer is yes, you can break the light barrier, but not in the way we see in the movies. There are, in fact, several ways to travel faster than light:

1. The Big Bang itself expanded much faster than the speed of light. But this only means that "nothing can go faster than light." Since nothing is just empty space or vacuum, it can expand faster than light speed since no material object is breaking the light barrier. Therefore, empty space can certainly expand faster than light.

2. If you wave a flashlight across the night sky, then, in principle, its image can travel faster than light speed (since the beam of light is going from one part of the Universe to another part on the opposite side, which is, in principle, many light years away). The problem here is that no material object is actually moving faster than light. (Imagine that you are surrounded by a giant sphere one light year across. The image from the light beam will eventually hit the sphere one year later. This image that hits the sphere then races across the entire sphere within a matter of seconds, although the sphere is one light year across.) Just the image of the beam as it races across the night sky is moving faster than light, but there is no message, no net information, no material object that actually moves along this image.

3. Quantum entanglement moves faster than light. If I have two electrons close together, they can vibrate in unison, according to the quantum theory. If I then separate them, an invisible umbilical cord emerges which connects the two electrons, even though they may be separated by many light years. If I jiggle one electron, the other electron "senses" this vibration instantly, faster than the speed of light. Einstein thought that this therefore disproved the quantum theory, since nothing can go faster than light.

But actually this experiment (the EPR experiment) has been done many times, and each time Einstein was wrong. Information does go faster than light, but Einstein has the last laugh. This is because the information that breaks the light barrier is random, and hence useless. (For example, let's say a friend always wears one red sock and one green sock. You don't know which leg wears which sock. If you suddenly see that one foot has a red sock, then you know instantly, faster than the speed of light, that the other sock is green. But this information is useless. You cannot send Morse code or usable information via red and green socks.)

4. Negative matter. The most credible way of sending signals faster than light is via negative matter. You can do this either by:

a) compressing the space in front of your and expanding the space behind you, so that you surf on a tidal wave of warped space. You can calculate that this tidal wave travels faster than light if driven by negative matter (an exotic form of matter which has never been seen.)

b) using a wormhole, which is a portal or shortcut through space-time, like the Looking Glass of Alice.

In summary, the only viable way of breaking the light barrier may be through General Relativity and the warping of space time. However, it is not known if negative matter exists, and whether the wormhole will be stable. To solve the question of stability, you need a fully quantum theory of gravity, and the only such theory which can unite gravity with the quantum theory is string theory (which is what I do for a living). Sadly, the theory is so complex that no has been able to fully solve it and give a definitive anwer to all these questions. Maybe someone reading this blog will be inspired to sovle string theory and answer the question whether we can truly break the light barrier.

https://bigthink.com/dr-kakus-universe/what-travels-faster-than-the-speed-of-light

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What is the speed of thought?

Posted by EarthSky Voices in HUMAN
WORLD | SCIENCE WIRE | June 29, 2015

It feels instantaneous, but how long does it really take to think a thought?

By Tim Welsh, University of Toronto

As inquisitive beings, we are constantly questioning and quantifying the speed of various things. With a fair degree of accuracy, scientists have quantified the speed of light, the speed of sound, the speed at which the earth revolves around the sun, the speed at which hummingbirds beat their wings, the average speed of continental drift….

These values are all well-characterized. But what about the speed of thought? It’s a challenging question that’s not easily answerable – but we can give it a shot.

First, some thoughts on thought

To quantify the speed of anything, one needs to identify its beginning and end. For our purposes, a “thought” will be defined as the mental activities engaged from the moment sensory information is received to the moment an action is initiated. This definition necessarily excludes many experiences and processes one might consider to be “thoughts.”

Here, a “thought” includes processes related to perception (determining what is in the environment and where), decision-making (determining what to do) and action-planning (determining how to do it). The distinction between, and independence of, each of these processes is blurry. Further, each of these processes, and perhaps even their sub-components, could be considered “thoughts” on their own. But we have to set our start- and endpoints somewhere to have any hope of tackling the question.

Finally, trying to identify one value for the “speed of thought” is a little like trying to identify one maximum speed for all forms of transportation, from bicycles to rockets. There are many different kinds of thoughts that can vary greatly in timescale. Consider the differences between simple, speedy reactions like the sprinter deciding to run after the crack of the starting pistol (on the order of 150 milliseconds

), and more complex decisions like deciding when to change lanes while driving on a highway or figuring out the appropriate strategy to solve a math problem (on the order of seconds to minutes).

[B]Thoughts are invisible, so what should we measure?[/B]

Thought is ultimately an internal and very individualized process that’s not readily observable. It relies on interactions across complex networks of neurons distributed throughout the peripheral and central nervous systems. Researchers can use imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography, to see what areas of the nervous system are active during different thought processes, and how information flows through the nervous system. We’re still a long way from reliably relating these signals to the mental events they represent, though.

Many scientists consider the best proxy measure of the speed or efficiency of thought processes to be reaction time – the time from the onset of a specific signal to the moment an action is initiated. Indeed, researchers interested in assessing how fast information travels through the nervous system have used reaction time since the mid-1800s. This approach makes sense because thoughts are ultimately expressed through overt actions. Reaction time provides an index of how efficiently someone receives and interprets sensory information, decides what to do based on that information, and plans and initiates an action based on that decision.

