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.
Consciousness
Tam Hunt, Guest
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.
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.
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.
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:
Source: Source link
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.
A new paper proposes resonance may contribute to human consciousness.
Source: Could Consciousness Come Down to the Way Things Vibrate? – Neuroscience News
Neuroscience NewsThese 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.
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]
“The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think.”
By Maria Popova
July 15, 2018
“Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that,” cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz wrote in her inquiry into how our conditioned way of looking narrows the lens of our perception. Attention, after all, is the handmaiden of consciousness, and consciousness the central fact and the central mystery of our creaturely experience. From the days of Plato’s cave to the birth of neuroscience, we have endeavored to fathom its nature. But it is a mystery that only seems to deepen with each increment of approach. “Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in his landmark 1902 treatise on spirituality, “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”
Half a century after James, two new molecules punctured the filmy screen to unlatch a portal to a wholly novel universe of consciousness, shaking up our most elemental assumptions about the nature of the mind, our orientation toward mortality, and the foundations of our social, political, and cultural constructs. One of these molecules — lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD — was a triumph of twentieth-century science, somewhat accidentally synthesized by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in the year physicist Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission. The other — the compound psilocin, known among the Aztecs as “flesh of the gods” — was the rediscovery of a substance produced by a humble brown mushroom, which indigenous cultures across eras and civilizations had been incorporating into their spiritual rituals since ancient times, and which the Roman Catholic Church had violently suppressed and buried during the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
Together, these two molecules commenced the psychedelic revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, frothing the stream of consciousness — a term James coined — into a turbulent existential rapids. Their proselytes included artists, scientists, political leaders, and ordinary people of all stripes. Their most ardent champions were the psychiatrists and physicians who lauded them as miracle drugs for salving psychic maladies as wide-ranging as anxiety, addition, and clinical depression. Their cultural consequence was likened to that of to the era’s other cataclysmic disruptor: the atomic bomb.
And then — much thanks to Timothy Leary’s reckless handling of his Harvard psilocybin studies that landed him in prison, where Carl Sagan sent him cosmic poetry — a landslide of moral panic and political backlash outlawed psychedelics, shut down clinical studies of their medical and psychiatric uses, and drove them into the underground. For decades, academic research into their potential for human flourishing languished and nearly perished. But a small subset of scientists, psychiatrists, and amateur explorers refused to relinquish their curiosity about that potential.
The 1990s brought a quiet groundswell of second-wave interest in psychedelics — a resurgence that culminated with a 2006 paper reporting on studies at Johns Hopkins, which had found that psilocybin had occasioned “mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and significance” for terminally ill cancer patients — experiences from which they “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.” In other words, the humble mushroom compound had helped people face the ultimate frontier of existence — their own mortality — with unparalleled equanimity. The basis of the experience, researchers found, was a sense of the dissolution of the personal ego, followed by a sense of becoming one with the universe — a notion strikingly similar to Bertrand Russell’s insistence that a fulfilling life and a rewarding old age are a matter of “[making] your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”
More clinical experiments followed at UCLA, NYU, and other leading universities, demonstrating that this psilocybin-induced dissolution of the ego, extremely difficult if not impossible to achieve in our ordinary consciousness, has profound benefits in rewiring the faulty mental mechanisms responsible for disorders like alcoholism, anxiety, and depression.
This renaissance of psychedelics, with its broad implications for understanding consciousness and the connection between brain and mind, treating mental illness, and recalibrating our relationship with the finitude of our existence, is what Michael Pollan explores in the revelatory How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (public library). With an eye to this renaissance and the scientists using brain-imaging technology to investigate how psychedelics may illuminate consciousness, Pollan writes:
One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens. By smashing atoms, a particle accelerator forces them to yield their secrets. By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical experience. While this is happening, imaging tools can observe the changes in the brain’s activity and patterns of connection. Already this work is yielding surprising insights into the “neural correlates” of the sense of self and spiritual experience.
