“Are they dreaming?” Recent footage shows an octopus changing color while it SLEEPS

It astounds me that people believe that animals do not feel, do not dream, and are not sentient. Humans are not the center of the universe anymore.

Source

Natural News

by: Edsel Cook

Saturday, July 20, 2019

Do octopuses experience dreams? A viral video of an octopus changing its color during its slumber brought up interesting questions about the neural activity in its many “brains” during sleep periods.

Octopuses can alter the color and texture of their skin in the blink of an eye. Sometimes, they rely on their color-changing capability to conceal themselves from predators and prey alike.

Other times, they communicate their intentions to others of their kind through colorful displays. But recent footage of a sleeping octopus showed that the animal could also change color unconsciously.

First posted on Twitter in 2018, the video starred a Caribbean two-spot octopus (Octopus hummelincki) in a brightly lit aquarium at the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, Colorado. The footage got recorded by Rebecca Otey, an intern at the zoo, back in 2017.

Normally, octopuses look for a secluded spot where they might sleep undisturbed. In this rare instance, the octopus felt either safe or tired enough to doze out in the open water.

As it slept, the color of its skin shifted from its normal white to the exact opposite before returning to a light coloration.

Octopuses can change their colors, but they are also colorblind

The beginning of the clip showed the octopus in a pearly white state. As the seconds ticked by, grey markings formed on its skin in line with its breathing patterns.

Eventually, most of its body adopted a speckled brown color before it returned to its paler scheme. During the entire time, the octopus remained asleep, as evidenced by its tightly shut eyes.

The chromatophores of the octopus are responsible for this and other changes in color. By altering their size through expansion or contraction, the highly developed pigment cells change the colors of the skin and form intricate patterns across the body.

Interestingly, Butterfly Pavilion researcher Sara Stevens pointed out that octopuses happen to be colorblind. Their eyes cannot detect the colors they are trying to copy.

Instead, they have specialized cells called iridophores and leucophores. These structures sense colors on their behalf, and octopuses adjust their chromatophores accordingly.

“The exact processes of how they match colors is still not fully understood, though it’s being very thoroughly studied,” Stevens explained in an interview. “But current research suggests that the actual cells themselves can match colors.”

Do octopus dream of electric-green leaf sheep?

Octopuses and other cephalopods typically changed their coloration in reaction to their environment. Since the octopus in the video was asleep, experts wondered if it dreamed – and if its dream prompted the shift in color.

Researchers have grown more interested in the sleep and dreaming of cephalopods in recent years. A 2012 study by Washington State University (WSU) researchers showed that sleeping cuttlefish displayed rapid eye movement (REM).

In humans, REM sleep leads to dreams. In cuttlefish, this stage of sleep causes the color of their skin to shift at random.

“It’s been hypothesized that octopus species can exhibit something very similar to REM cycles in humans — but the jury’s still out on whether they’re achieving REM sleep,” explained Stevens.

An octopus lacks the central nervous system of vertebrates like humans. Instead, it has large groups of nerve cells in each of its eight tentacles.

These eight “brains” give an octopus incredible control over its body, including its chromatophores. But it seems that the animal doesn’t always assume direct control of its color-changing cells.

Researchers like Stevens continue to wonder if these fascinating animals dream. Some even dare hope that octopuses dream of electric-green leaf sheep.

Sources include:

LiveScience.com

AtlasObscura.com

Journals.PLOS.org

Reefs.com

The total number of minds in the universe is one

Tao & Zen

Anil Seth: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality (17 min)

TED

Published on 18 Jul 2017

Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience — and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we’re all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it “reality.” Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.

 

 

Graham Hancock Recently Drank Ayahuasca and Returned with this Important Message for Humanity

Source: Source link

Waking Times

Vic Bishop, Staff Writer

December 11, 2018

“…the time has come to awaken from this nightmare of our own making and remember the truth about ourselves.” ~Graham Hancock

Such chaotic and divisive times these are. Corruption, stress and strife are chipping away at our happiness, clouding our purpose, and keeping us from re-connecting to what it means to be part of the human family.