[B]Neural factors involved[/B]

The time it takes for all thoughts to occur is ultimately shaped by the characteristics of the neurons and the networks involved. Many things influence the speed at which information flows through the system, but three key factors are:

[B]Distance[/B] – The farther signals need to travel, the longer the reaction time is going to be. Reaction times for movements of the foot are longer than for movements of the hand, in large part because the signals traveling to and from the brain have a longer distance to cover. This principle is readily demonstrated through reflexes (note, however, that reflexes are responses that occur without “thought” because they do not involve neurons that engaged in conscious thought). The key observation for the present purpose is that the same reflexes evoked in taller individuals tend to have longer response times than for shorter individuals. By way of analogy, if two couriers driving to New York leave at the same time and travel at exactly the same speed, a courier leaving from Washington, DC will always arrive before one leaving from Los Angeles.

[B]Neuron characteristics[/B] – The width of the neuron is important. Signals are carried more quickly in neurons with larger diameters than those that are narrower – a courier will generally travel faster on wide multi-lane highways than on narrow country roads.

How much myelination a neuron has is also important. Some nerve cells have myelin cells that wrap around the neuron to provide a type of insulation sheath. The myelin sheath isn’t completely continuous along a neuron; there are small gaps in which the nerve cell is exposed. Nerve signals effectively jump from exposed section to exposed section instead of traveling the full extent of the neuronal surface. So signals move much faster in neurons that have myelin sheaths than in neurons that don’t. The message will get to New York sooner if it passes from cellphone tower to cellphone tower than if the courier drives the message along each and every inch of the road. In the human context, the signals carried by the large-diameter, myelinated neurons that link the spinal cord to the muscles can travel at speeds ranging from 70-120 meters per second (m/s) (156-270 miles per hour[mph]), while signals traveling along the same paths carried by the small-diameter, unmyelinated fibers of the pain receptors travel at speeds ranging from 0.5-2 m/s (1.1-4.4 mph). That’s quite a difference!

[B]Complexity[/B] – Increasing the number of neurons involved in a thought means a greater absolute distance the signal needs to travel – which necessarily means more time. The courier from Washington, DC will take less time to get to New York with a direct route than if she travels to Chicago and Boston along the way. Further, more neurons mean more connections. Most neurons are not in physical contact with other neurons. Instead, most signals are passed via neurotransmitter molecules that travel across the small spaces between the nerve cells called synapses. This process takes more time (at least 0.5 ms per synapse) than if the signal was continually passed within the single neuron. The message carried from Washington, DC will take less time to get to New York if one single courier does the whole route than if multiple couriers are involved, stopping and handing over the message several times along the way. In truth, even the “simplest” thoughts involve multiple structures and hundreds of thousands of neurons.

[B]How quickly it can happen[/B]

It’s amazing to consider that a given thought can be generated and acted on in less than 150 ms. Consider the sprinter at a starting line. The reception and perception of the crack of the starter’s gun, the decision to begin running, issuing of the movement commands, and generating muscle force to start running involves a network that begins in the inner ear and travels through numerous structures of the nervous system before reaching the muscles of the legs. All that can happen in literally half the time of a blink of an eye.

Although the time to initiate a sprint start is extremely short, a variety of factors can influence it. One is the loudness of the auditory “go” signal. Although reaction time tends to decrease as the loudness of the “go” increases, there appears to be a critical point in the range of 120-124 decibels where an additional decrease of approximately 18 ms can occur. That’s because sounds this loud can generate the “startle” response and trigger a pre-planned sprinting response.

Researchers think this triggered response emerges through activation of neural centers in the brain stem. These startle-elicited responses may be quicker because they involve a relatively shorter and less complex neural system – one that does not necessarily require the signal to travel all the way up to the more complex structures of the cerebral cortex. A debate could be had here as to whether or not these triggered responses are “thoughts,” because it can be questioned whether or not a true decision to act was made; but the reaction time differences of these responses illustrate the effect of neural factors such as distance and complexity. Involuntary reflexes, too, involve shorter and simpler circuitry and tend to take less time to execute than voluntary responses.

[B]Perceptions of our thoughts and actions[/B]

Considering how quickly they do happen, it’s little wonder we often feel our thoughts and actions are nearly instantaneous. But it turns out we’re also poor judges of when our actions actually occur.

Although we’re aware of our thoughts and the resulting movements, an interesting dissociation has been observed between the time we think we initiate a movement and when that movement actually starts. In studies, researchers ask volunteers to watch a second hand rotate around a clock face and to complete a simple rapid finger or wrist movement, such as a key press, whenever they liked. After the clock hand had completed its rotation, the people were asked to identify where the hand was on the clock face when they started their own movement.

Surprisingly, people typically judge the onset of their movement to occur 75-100 ms prior to when it actually began. This difference cannot be accounted for simply by the time it takes for the movement commands to travel from the brain to the arm muscles (which is on the order of 16-25 ms). It’s unclear exactly why this misperception occurs, but it’s generally believed that people base their judgment of movement onset on the time of the decision to act and the prediction of the upcoming movement, instead of on the movement itself. These and other findings raise important questions about the planning and control of action and our sense of agency and control in the world – because our decision to act and our perception of when we act appear to be distinct from when we in fact do.