Pollan reflects on the psilocybin studies of cancer patients, which reignited scientific interest in psychedelics, and the profound results of subsequent studies exploring the use of psychedelics in treating mental illness, including addiction, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder:
What was most remarkable about the results… is that participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the most meaningful in their lives, comparable “to the birth of a first child or death of a parent.” Two-thirds of the participants rated the session among the top five “most spiritually significant experiences” of their lives; one-third ranked it the most significant such experience in their lives. Fourteen months later, these ratings had slipped only slightly. The volunteers reported significant improvements in their “personal well-being, life satisfaction and positive behavior change,” changes that were confirmed by their family members and friends.
[…]
What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions — involving the temporary dissolution of one’s ego — that may be the key to changing one’s mind.
Pollan approaches his subject as a science writer and a skeptic endowed with equal parts rigorous critical thinking and openminded curiosity. In a sentiment evocative of physicist Alan Lightman’s elegant braiding of the numinous and the scientific, he echoes Carl Sagan’s views on the mystery of reality and examines his own lens:
My default perspective is that of the philosophical materialist, who believes that matter is the fundamental substance of the world and the physical laws it obeys should be able to explain everything that happens. I start from the assumption that nature is all that there is and gravitate toward scientific explanations of phenomena. That said, I’m also sensitive to the limitations of the scientific-materialist perspective and believe that nature (including the human mind) still holds deep mysteries toward which science can sometimes seem arrogant and unjustifiably dismissive.
Was it possible that a single psychedelic experience — something that turned on nothing more than the ingestion of a pill or square of blotter paper — could put a big dent in such a worldview? Shift how one thought about mortality? Actually change one’s mind in enduring ways?
The idea took hold of me. It was a little like being shown a door in a familiar room — the room of your own mind — that you had somehow never noticed before and being told by people you trusted (scientists!) that a whole other way of thinking — of being! — lay waiting on the other side. All you had to do was turn the knob and enter. Who wouldn’t be curious? I might not have been looking to change my life, but the idea of learning something new about it, and of shining a fresh light on this old world, began to occupy my thoughts. Maybe there was something missing from my life, something I just hadn’t named.
The root of this unnamed dimension of existence, Pollan suggests, is the inevitable narrowing of perspective that takes place as we grow up and learn to navigate the world by cataloguing its elements into mental categories that often fail to hold the complexity and richness of the experiences they name — an impulse born out of our longing for absolutes in a relative world. Psychedelics break down these artificial categories and swing open the doors of perception — to borrow William Blake’s famous phrase later famously appropriated by Aldous Huxley as the slogan of the first-wave psychedelic revolution — so that life can enter our consciousness in its unfiltered, unfragmented completeness. In consequence, we view the world — the inner world and the outer world — with a child’s eyes.
Pollan writes:
Over time, we tend to optimize and conventionalize our responses to whatever life brings. Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive — it helps us get the job done with a minimum of fuss — eventually it becomes rote. It dulls us. The muscles of attention atrophy.
A century after William James examined how habit gives shape and structure to our lives, Pollan considers the other edge of the sword — how habit can constrict us in a prison of excessive structure, blinding us to the full view of reality:
Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.)
[…]
The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.
One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful — wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I’m seldom surprised. The bad thing is I’m seldom surprised.
Psychedelics, Pollan argues, eject us from our habitual consciousness to invite a pure experience of reality that calls to mind Jeanette Winterson’s notion of “active surrender” and Emerson’s exultation in “the power to swell the moment from the resources of our own heart until it supersedes sun & moon & solar system in its expanding immensity.” Pollan arrives at this conclusion not only by surveying the history of and research on psychedelics, but by conducting a series of carefully monitored experiments on himself — he travels the world to meet with mycologists, shamans, and trained facilitators, and to experience first-hand the most potent psychedelics nature and the chemistry lab have produced, from the psilocybin mushroom to LSD to the smoked venom of a desert toad.
Together with his wife, Judith, he ingests a psilocybin mushroom he himself has picked from the woods of the Pacific Northwest with the mycologist Paul Stamets, author of the foundational guide to psilocybin mushrooms. Pollan reflects on the perplexity of the experience:
In a certain light at certain moments, I feel as though I had had some kind of spiritual experience. I had felt the personhood of other beings in a way I hadn’t before; whatever it is that keeps us from feeling our full implication in nature had been temporarily in abeyance. There had also been, I felt, an opening of the heart, toward my parents, yes, and toward Judith, but also, weirdly, toward some of the plants and trees and birds and even the damn bugs on our property. Some of this openness has persisted. I think back on it now as an experience of wonder and immanence.