But there is a messenger of truth in this world, found in the Amazonian shamanic plant medicine ayahuasca. It has a unique way of challenging those who have the courage to look deep within and attempt reconcile the real you with the person whom you pretend to be. In this is the power to transform into your greatest self, and when the individual awakens and transforms, then we can have hope for the world.

Author and researcher Graham Hancock has been a leader in the global movement to expand consciousness, and after taking a three year break from drinking ayahuasca due to unrelated health concerns, he recently returned to ceremony, leaving us with a hopeful note about the condition of the human race on planet earth.

Here he reflects on the incredible transformative power of ayahuasca, pointing out that it has the profound capacity to remind us of who we really are.

A Message to Humanity

From Graham Hancock’s blog, December 1st, 2018:

I have witnessed the almost miraculous effects that Ayahuasca has had on many members of our group during this week. There have been such profound realisations, such life-changing and life-affirming experiences, such beauty, such joy and such love. It is as though my closest family has suddenly expanded to encompass this wonderful new soul family that I have been integrated with through the enchantment of the brew and the magic of the ceremonies. There are people here from many different walks of life and from many different nations and ethnicities and what we have all found is the common ground that unites us.

Would it could be so, always, for the entire human family! There is so much division in the world today, so much hatred, so much fear, so much suspicion and so much greed that our species seems close to tearing itself apart and rendering the Earth uninhabitable in the process.

What fools we are to allow such a state of affairs to persist, and to allow politicians and religious mis-leaders – for their own short-term gain — to divide us from one another in order to rule us.

Brothers and sisters, wherever we are, no matter on which land or under which political or religious system chance brought us to be born, the time has come to awaken from this nightmare of our own making and remember the truth about ourselves — that we are all members of one family, no matter how widely scattered, that none of us have the slightest justification to claim superiority over any other, and that we all share the same hopes, fears, courage, fragility and capacity for love.

United we stand. It is just plain madness to continue to allow ourselves to be divided and defined by the artificial barriers of nation, race or creed. We must remember our common humanity, remember that we are one family, and put that realisation first before all other considerations if our species is to survive the challenges of the coming years and return once again to being good stewards of this precious garden of a planet.

Read more articles by Vic Bishop.

About the Author

Vic Bishop is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com. He is an observer of people, animals, nature, and he loves to ponder the connection and relationship between them all. A believer in always striving to becoming self-sufficient and free from the matrix, please track him down on Facebook.

Could Consciousness Come Down to the Way Things Vibrate?

A new paper proposes resonance may contribute to human consciousness.

Source: Could Consciousness Come Down to the Way Things Vibrate? – Neuroscience News

Neuroscience News

November 18, 2018

Summary: A new paper proposes resonance may contribute to human consciousness.Source: The Conversation.Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there? Why is the universe split in two for each of us, into a subject and an infinity of objects? How is each of us our own center of experience, receiving information about the rest of the world out there? Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A gnat? A bacterium?

These questions are all aspects of the ancient “mind-body problem,” which asks, essentially: What is the relationship between mind and matter? It’s resisted a generally satisfying conclusion for thousands of years.

The mind-body problem enjoyed a major rebranding over the last two decades. Now it’s generally known as the “hard problem” of consciousness, after philosopher David Chalmers coined this term in a now classic paper and further explored it in his 1996 book, “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.”

Chalmers thought the mind-body problem should be called “hard” in comparison to what, with tongue in cheek, he called the “easy” problems of neuroscience: How do neurons and the brain work at the physical level? Of course they’re not actually easy at all. But his point was that they’re relatively easy compared to the truly difficult problem of explaining how consciousness relates to matter.