In sum, although quantifying a single “speed of thought” may never be possible, analyzing the time it takes to plan and complete actions provides important insights into how efficiently the nervous system completes these processes, and how changes associated with movement and cognitive disorders affect the efficiency of these mental activities.

Tim Welsh is Professor of Kinesiology and Physical Education at University of Toronto.

[URL="https://earthsky.org/human-world/what-is-the-speed-of-thought"]https://earthsky.org/human-world/what-is-the-speed-of-thought[/URL]

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

[url]https://theconversation.com/it-feels-instantaneous-but-how-long-does-it-really-take-to-think-a-thought-42392[/url]

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[B]Physicist suggests speed of light might be slower than thought[/B]

by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

(Phys.org) —Physicist James Franson of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has captured the attention of the physics community by posting an article to the peer-reviewed New Journal of Physics in which he claims to have found evidence that suggests the speed of light as described by the theory of general relativity, is actually slower than has been thought.

The theory of general relativity suggests that light travels at a constant speed of 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum. It's the c in Einstein's famous equation after all, and virtually everything measured in the cosmos is based on it—in short, it's pretty important. But, what if it's wrong?

Franson's arguments are based on observations made of the supernova SN 1987A–it exploded in February 1987. Measurements here on Earth picked up the arrival of both photons and neutrinos from the blast but there was a problem—the arrival of the photons was later than expected, by 4.7 hours. Scientists at the time attributed it to a likelihood that the photons were actually from another source. But what if that wasn't what it was, Franson wonders, what if light slows down as it travels due to a property of photons known as vacuum polarization—where a photon splits into a positron and an electron, for a very short time before recombining back into a photon. That should create a gravitational differential, he notes, between the pair of particles, which, he theorizes, would have a tiny energy impact when they recombine—enough to cause a slight bit of a slowdown during travel. If such splitting and rejoining occurred many times with many photons on a journey of 168,000 light years, the distance between us and SN 1987A, it could easily add up to the 4.7 hour delay, he suggests.

If Franson's ideas turn out to be correct, virtually every measurement taken and used as a basis for cosmological theory, will be wrong. Light from the sun for example, would take longer to reach us than thought, and light coming from much more distant objects, such as from the Messier 81 galaxy, a distance of 12 million light years, would arrive noticeably later than has been calculated—about two weeks later. The implications are staggering—distances for celestial bodies would have to be recalculated and theories that were created to describe what has been observed would be thrown out. In some cases, astrophysicists would have to start all over from scratch.

[url]https://phys.org/news/2014-06-physicist-slower-thought.html[/url]

 

[Joe Mahmood]

CHORD OVERSTREET - HOLD ON

https://youtu.be/8ofCZObsnOo

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1st January 2021

After you die, your brain knows you’re dead, terrifying study reveals

By Andrea Downey, The Sun
October 19, 2017 | 11:55am | Updated


Have you ever wondered what happens when you die?

You’ve probably heard about how those who have died and come back to life say they saw light at the end of a tunnel.

Or that they floated above their bodies, watching as doctors frantically worked to keep them alive.

But until now, it was not known if the mind kept working after the body died.

Just like the remake of the ’90s cult horror “Flatliners,” starring Ellen Page, scientists have discovered that a person’s consciousness continues to work after they have died.

In the film, a group of young doctors conducts a dangerous experiment to see what happens in the afterlife by taking turns stopping their hearts.

Dr. Sam Parnia and her team from New York University Langone School of Medicine had the same question.

They set out to find the answer in a much less dangerous fashion, looking at studies in Europe and the US on people who have suffered cardiac arrest and “come back to life.”

“They’ll describe watching doctors and nurses working and they’ll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them,” Parnia told Live Science.

Their recollections were also verified by medical staff who reported their patients could remember the details.

Death, in a medical sense, is when the heart stops beating and cuts off blood to the brain.

This means the brain’s functions also stop and can no longer keep the body alive.

Parnia explained that the brain’s cerebral cortex — the so-called “thinking part” of the brain — also slows down instantly, and flatlines, meaning that no brainwaves are visible on an electric monitor, within 2 to 20 seconds.

This eventually results in the death of the brain.

Parnia and his colleagues are also observing how the brain reacts during a cardiac arrest to determine how much of these experiences relate to brain activity.

“At the same time, we also study the human mind and consciousness in the context of death, to understand whether consciousness becomes annihilated or whether it continues after you’ve died for some period of time — and how that relates to what’s happening inside the brain in real time,” he said.

It is not the first time brain activity after death has been recorded.

In March, doctors at a Canadian intensive care unit discovered that one person had persistent brain activity for up to 10 minutes after they turned off their life support machine, but three others did not.

For more than 10 minutes after the medics declared the person clinically dead, brain waves, like those we experience in our sleep, continued to occur.

The researchers also found the experience of death can be very different for individual patients.

Each patient recorded different electroencephalographic results — the electrical activity in the brain — both before and after death.

https://nypost.com/2017/10/19/after..._medium=referral&utm_campaign=zergnet_5809560

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20th February 2021

What Near-Death Experiences Teach Us About the Brain

New research may shake up science’s understanding of the brain and consciousness

The truck driver’s story sounded far-fetched.

The man claimed that in the middle of his quadruple bypass heart surgery — during which he was fully anesthetized and his eyes were taped shut — he had “come to” and found that he was looking down at his own body and the doctors preparing to operate on it. He described the scene in detail, and he recalled that his surgeon had waved his elbows in the air as if he were mimicking a bird flapping its wings.