The fact that this transformation of my familiar world into something I can only describe as numinous was occasioned by the eating of a little brown mushroom that Stamets and I had found growing on the edge of a parking lot in a state park on the Pacific coast — well, that fact can be viewed in one of two ways: either as an additional wonder or as support for a more prosaic and materialist interpretation of what happened to me that August afternoon. According to one interpretation, I had had “a drug experience,” plain and simple. It was a kind of waking dream, interesting and pleasurable but signifying nothing. The psilocin in that mushroom unlocked the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2-A receptors in my brain, causing them to fire wildly and set off a cascade of disordered mental events that, among other things, permitted some thoughts and feelings, presumably from my subconscious (and, perhaps, my reading too), to get cross-wired with my visual cortex as it was processing images of the trees and plants and insects in my field of vision.
Not quite a hallucination, “projection” is probably the psychological term for this phenomenon: when we mix our emotions with certain objects that then reflect those feelings back to us so that they appear to glisten with meaning. T. S. Eliot called these things and situations the “objective correlatives” of human emotion.
Pollan finds in the experience an affirmation of James’s notion that we possess different modes of consciousness separated from our standard waking consciousness by a thin and permeable membrane. The psychedelic puncturing of that membrane, he suggests, is what people across the ages have considered “mystical experiences.” But they are purely biochemical, devoid of the divine visitations ascribed to them:
I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight… Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin.
[…]
Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural — of God, of a Beyond — but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think.
After another psychedelic journey on the drug LSD, which left him with “a cascading dam break of love” for everyone from his wife to his grandmother to his awkward childhood music teacher, Pollan reflects on some of the things he had said during the experience, recorded by his guide, and the limitations of language in conveying the depth and dimension of the feelings stirred in him. A century after William James listed ineffability as the first of the four features of transcendent experiences, Pollan writes:
It embarrasses me to write these words; they sound so thin, so banal. This is a failure of my language, no doubt, but perhaps it is not only that. Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force of revealed truth.
Love is everything.
Psychedelics, Pollan’s experience suggests, can be a potent antidote to our conditioned cynicism — that habitual narrowing and hardening of the soul, to which we resort as a maladaptive coping mechanism amid the chaos and uncertainty of life, a kind of defensive cowardice reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt’s indictment that “the poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.” Half a century after psychedelics evangelist Aldous Huxley confronted our fear of the obvious with the assertion that “all great truths are obvious truths,” Pollan writes:
Psychedelics can make even the most cynical of us into fervent evangelists of the obvious… For what after all is the sense of banality, or the ironic perspective, if not two of the sturdier defenses the adult ego deploys to keep from being overwhelmed — by our emotions, certainly, but perhaps also by our senses, which are liable at any time to astonish us with news of the sheer wonder of the world. If we are ever to get through the day, we need to put most of what we perceive into boxes neatly labeled “Known,” to be quickly shelved with little thought to the marvels therein, and “Novel,” to which, understandably, we pay more attention, at least until it isn’t that anymore. A psychedelic is liable to take all the boxes off the shelf, open and remove even the most familiar items, turning them over and imaginatively scrubbing them until they shine once again with the light of first sight. Is this reclassification of the familiar a waste of time? If it is, then so is a lot of art. It seems to me there is great value in such renovation, the more so as we grow older and come to think we’ve seen and felt it all before.
Pollan’s reflections bear undertones of the concept of complementarity in quantum physics. But perhaps more than anything, in widening the lens of his attention to include all beings and the whole of the universe, his psychedelic experience calls to mind philosopher Simone Weil. After what she considered a point of contact with the divine — a mystical experience she had while reciting George Herbert’s poem Love III — Weil wrote that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer, [for] it presupposes faith and love.”