Over the last decade, my colleague, University of California, Santa Barbara psychology professor Jonathan Schooler and I have developed what we call a “resonance theory of consciousness.” We suggest that resonance – another word for synchronized vibrations – is at the heart of not only human consciousness but also animal consciousness and of physical reality more generally. It sounds like something the hippies might have dreamed up – it’s all vibrations, man! – but stick with me.

All about the vibrations

All things in our universe are constantly in motion, vibrating. Even objects that appear to be stationary are in fact vibrating, oscillating, resonating, at various frequencies. Resonance is a type of motion, characterized by oscillation between two states. And ultimately all matter is just vibrations of various underlying fields. As such, at every scale, all of nature vibrates.

Something interesting happens when different vibrating things come together: They will often start, after a little while, to vibrate together at the same frequency. They “sync up,” sometimes in ways that can seem mysterious. This is described as the phenomenon of spontaneous self-organization.

Mathematician Steven Strogatz provides various examples from physics, biology, chemistry and neuroscience to illustrate “sync” – his term for resonance – in his 2003 book “Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life,” including:

• When fireflies of certain species come together in large gatherings, they start flashing in sync, in ways that can still seem a little mystifying.
• Lasers are produced when photons of the same power and frequency sync up.
• The moon’s rotation is exactly synced with its orbit around the Earth such that we always see the same face.

Examining resonance leads to potentially deep insights about the nature of consciousness and about the universe more generally.

Sync inside your skull

Neuroscientists have identified sync in their research, too. Large-scale neuron firing occurs in human brains at measurable frequencies, with mammalian consciousness thought to be commonly associated with various kinds of neuronal sync.

For example, German neurophysiologist Pascal Fries has explored the ways in which various electrical patterns sync in the brain to produce different types of human consciousness.

Fries focuses on gamma, beta and theta waves. These labels refer to the speed of electrical oscillations in the brain, measured by electrodes placed on the outside of the skull. Groups of neurons produce these oscillations as they use electrochemical impulses to communicate with each other. It’s the speed and voltage of these signals that, when averaged, produce EEG waves that can be measured at signature cycles per second.

Gamma waves are associated with large-scale coordinated activities like perception, meditation or focused consciousness; beta with maximum brain activity or arousal; and theta with relaxation or daydreaming. These three wave types work together to produce, or at least facilitate, various types of human consciousness, according to Fries. But the exact relationship between electrical brain waves and consciousness is still very much up for debate.

External electrodes can record a brain’s activity. NeuroscienceNews.com image is adapted from the Conversation news release.

Fries calls his concept “communication through coherence.” For him, it’s all about neuronal synchronization. Synchronization, in terms of shared electrical oscillation rates, allows for smooth communication between neurons and groups of neurons. Without this kind of synchronized coherence, inputs arrive at random phases of the neuron excitability cycle and are ineffective, or at least much less effective, in communication.

A resonance theory of consciousness

Our resonance theory builds upon the work of Fries and many others, with a broader approach that can help to explain not only human and mammalian consciousness, but also consciousness more broadly.

Based on the observed behavior of the entities that surround us, from electrons to atoms to molecules, to bacteria to mice, bats, rats, and on, we suggest that all things may be viewed as at least a little conscious. This sounds strange at first blush, but “panpsychism” – the view that all matter has some associated consciousness – is an increasingly accepted position with respect to the nature of consciousness.

The panpsychist argues that consciousness did not emerge at some point during evolution. Rather, it’s always associated with matter and vice versa – they’re two sides of the same coin. But the large majority of the mind associated with the various types of matter in our universe is extremely rudimentary. An electron or an atom, for example, enjoys just a tiny amount of consciousness. But as matter becomes more interconnected and rich, so does the mind, and vice versa, according to this way of thinking.

Biological organisms can quickly exchange information through various biophysical pathways, both electrical and electrochemical. Non-biological structures can only exchange information internally using heat/thermal pathways – much slower and far less rich in information in comparison. Living things leverage their speedier information flows into larger-scale consciousness than what would occur in similar-size things like boulders or piles of sand, for example. There’s much greater internal connection and thus far more “going on” in biological structures than in a boulder or a pile of sand.