Later, when asked about his patient’s peculiar account, the truck driver’s surgeon confirmed that he had indeed waved his elbows in the air. He explained that, in order to avoid contaminating his gloved hands before a procedure, he would place his palms on his chest and point with his elbows — an uncommon practice that his patient couldn’t have seen or anticipated.
Bruce Greyson, MD, is a professor of psychiatric medicine at the University of Virginia. In his new book, After, he describes the truck driver’s near-death experience (NDE) and many others like it. Greyson spoke with both the truck driver and with his surgeon, and he tried to pin down the source of the man’s uncanny recollections. But his efforts only deepened the mystery of the man’s apparent out-of-body perceptions.

After studying NDEs for decades, Greyson says that much of what he’s learned has been hard to square with prevailing notions of how the mind and brain work. “Our common assumption is that the mind, or consciousness, is just what the brain does,” he says. In other words, the mind and the brain are one and the same. They’re inseparable. “There’s a lot of evidence for this,” he adds. “When you get drunk or you get hit on the head, you don’t think very well.”
But, paradoxically, NDEs often occur when the brain is heavily disabled or even measurably inactive. “The evidence we have from NDEs seems to suggest that the mind and brain can dissociate under extreme circumstances,” he says. “Somehow, the mind can continue to function when the brain seems to stop.”

“People who have had both an NDE and a psychedelic drug trip say that they are not the same experience. The accurate out-of-body perceptions — you don’t have those with drug trips.”

What we know about NDEs

For one thing, they’re surprisingly commonplace. Estimates vary, but most research efforts have found that somewhere between 10% and 20% of people who come close to death — for example, they suffer a perilous accident, or their heart stops — say that they experienced one or more features of an NDE.
For a 2014 study in the journal Resuscitation, researchers found that roughly one in 10 people who survived a cardiac arrest episode reported an NDE. Furthermore, 2% of these survivors were able to recall some of what was happening as doctors worked to save them — recollections that the study’s authors could not explain.

NDE’s are not only common, but their features are also fairly consistent. The sense of floating above one’s body, and also the ability to recall in detail events that took place during periods of apparent unconsciousness, are not rare. Some other distinctive features of NDEs include an awareness of being dead or near death, a surge of pleasant or euphoric sensations, the perception of time slowing down, encounters with god-like entities or deceased loved ones, and lucid recall of memories — almost like a detailed highlight reel of one’s life.

Not all of these experiences are unique to NDEs. Some researchers have drawn parallels between near-death experiences and REM sleep disturbances, which can likewise induce vivid hallucinations and out-of-body sensations. Other experts have highlighted the apparent overlap between NDEs and the experience of taking psychedelic drugs such as ketamine and N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Like NDEs, these drugs can induce the sensation of leaving or transcending one’s body, of time slowing down, and of perceiving or communicating with supernatural entities.

Some have pointed to these parallels as evidence that, while bizarre, NDEs are surely the output of neurochemical processes or other conventional brain operations. “Near-death experiences are the manifestation of normal brain function gone awry,” wrote the authors of a 2011 study in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

While this seems almost self-evident, Greyson disagrees with this conclusion. He says that scientists who take this view tend to simply ignore the many documented NDEs in which people describe, in startling detail, events that took place around them during periods of unconsciousness. “People who have had both an NDE and a psychedelic drug trip say that they are not the same experience,” he adds. “The accurate out-of-body perceptions — you don’t have those with drug trips.”

Far from establishing that NDEs can be firmly tied to the brain, he says that the research on psychedelics leads one in a different direction. “Studies on psychedelics consistently show that the more elaborate mystical experiences are associated with decreased brain activity, not increased, which is the opposite of what you’d expect,” he explains. He also brings up a documented phenomenon known as terminal lucidity, in which people who have severe brain disorders — such as those with end-stage dementia — somehow regain their ability to communicate, to remember, and to think clearly shortly before they die. These are people who have brains that are sometimes visibly ravaged and disfigured by neurological illness. “There’s no medical explanation for how they can regain lucidity,” he says.

All this evidence has led him and others to consider alternative explanations for NDEs — including some that fundamentally challenge the relationship between the brain and the mind.

If consciousness is not a product of the brain, then where exactly does it come from?

The brain as a ‘filter’ for consciousness

If NDEs are not the result of “normal brain function gone awry,” what are they?

Greyson says one theory is that the brain, rather than creating consciousness, is more like a filter for conscious experience — a filter that blocks out some information while letting other bits through. He says it’s possible that, during an NDE, the brain’s filtering ability may “break down” in a way that somehow allows consciousness to expand.

Other researchers are more vociferous proponents of this filtering theory. When it comes to consciousness, “our brain has a facilitating function, not a producing function,” says Pim van Lommel, MD, a Dutch cardiologist, NDE researcher, and author of Consciousness Beyond Life.

Van Lommel says that contemporary neuroscience regards activity in the brain — and, specifically, in the brain’s cerebral cortex — as a “necessary condition” of conscious experience. And yet for people who experience NDEs during cardiac arrest, research has found that consciousness seems to persist — and even broaden — despite an absence of measurable brain activity.