In a passage that calls to mind Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stunning description of the transcendent state between wakefulness and sleep, Pollan writes:
Because the acid had not completely dissolved my ego, I never completely lost the ability to redirect the stream of my consciousness or the awareness it was in fact mine. But the stream itself felt distinctly different, less subject to will or outside interference. It reminded me of the pleasantly bizarre mental space that sometimes opens up at night in bed when we’re poised between the states of being awake and falling asleep—so-called hypnagogic consciousness. The ego seems to sign off a few moments before the rest of the mind does, leaving the field of consciousness unsupervised and vulnerable to gentle eruptions of imagery and hallucinatory snatches of narrative. Imagine that state extended indefinitely, yet with some ability to direct your attention to this or that, as if in an especially vivid and absorbing daydream. Unlike a daydream, however, you are fully present to the contents of whatever narrative is unfolding, completely inside it and beyond the reach of distraction. I had little choice but to obey the daydream’s logic, its ontological and epistemological rules, until, either by force of will or by the fresh notes of a new song, the mental channel would change and I would find myself somewhere else entirely.
Echoing Hannah Arendt’s distinction between thought and cognition, in which she asserted that “thought is related to feeling and transforms its mute and inarticulate despondency,” Pollan adds:
For me it felt less like a drug experience… than a novel mode of cognition, falling somewhere between intellection and feeling.
[…]
Temporarily freed from the tyranny of the ego, with its maddeningly reflexive reactions and its pinched conception of one’s self-interest, we get to experience an extreme version of Keats’s “negative capability” — the ability to exist amid doubts and mysteries without reflexively reaching for certainty. To cultivate this mode of consciousness, with its exceptional degree of selflessness (literally!), requires us to transcend our subjectivity or — it comes to the same thing — widen its circle so far that it takes in, besides ourselves, other people and, beyond that, all of nature. Now I understood how a psychedelic could help us to make precisely that move, from the first-person singular to the plural and beyond. Under its influence, a sense of our interconnectedness — that platitude — is felt, becomes flesh. Though this perspective is not something a chemical can sustain for more than a few hours, those hours can give us an opportunity to see how it might go. And perhaps to practice being there.
Looking back on his theoretical and empirical investigation — his research on the ancient history and modern science of psychedelics; his interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, mycologists, hospice patients, and ordinary psychonauts; his own experience with a variety of these substances and his sometimes meticulous, sometimes messy field notes on the interiority of his mind under their influence — Pollan writes:
The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress. But the ego, that inner neurotic who insists on running the mental show, is wily and doesn’t relinquish its power without a struggle. Deeming itself indispensable, it will battle against its diminishment, whether in advance or in the middle of the journey. I suspect that’s exactly what mine was up to all through the sleepless nights that preceded each of my trips, striving to convince me that I was risking everything, when really all I was putting at risk was its sovereignty… That stingy, vigilant security guard admits only the narrowest bandwidth of reality… It’s really good at performing all those activities that natural selection values: getting ahead, getting liked and loved, getting fed, getting laid. Keeping us on task, it is a ferocious editor of anything that might distract us from the work at hand, whether that means regulating our access to memories and strong emotions from within or news of the world without.
What of the world it does admit it tends to objectify, for the ego wants to reserve the gifts of subjectivity to itself. That’s why it fails to see that there is a whole world of souls and spirits out there, by which I simply mean subjectivities other than our own. It was only when the voice of my ego was quieted by psilocybin that I was able to sense that the plants in my garden had a spirit too.
It is a notion evocative of Ursula K. Le Guin’s conception of poetry as a means to “subjectifying the universe” — a counterpoint to the way science objectifies it. “Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates,” Le Guin wrote. Perhaps psychedelics, then, are a portal to the poetic truth that resides beyond scientific fact — the kind of transcendence Rachel Carson found in beholding the marvels of bioluminescence, “one of those experiences that gives an odd and hard-to-describe feeling, with so many overtones beyond the facts themselves.” Such a feeling radiates beyond the walls of the ego-bound self and into a deep sense of belonging to the whole of nature, part and particle of the universe.
Pollan writes:
The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry — that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.” Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn’t reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic — that is, more spiritual — idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.