Under our approach, boulders and piles of sand are “mere aggregates,” just collections of highly rudimentary conscious entities at the atomic or molecular level only. That’s in contrast to what happens in biological life forms where the combinations of these micro-conscious entities together create a higher level macro-conscious entity. For us, this combination process is the hallmark of biological life.

The central thesis of our approach is this: the particular linkages that allow for large-scale consciousness – like those humans and other mammals enjoy – result from a shared resonance among many smaller constituents. The speed of the resonant waves that are present is the limiting factor that determines the size of each conscious entity in each moment.

As a particular shared resonance expands to more and more constituents, the new conscious entity that results from this resonance and combination grows larger and more complex. So the shared resonance in a human brain that achieves gamma synchrony, for example, includes a far larger number of neurons and neuronal connections than is the case for beta or theta rhythms alone.

What about larger inter-organism resonance like the cloud of fireflies with their little lights flashing in sync? Researchers think their bioluminescent resonance arises due to internal biological oscillators that automatically result in each firefly syncing up with its neighbors.

Is this group of fireflies enjoying a higher level of group consciousness? Probably not, since we can explain the phenomenon without recourse to any intelligence or consciousness. But in biological structures with the right kind of information pathways and processing power, these tendencies toward self-organization can and often do produce larger-scale conscious entities.

Our resonance theory of consciousness attempts to provide a unified framework that includes neuroscience, as well as more fundamental questions of neurobiology and biophysics, and also the philosophy of mind. It gets to the heart of the differences that matter when it comes to consciousness and the evolution of physical systems.

It is all about vibrations, but it’s also about the type of vibrations and, most importantly, about shared vibrations.

About this neuroscience research article

Funding: The Conversation funded this study.

Source: Tam Hunt – The Conversation
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is adapted from The Conversation news release.

Scientists Want to Turn Consciousness On and Off Like a Light Switch

David Bohm on Consciousness and the Concept of Actuality

Now, there’s one other thing that modern quantum mechanics doesn’t handle. Oddly enough, physics at present has no contact with the notion of actuality. You see, classical physics has at least some notion of actuality in saying that actuality consists of a whole collection of particles that are moving and interacting in a certain way. Now, in quantum physics, there is no concept of actuality whatsoever, because quantum physics maintains that its equations don’t describe anything actual, they merely describe the probability of what an observer could see if he had an instrument of a certain kind, and this instrument is therefore supposed to be necessary for the actuality of the phenomenon. But the instrument, in turn, is supposed to be made of similar particles, obeying the same laws, which would, in turn, require another instrument to give them actuality. That would go on an infinite regress. Wigner has proposed to end the regress by saying it is the consciousness of the actual observer that gives actuality to everything.”

David Bohm

Wiki:

David Joseph Bohm FRS^[1] (/boʊm/; December 20, 1917 – October 27, 1992) was an American scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century^[2] and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind.

Bohm advanced the view that quantum physics meant that the old Cartesian model of reality – that there are two kinds of substance, the mental and the physical, that somehow interact – was too limited. To complement it, he developed a mathematical and physical theory of “implicate” and “explicate” order.^[3] He also believed that the brain, at the cellular level, works according to the mathematics of some quantum effects, and postulated that thought is distributed and non-localised just as quantum entities are.^{[4][not in citation given]}

Bohm warned of the dangers of rampant reason and technology, advocating instead the need for genuine supportive dialogue, which he claimed could broaden and unify conflicting and troublesome divisions in the social world. In this, his epistemology mirrored his ontology.^[5] Due to his Communist affiliations, Bohm was the subject of a federal government investigation in 1949, prompting him to leave the United States. He pursued his scientific career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian and then a British citizen. He abandoned Marxism in the wake of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.^[6]

Bohm’s main concern was with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which according to Bohm is never static or complete but rather an unfolding process.^[7]