All of this is controversial, to say the least. But if consciousness is not a product of the brain, then where exactly does it come from? While Greyson punts — “I don’t have an answer for that,” he says — van Lommel proposes a theory that he and others have termed “nonlocal consciousness.” The gist is that consciousness comes from “informational fields” that exist outside of our minds and bodies — and even outside of time and space. In some of his published work, he compares the brain to a television set; just as a TV can convert electromagnetic waves of information into sights and sounds, perhaps the brain and body are mere conduits for consciousness. This, he says, could explain many of the features of NDEs that science’s current conceptions of the brain fail to elucidate.

Many scientists surely scoff at van Lommel’s ideas or dismiss them out of hand. But Greyson doesn’t. He also doesn’t endorse them. He says that his research on NDEs has taught him to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty — especially when it comes to the human mind.

“I think we’re still at the very beginning of understanding the brain and what it does,” he says. “In 100 years, I think people are going to look back at today’s models and laugh at how naive we were.”

https://elemental.medium.com/what-near-death-experiences-teach-us-about-the-brain-c09a3430bcf9

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20th February 2021

DR. PIM VAN LOMMEL INTERVIEW BY LILOU MACE

https://pimvanlommel.nl/en/media/interview-mace/

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3rd March 2021

BEYOND DEATH - THE STORY OF GOD WITH MORGAN FREEMAN

https://youtu.be/wZORPVmXN7k

 

[Joe Mahmood]

BRIAN MACFADDEN FT. DELTA GOODREM - ALMOST HERE

 

[Joe Mahmood]

SAM FISCHER - I GOT TO LIVE

 

[Joe Mahmood]

KARMINA - ALL THE KING'S HORSES

 

[Joe Mahmood]

EVANESCENCE - USE MY VOICE

https://youtu.be/1KAa5woluuM


1st December 2020

THE INFINITE MONKEY THEOREM

This theorem states that a group of monkeys typing at random on a typewriter for an infinite period of time will almost surely end up writing any given book from the French National Library. In a different way of posing the theory, popular among Anglophones, the monkeys could write the works of William Shakespeare. In this context, the term "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the monkey is a metaphor for the creation of random sequence of letters.

The original idea was formulated by the mathematician Emile Hotel (1871 - 1956) in his article Mecanique statistique et irreversibilite, published in 1913. Borel proposed that if a million monkeys typed 10 hours a day, it was extremely unlikely that they could produce something equal to the content of the books of the world's richest libraries and yet, by comparison, it would be even more likely that the laws of statistics would be violated, even slightly. For Borel, the purpose of the metaphor of the monkeys was to illustrate the magnitude of an extremely unlikely event.

In the 1970s, it was proposed that the time range imagined be extended to infinity, making it an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite time interval. However, insisting on both infinites is excessive - a single immortal monkey that infinitely types on a typewriter could be enough to formulate the theorem.

Surprisingly, there have been several practical experiments that aimed to bring this theory to life. One of the most famous attempts was carried out in 2003 by a group of scientists in Paignton Zoo and the University of Plymouth (England) by placing a computer keyboard in a cage with six crested black macaques for a month. Not only did the monkeys produce five pages consisting of a long series of the letters g, s and q, but the monkeys took to stoning and defecating on the keyboard.

Emile Borel was a pioneer of measure theory and its application to the theory of probability. His research on game theory also stands out.

Extracted from SECRETS OF INFINITY by Editor: Antonio Lamua

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1st December 2020

INSPIRATION

Definition of inspiration

1: an inspiring agent or influence

2a: the quality or state of being inspired
b: something that is inspired
a scheme that was pure inspiration

3: the act of drawing in
specifically : the drawing of air into the lungs

4a: a divine influence or action on a person believed to qualify him or her to receive and communicate sacred revelation
b: the action or power of moving the intellect or emotions
c: the act of influencing or suggesting opinions

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inspiration

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29th December 2020

Meet Bunny, the TikTok famous 'talking' dog, who uses buttons to speak to her owner. Scientists are observing her to learn more about our pets' secret lives.

Joshua Zitser

Dec 27, 2020, 6:36 AM


* Bunny, a dog who can communicate using sound-making buttons, has over 5.7 million followers on TikTok.

* Her owner, Alexis Devine, frequently posts videos showing her dog 'talking' to her.

* Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, are observing Bunny to see whether pets can express themselves in language-like ways.

* In addition to Bunny, 1300 other dogs are being examined as part of the TheyCanTalk study.

* So far, the project's lead scientist has described some of their discoveries as "exciting" and as having exceeded his expectations.

On a sunny July afternoon, Bunny — a 1-year-old Poodle mix —had just returned from a walk with her owner in Tacoma, Washington. As she often does, Bunny was hovering around her language board, eyeing up the sound-making buttons.

The black-and-white dog then pressed a button, which immediately sounded the word "mad." "Why mad?" asked Alexis Devine — Bunny's 40-year-old owner. The dog then moved to press the 'ouch' button. Devine, skeptically, proceeded to ask: "Where is your ouch?"

After a few moments of hesitation, Bunny walked over to a new button. "Stranger," it chimed. Soon after that, she sounded the 'paw' button.

Devine pieced together this information – mad, ouch, stranger, paw. She decided to investigate further.

She called over her pet and began to examine Bunny's foot. To her amazement, lodged in between Bunny's toes was a foxtail – an invasive cluster of grass that can penetrate the skin of dogs and occasionally requires surgery.