[…]
One of the gifts of psychedelics is the way they reanimate the world, as if they were distributing the blessings of consciousness more widely and evenly over the landscape, in the process breaking the human monopoly on subjectivity that we moderns take as a given. To us, we are the world’s only conscious subjects, with the rest of creation made up of objects; to the more egotistical among us, even other people count as objects. Psychedelic consciousness overturns that view, by granting us a wider, more generous lens through which we can glimpse the subject-hood — the spirit! — of everything, animal, vegetable, even mineral, all of it now somehow returning our gaze. Spirits, it seems, are everywhere. New rays of relation appear between us and all the world’s Others.
In the remainder of the immensely fascinating How to Change Your Mind, Pollan goes on to explore the neuroscience of what actually happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, how such a temporary rewiring of the cognitive apparatus can translate into enduring psychological change and precipitate profound personal growth, and why this breaking down of “the usually firm handshake between brain and world” may be particularly palliative to those perched on the precipice of mortality. Complement it with Albert Camus on consciousness and the lacuna between truth and meaning, then revisit William James’s trailblazing treatise on the limits of materialism.
Cat’s eye nebula halo
You don’t have to look far to find outlandish theories on the nature of the cosmos and human consciousness. These days, notions once relegated to science fiction are finding their way into esoteric academic journals, and from there, into mainstream discourse. One example of this is the Simulation Argument, recently championed by Elon Musk; another is ‘time crystals,’ a tantalizing non-linear phase of matter. The newest symphony of mind jazz being broadcast across the Internet posits new ideas about the embattled theory of “panpsychism,” or the belief that mind is a fundamental property of the physical universe and is imbued into all states of matter.
A new paper, published by physicist Gregory Matloff, has brought the idea back into scientific discussions, promising experimental tests that could “validate or falsify” the concept of a ubiquitous “proto-consciousness field.” Matloff also pushes the controversial idea of volitional stars, suggesting there is actually evidence that stars control their own galactic paths.
As absurd as the theory sounds, it has several prominent adherents, including British theoretical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, who introduced panpsychism three decades ago. Penrose believed consciousness arises from the properties of quantum entanglement. He and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff authored the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) hypothesis, which asserts, among other things, that consciousness results from quantum vibrations inside microtubules.
In 2006, German physicist Bernard Haisch took the idea further and proposed that consciousness arises within a “quantum vacuum” any time there is a significantly advanced system through which energy flows.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch, another proponent of panpsychism, approaches it from a different angle, using integrated information theory to argue that consciousness is not unique to biological organisms.
“The only dominant theory we have of consciousness says that it is associated with complexity — with a system’s ability to act upon its own state and determine its own fate,” Koch argues. “Theory states that it could go down to very simple systems. In principle, some purely physical systems that are not biological or organic may also be conscious.”
Matloff and other scientists are moving the argument into a new phase: experimentation. Matloff intends to study the behavior of stars, specifically analyzing an anomaly in stellar motion known as Paranego’s Discontinuity. Matloff wants to know why certain cooler stars appear to emit jets of energy pointed in one direction, a characteristic that seems oddly and inexplicably ubiquitous in the galaxy. In 2018, he plans to use results from the Gaia star-mapping space telescope to show that the anomaly may be a willful stellar action.
Meanwhile, as Matloff studies cosmic activity on the grandest scale, Koch approaches the experimental phase of the theory using brain-impaired patients. He wants to know if their information responses match underlying neurochemical foundations of consciousness. He plans to test this by wiring the brains of mice together to see if their minds merge into a larger information system.
Panpsychism certainly has critics, as well. In an article for The Atlantic entitled “Why Panpsychism Is Probably Wrong,” Keith Frankish writes:
“Panpsychism gives consciousness a curious status. It places it at the very heart of every physical entity yet threatens to render it explanatorily idle. For the behavior of subatomic particles and the systems they constitute promises to be fully explained by physics and the other physical sciences. Panpsychism offers no distinctive predictions or explanations. It finds a place for consciousness in the physical world, but that place is a sort of limbo.”
The quote expresses a general sense that panpsychism oversimplifies the hard problem of consciousness in the universe, an opinion many scientists share. However, Matloff, Penrose, and other proponents continue undertaking the job of venturing outside the margins of accepted science to try reconciling intractable contradictions and anomalies exposed by quantum theory.
Neuroscience backs up the Buddhist belief that “the self” isn’t constant, but ever-changing
qz.com
Still evolving. (Reuters/Abhishek N. Chinnappa)
While you may not remember life as a toddler, you most likely believe that your selfhood then—your essential being—was intrinsically the same as it is today.
Buddhists, though, suggest that this is just an illusion—a philosophy that’s increasingly supported by scientific research.
“Buddhists argue that nothing is constant, everything changes through time, you have a constantly changing stream of consciousness,” Evan Thompson, a philosophy of mind professor at the University of British Columbia, tells Quartz. “And from a neuroscience perspective, the brain and body is constantly in flux. There’s nothing that corresponds to the sense that there’s an unchanging self.”
Neuroscience and Buddhism came to these ideas independently, but some scientific researchers have recently started to reference and draw on the Eastern religion in their work—and have come to accept theories that were first posited by Buddhist monks thousands of years ago.
One neuroscience paper, published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in July, links the Buddhist belief that our self is ever-changing to physical areas of the brain. There’s scientific evidence that “self-processing in the brain is not instantiated in a particular region or network, but rather extends to a broad range of fluctuating neural processes that do not appear to be self specific,” write the authors.
Thompson, whose work includes studies of cognitive science, phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy, says this is not the only area where neuroscience and Buddhism converge. For example, some neuroscientists now believe that cognitive faculties are not fixed but can be trained through meditation. And there may be scientific backing to the Buddhist belief that consciousness extends into deep sleep.
“The standard neuroscience view is that deep sleep is a blackout state where consciousness disappears,” Thompson says. “In Indian philosophy we see some theorists argue that there’s a subtle awareness that continues to be present in dreamless sleep, there’s just a lack of ability to consolidate that in a moment-to-moment way in memory.”
Continue:
Neuroscience backs up the Buddhist belief that “the self” isn’t constant, but ever-changing
Scientists say your “mind” isn’t confined to your brain, or even your body
Scientists say your “mind” isn’t confined to your brain, or even your body
qz.com
Written by Olivia Goldhill
You might wonder, at some point today, what’s going on in another person’s mind. You may compliment someone’s great mind, or say they are out of their mind. You may even try to expand or free your own mind.
But what is a mind? Defining the concept is a surprisingly slippery task. The mind is the seat of consciousness, the essence of your being. Without a mind, you cannot be considered meaningfully alive. So what exactly, and where precisely, is it?
Traditionally, scientists have tried to define the mind as the product of brain activity: The brain is the physical substance, and the mind is the conscious product of those firing neurons, according to the classic argument. But growing evidence shows that the mind goes far beyond the physical workings of your brain.
No doubt, the brain plays an incredibly important role. But our mind cannot be confined to what’s inside our skull, or even our body, according to a definition first put forward by Dan Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and the author of a recently published book, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human.
He first came up with the definition more than two decades ago, at a meeting of 40 scientists across disciplines, including neuroscientists, physicists, sociologists, and anthropologists. The aim was to come to an understanding of the mind that would appeal to common ground and satisfy those wrestling with the question across these fields.
After much discussion, they decided that a key component of the mind is: “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us.” It’s not catchy. But it is interesting, and with meaningful implications.
The most immediately shocking element of this definition is that our mind extends beyond our physical selves. In other words, our mind is not simply our perception of experiences, but those experiences themselves. Siegel argues that it’s impossible to completely disentangle our subjective view of the world from our interactions.
“I realized if someone asked me to define the shoreline but insisted, is it the water or the sand, I would have to say the shore is both sand and sea,” says Siegel. “You can’t limit our understanding of the coastline to insist it’s one or the other. I started thinking, maybe the mind is like the coastline—some inner and inter process. Mental life for an anthropologist or sociologist is profoundly social. Your thoughts, feelings, memories, attention, what you experience in this subjective world is part of mind.”
Continue:
Scientists say your “mind” isn’t confined to your brain, or even your body
As sound healing becomes more popular, more and more people are starting to experiment with it. You have people learning how to chant, listening to specific frequencies, and using singing bowls. It’s not just those of us who are interested in spirituality and New Age concepts that are looking into this ancient Eastern knowledge, but scientists as well, studying these sounds and how they affect the body.