"When Bunny told me 'stranger, paw,' I knew that there was a foreign object there. I was able to look and remove it before it required medical attention," Devine told Insider.

"Any time she's able to tell me she's in pain, specifically where she's in pain, I'm totally gobsmacked," continued Devine. "It's incredible."

Devine isn't the only person amazed by these human-like 'conversations' between a pet and its owner. 5.7 million people now follow Bunny's TikTok account, commenting their astonishment at the dog's apparent ability to communicate.

Quickly, Bunny and Devine built a dedicated fanbase. Just a month after setting up the account in June, they had accumulated over one million followers and tens of millions of likes.

Bunny's early viral videos show the Sheepadoodle using a handful of simple buttons to communicate with Devine. In them, Bunny presses 'love you' and 'outside' in an attempt to converse with her owner.

Christina Hunger, a speech therapist from San Diego, is credited with being the pioneer behind this innovative way of getting pets to communicate. Having been inspired by her work doing speech therapy with toddlers, she was eager to see if dogs could also similarly express themselves with words.

Writing on her blog, Hunger said: "When I brought my new puppy Stella home, I realized she demonstrated many of the same pre-linguistic communication skills as toddlers do right before they start talking, which is when I was struck with an idea!"

Hunger's idea was to start using an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) board with her dog. The AAC device is an organized 'hex board' of interlocking tiles, featuring various individual buttons that represent and vocalize specific words.

Relatively quickly, her two-year-old dog started using the device to sound out words and even seemingly form phrases up to five-words-long.

Devine, astonished by Stella's progress, "devoured" Hunger's blog and purchased a couple of simple buttons for Bunny to try out. "I added a few more buttons with velcro to a plywood board and then kept on expanding," she told Insider.

It was after that she decided to broadcast Bunny's progress on social media. Devine was then contacted by a cognitive scientist who approached her about an AAC prototype that was now being produced by FluentPet.

In exchange for the AAC board, Devine agreed to have Bunny monitored by a team at the University of California, San Diego.

The prototype was delivered and numerous cameras were installed around her living room to monitor Bunny's behavior.

Bunny's observation is part of the TheyCanTalk study, a project led by scientists from CleverPet and UC San Diego's Comparative Cognition Lab. Leo Trottier, Cleverpet's Founder, and UC San Diego's Dr. Federico Rossano are examining Bunny to determine whether dogs can actually 'talk.'

The research uses a scientific approach to determine whether, and if so, how and how much animals can express themselves in language-like ways.

Rossano, a linguist who had studied non-human communication with primates, was skeptical when first approached about the study.

Six months in, he's astonished by some of his team's observations. Rossano told Insider: "What we've seen is that once the dogs understand several buttons, they're able to begin producing multi-button combinations. We're already seeing six-button combinations, which is, to be perfectly honest, more than I expected."

Bunny, the star of the project, is one of 1300 dogs participating. "We also know that several dogs are using over 20 buttons," he added.

Rossano continued: "It's very exciting to see and we're now trying to determine to what degree those multi-button combinations are systematic."

This isn't the only observation that has taken the TheyCanTalk team by surprise. One discovery wasn't even modeled for in the initial experiment but suggested that dogs might have an intellect that far exceeds current expectations.

"There are several instances we've seen in the data set where you have dogs referring to things they're not familiar with using expressions that appear to convey some productivity abilities," Rossano explained. "This is when dogs find ways to refer to things they don't specifically have words for in a creative way."

Bunny has demonstrated an ability to do this in many of her TikTok videos.

Devine said: "One time on the beach, we saw a baby seal. Bunny was wagging her tail and looked so curious. When she came home, she pressed 'water' and 'hippo."

She continued: "Then, another time, we were walking in the park and saw a deer on our trail. She came home and pressed 'cat' and 'hippo.'"

Rossano reflected on this, telling Insider: "This is really creative. Bunny is using a combination of words that capture the features of an animal's appearance. She's trying to find ways to refer to things she doesn't have the words for in a creative way."

Another area that sparked the TheyCanTalk team's interest is the "clarity" with which dogs seem to be able to share their emotions. Rossano said: "There are some dogs sharing their emotional view, whether they're mad, happy, or in pain."

"We didn't expect the kind of clarity that seems to be emerging in some of these situations," he added.

This finding, according to Rossano, is potentially momentous. It could have a "humongous" impact on animal welfare and how we look after our pets.

"For me, a lot of the research is about trying to understand animal cognition to show that these animals are smarter than we have previously thought. They have emotions, abilities, experiences, and a life that is worth acknowledging," he said.

Rossano continued: "Many animals are underappreciated for their intelligence and because of that, we do things to them that we shouldn't be doing — inhumane things. Through this study, we're trying to enhance the wellbeing of dogs by making their needs more understandable to humans."

Devine agrees. "I think there are some people who think of their pets as some sort of fluffy potato," she said. "If after this research people can start looking at their animals as these sentient creatures with complex cognitions, it could completely change our relationships with animals. I think that would be wonderful."