Though sound healing is only now beginning to enter into the mainstream, it’s been used as an ancient healing modality for many centuries in different religions. Even scientists such as Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein spoke of the importance of viewing everything in terms of vibration, energy, and frequency.
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”
– Nikola Tesla
Science has proven that everything is made up of energy and that everything holds its own vibration and frequency, which can then be increased or decreased. One person’s vibration that they’re emitting can then affect another person’s energy, and science has proven this interrelation through studying quantum mechanics and our electromagnetic fields or auras. You can read more about the research The HeartMath Institute is conducting on the heart’s aura and how we affect other people here.
With that logic, since sounds also hold their own frequency, wouldn’t it make sense that a specific sound’s frequency would affect that of our own?
The Science Behind Sound Healing
Dr. Herbert Benson, professor, author, cardiologist, and founder of Harvard’s Mind/Body Medical Institute, studied how sound healing, specifically mantric chanting, can help induce the Relaxation Response. The Relaxation Response is defined as an individual’s ability to prompt their body to release chemicals and brain signals that cause muscles to relax, respiration to slow, and blood pressure to drop.
The Relaxation Response can reduce symptoms of IBS and counteract the physiological changes of stress and the fight or flight response, including muscle tension, headache, upset stomach, racing heartbeat, and shallow breathing.
Dr. Ranjie Singh, a neuroscientist, writer, businessman, and global educator, found that chanting specific mantras releases the hormone melatonin, and this in turn offers many benefits, including tumour shrinkage and enhanced sleep.
Chanting has been found to oxygenate the brain, reduce heart rate, improve blood pressure, and calm brainwave activity. It can even cause the left and right hemispheres of the brain to synchronize.
Jonathan Goldman, American author, musician, and teacher in the fields of harmonics and sound healing, says:
Dr. Alfred Tomatis has utilized the sounds of Gregorian Monks to stimulate the ears, brain and nervous systems of clients. His work is very important with regard to the scientific and medical uses of sound and chant. He found that certain sounds that are particularly high in vocal harmonics will stimulate and charge the cortex of the brain and the nervous system. Some years ago, there was a very popular recording of Gregorian chanting that occurred just when this research was being made public. I know that many other types of chanting from different traditions have very similar effects. These are just a few of the hard physical phenomenon of mantric chanting that have been observed. There certainly are others, as well.
Another study performed in 2006 looked at the effects of transcendental meditation (TM), a form of meditation whereby the practitioner continuously repeats a mantra or chants, and concluded that TM can improve blood pressure and cardiac autonomic nervous system tone and decrease risk of coronary heart disease.
A series of experiments conducted by neuro-electric therapy engineer Dr. Margaret Patterson and Dr. Ifor Capel revealed how alpha brainwaves boosted the production of serotonin. Dr. Capel explained:
[A]s far as we can tell, each brain center generates impulses at a specific frequency based on the predominant neurotransmitter it secretes. In other words, the brain’s internal communication system—its language, if you like—is based on frequency… Presumably, when we send in waves of electrical energy at, say, 10 Hz, certain cells in the lower brain stem will respond because they normally fire within that frequency range.
Additional research upholds the beliefs of mind-body medicine in this sense, stating that brainwaves being in the Alpha state, 8 to 14 Hz, permits a vibration allowing for more serotonin to be created.
Why You Should Consider Listening to A=432 HZ Music
Most music worldwide has been tuned to A=440 Hz since the International Standards Organization (ISO) promoted it in 1953. However, when looking at the vibratory nature of the universe, it’s possible that this pitch isn’t actually harmonious with the natural resonance of nature and may generate negative effects on human behaviour and consciousness.
More words:
Full story
Jeff Street, Contributor
Reality is not what it appears — the ancients knew it, pioneering physicists of the early 2Oth century knew it, and current leading edge scientists are proving it — all is mind.