Taking part in the study has also changed Devine's relationship with Bunny. "I think this has really strengthened our bond," she said. "Bunny's a miraculous little creature."

https://www.insider.com/tiktoks-tal...ists-studying-canine-intelligence-2020-12?amp

 

[Joe Mahmood]

12 STONES - WORLD SO COLD

 

[Joe Mahmood]

THREE DAYS GRACE - WORLD SO COLD

 

[Joe Mahmood]

ANBERLIN - THE UNWINDING CABLE CAR

 

[Joe Mahmood]

TRAVIS - SIDE

https://youtu.be/VK3Q4SLVkAU

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9th March 2021

The term "foo fighter" was used by Allied aircraft pilots during World War II to describe various UFOs or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over both the European and Pacific theaters of operations.

Though "foo fighter" initially described a type of UFO reported and named by the U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron, the term was also commonly used to mean any UFO sighting from that period. Formally reported from November 1944 onwards, witnesses often assumed that the foo fighters were secret weapons employed by the enemy.

The Robertson Panel explored possible explanations, for instance that they were electrostatic phenomena similar to St. Elmo's fire, electromagnetic phenomena, or simply reflections of light from ice crystals.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter

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9th March 2021

UPDATED: JAN 15, 2020 | ORIGINAL: AUG 15, 2018

Mysterious UFOs Seen by WWII Airman Still Unexplained

They were cigar-shaped, glowed red and could turn on a dime. Which ruled out even the most sophisticated rockets of the time.

BY ADAM JANOS

It was nearly the end of World War II. But for the airmen of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, it felt more like the beginning of War of the Worlds.

Lt. Fred Ringwald was the first to see it. He was riding as observer in a night fighter piloted by Lt. Ed Schlueter, with Lt. Donald J. Meiers on radar. It was a late November evening in 1944, partly cloudy with a quarter moon. They were roaming the Rhine Valley just north of Strasbourg on the French-German border when Ringwald said, “I wonder what those lights are, over there in the hills,” according to an American Legion Magazine story on the sightings from 1945.

There were eight to 10 of them in a row, glowing fiery orange. Then Schlueter saw them off his right wing. They checked with Allied ground radar, but they registered nothing. Thinking that the lights might be some kind of German air weapon, Schlueter turn the plane to fight…only to have the lights vanish.

At first the men said nothing, fearing they’d be ostracized. But then the sightings spread through the unit.

More crews, more sightings

On December 17, 1944, near Breisach, Germany, a pilot was flying at approximately 800 feet when he saw “5 or 6 flashing red and green lights in ’T’ shape.” The lights seemed to follow him, closing in “to about 8 o’clock and 1,000 ft.” before disappearing as inexplicably as they came.

Then on December 22nd, two more flight crews sighted lights. One crew, near Hagenau, reported two lights in a large orange glow, seeming to rise from the earth to 10,000 feet, tailing the fighter “for approximately two minutes.” After that, the lights, “peel off and turn away, fly along level for a few minutes and then go out. They appear to be under perfect control at all times,” according to Keith Chester’s Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOs in World War II.

And then there was Lt. Samuel A. Krasney’s experience: a wingless cigar-shape object, glowing red, just a few yards off the plane’s wingtip. Lt. Krasney, justifiably spooked, instructed the pilot to attempt evasive maneuvers, but the glowing object stayed right next to the jet for several minutes before it “flew off and disappeared.”

Eventually, the airmen named the lights: foo fighters, inspired by the comic strip “Smokey Stover,” in which Smokey (a firefighter) would often declare, “Where there’s foo, there’s fire.”

The ‘combat fatigue’ explanation

An Associated Press reporter broke news of the foo-fighter sightings on January 1st, 1945, and theories about their origins quickly abounded: The sightings were flares, or weather balloons or St. Elmo’s Fire—a phenomenon where a light appears on the tips of objects in stormy weather. But the members of the 415th rejected all those theories. Flares and weather balloons can’t track planes like these objects could, and they’d seen St. Elmo’s fire and could distinguish the two.

Then there were those who claimed that the airmen were suffering from “combat fatigue,” a polite way of saying that war stress was driving them insane. But there was scant evidence to suggest collective psychosis: The 415th had an otherwise excellent record, and when a reporter for American Legion Magazine went to report on the squadron he described them as “very normal airmen, whose primary interest was combat, and after that came pin-up girls, poker, doughnuts and the derivatives of the grape.”

Lt. Krasney’s son, Keith Krasney, says his late father didn’t fit the stereotypical profile of a UFO theorizer. In fact, he never even suggested that the glowing wingless cigar-like object that flew next to his plane was extraterrestrial in origin.

“He was very level-headed, very analytical,” says Krasney of his father, adding that he kept a notebook where he wrote about (and drew) his foo-fighter sighting. But although he never seemed prone to conspiracy theories, Krasney says his father was open to one: “He entertained the idea that it could be late-breaking German technology. He did express the view that there were a lot of things during the war that were kept quiet.”

Was it the work of Nazi astrophysicists?

Holding Nazi Germany responsible for the flying glowing orbs isn’t too far-fetched. For one thing, the sightings took place over Nazi-occupied Europe, at a time when Germany’s Luftwaffe was making tremendous strides. Then there’s the fact that the sightings stopped once the German army was defeated.

But the most compelling link to the foo fighters might be Wernher von Braun, a 32-year-old wunderkind rocket engineer. Von Braun helped the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket: a long-range guided ballistic missile that Hitler was using in 1944 against Belgium and other parts of Allied Europe. It’s not to hard imagine pilots—unfamiliar with long-range ballistics—comparing these rockets to a cigar-like wingless planes. The V-2 could even explain the glow, since its tail emitted a long burning plume.

Nicholas Veronico, an author who has written several books on military aviation history, says that explanation comes up short.

“The V-2 rocket doesn’t have the maneuverability,” he says. “It couldn’t turn on a dime and change its acceleration pattern. Once it started burning, it burned and produced thrust at one rating.”

Nothing in Nazi Germany’s military-aviation arsenal can explain the foo-fighter description, Veronico says. One airman’s observation from the time—that the foo fighters follow the fighters so closely as to seem almost magnetized to them—is particularly confounding, given that “there just wasn’t the propulsion or metallurgical technology that could enable something like that.”

And yet von Braun’s career after World War II is worth considering. Following the collapse of the Third Reich, the engineer was recruited to be part of Operation Paperclip, a clandestine U.S. military program that spared 1,600 Nazi scientists prosecution for war crimes, moving them instead into the American military, where their past was whitewashed to the public.

By 1952, von Braun had reinvented himself as a space-flight advocate, writing a piece that year in Collier’s magazine declaring that “within the next 10 or 15 years, the earth will have a new companion in the skies, a man-made satellite that could be either the greatest force for peace ever devised, or one of the most terrible weapons of war—depending on who makes and controls it.” His prediction proved overly conservative: The Soviets launched Sputnik 1 only five years later. Von Braun helped the U.S. Army launch Explorer 1 shortly thereafter. By 1960 he was with NASA, where he became the chief architect on Saturn V—the rocket that sent Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew to the moon.

As von Braun recast himself as an American patriot, his career in the Nazi party shadowed him, an ambiguous secret that reporters would playfully poke at. At one press conference before one Apollo launch, a reporter asked von Braun to assure the press that the rocket wouldn’t hit London. But they could never prove his involvement, and it was only in 1985—several years after von Braun’s death—that CNN broke news of the full extent of the aerospace engineer’s Nazi past, more than 40 years after the fact.

Veronico hopes the foo-fighter narrative will follow a similar trajectory.

“The fantasy is that 100 years after the war, the U.S. or Soviets will release information about what they captured, and it’ll blow all our minds. But I think they would’ve capitalized on it by this point,” the historian says. “Or weaponized it.”

https://www.history.com/news/wwii-ufos-allied-airmen-orange-lights-foo-fighters

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9th March 2021

Multiple UFOs Spotted Trailing Jet in Taiwan; Conspiracy Theorist Calls it Proof of Aliens

After analyzing the mysterious UFO footage, Waring concluded that sightings like these are irrefutable proof of alien existence.

By Nirmal Narayanan
February 7, 2021 01:30 +08

A creepy video shot by an airplane passenger from the skies of Taiwan is now the hottest debating point among conspiracy theorists and alien believers.

In the video shot from the airplane's window, multiple flying objects can be seen trailing the passenger flight. Interestingly, these unidentified flying objects (UFO) seem glowing, and all of them appeared like orbs.

UFO Sighting Baffles Eyewitness

After capturing the eerie incident on camera, the eyewitness soon handed it over to MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), a US-based non-profit organization composed of civilian volunteers who study reported UFO sightings. In the testimonial shared, the eyewitness who wished to remain anonymous claimed that he was traveling from Vancouver, Canada, to Taipei in Eva Airlines. Even though the UFO sighting happened years ago, the clip was released just recently, and it has already captured public attention.

Self-Styled Alien Hunter Analyzes UFO Footage

The video was later analyzed by popular conspiracy theorist Scott C Waring, who is currently operating from Taiwan. After analyzing the UFO footage, Waring assured that this clip could be proof of alien existence on earth. Waring also claimed that the objects spotted by the airplane passengers could be most probably foo fighters. Interestingly, stories regarding foo fighters are very popular among conspiracy theorists, and they believe that these orb-like flying objects developed by aliens used to follow human airplanes since the time of World War I.

"Although this is a video from 2014, it shows something that's all too rare nowadays. Foo fighters! And a whole fleet of them to boot. There are at least nine of these white orbs, but probably three times more due to the eyewitness unable to see directly below, in front of, behind, or to the opposite side of the plane. So what we see is just a small sample of the entire Foo Fighter fleet," wrote Waring on his website UFO Sightings Daily.

A similar incident happened above the Indian ocean recently when a Pakistani pilot spotted a UFO, and he even captured the event on camera. The video soon went viral, but until now, neither the airport authorities nor the government has given a convincing explanation.

"It could either have been hovering or moving slowly (difficult to tell due relative motion). Cell phone cameras were put in action fat to capture the object. After landing was found out that it had been seen/filmed in different areas as well," said the pilot who witnessed the sighting.

https://www.ibtimes.sg/multiple-ufo...nspiracy-theorist-calls-it-proof-aliens-55406

 

[Joe Mahmood]

HURTS - ALL I HAVE TO GIVE

 

[Joe Mahmood]

MATT BERNINGER - ONE MORE SECOND

 

[Joe Mahmood]

ILLENIUM, JON BELLION - GOOD THINGS FALL APART





4th May 2021
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...roid-2021-earth-nasa-simulation-b1841219.html
7th July 2021
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/art...steroid-impact-couldnt-stop-it-hitting-europe
7th July 2021
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/sci...se-rockets-could-save-world-doomsday-asteroid