The Big Questions and The Modern Scientific Worldview
Throughout the ages, Mankind has been trying to answer the big questions — What is the nature of existence and reality, what are we, and why are we here? In our current age, with the ascendance of the ideology of scientific materialism, we have a strong tendency to reject anything that doesn’t fit our materialistic paradigm and label it as “mystical”. We have become mesmerized by the material world. Materialism and consumerism run rampant in our society. Lured by the apparent success of the reductionist method that we have used to analyze and understand our world, we have come to view the universe as purely a physical system, working something like a great machine, and with matter being the fundamental substance of reality.
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” ~Nikola Tesla
Our scientific analytical methods have certainly been successful and have led us to understand the inner workings of matter well enough to create many useful technologies. But these successes have erroneously led us to conclude that our materialistic view of the universe must be correct and reject other ideas as “mystical” and backward.
The materialistic paradigm persists in the popular and scientific thought despite plenty of evidence that it is indeed not true. The Theory of Relativity and Quantum Physics have both shown that energy is more fundamental than matter. The pioneers of quantum physics in the early 20th century — Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and others — all came to the same conclusion — that everything is energy and that somehow consciousness is intimately intertwined with it. And yet this insight seems to have been lost since then. Physicists are still chasing the fundamental “particle”, and focusing on material phenomena rather than focusing on what energy is, how it forms matter, and what other forms can it take.
And modern science is still largely ignoring the role of consciousness, despite the observations of quantum phenomena that strongly suggest that consciousness is intimately related to the nature of reality. Mainstream science continues to assume that reality is objective, EG; that it exists independent of the consciousness of the observer despite much evidence to the contrary, and the conclusions of many pioneers of physics.
The accomplished English physicist, astronomer and mathematician, Sir James Jeans, had this to say — “I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe… In general the universe seems to me to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine. It may well be, it seems to me, that each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind.” And he wasn’t alone, below Max Plank shares a similar viewpoint.
Reality is Not What it Appears
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” ~Shakespeare, Hamlet
Consciousness is probably the most mysterious and significant phenomena in the universe, so to treat it as irrelevant to understanding reality is a major mistake. In fact, there have been some very profound experiments (see this video about these experiments) that leave very little doubt that there is an intimate relationship between consciousness and reality. Leading some to conclude that consciousness is the fundamental substance of the universe, as many esoteric and mystical philosophies throughout the ages have claimed in one way or another.
It’s not surprising that we might get stuck on the idea that matter is the fundamental substance of reality because this idea is just a natural consequence of our perceptual limitations. Our sensory apparatus — sight, hearing, smell, touch — provide us a useful representation of the external world, but when it comes to our primary sensory channel, vision, it is well known that we are “seeing” only are very narrow band of energies. Our eyes detect electromagnetic energy frequencies and convert them to the images and colors that we perceive. But our eyes only detect an extremely small portion of those frequencies, less than 0.00018%. And we are only “seeing” the clumps of energy condensed to a slow vibration (EG; matter). We can’t see all the rest of the energy and how everything is interconnected patterns of energy.
“All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration.” ~Bill Hicks
Despite the lesson that the unseen phenomena of electromagnetic radiation should be teaching us we are still largely unaware of how the limitations of our sensory apparatus have conditioned our models of reality. There are many more unseen phenomena we have yet to detect and understand. Our visual perceptions are far less complete than we have ever imagined, and this has led to a tenacious conceptual bias that has colored our models of reality. This bias is interfering with formulating a broader, deeper more accurate model including tackling the big question we’ve been avoiding — what is consciousness and how it is related to reality.
Ancient Cosmological Philosophies – All is Mind
Long before our current scientific age, and for much longer, there were many cultures with a vastly different view of the cosmos. They saw the universe as intelligent and alive in it’s very fabric; they thought of the cosmos as a great mind, and that our earthly reality was in some sense a grand illusion. Philosophy continues to explore the nature of reality and consciousness and debate many alternate perspectives. Amongst contemporary schools of thought, there are those that resonant with the ancient idea that “all is mind”. This idea has not been lost completely.
“The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.” ~Sir James Jeans, Physicist
Science was born from philosophy but it has long since gone its separate way — science focusing on how things work and FACTS and philosophy focusing on MEANING. This is why humanity has lost its heart and it’s soul — facts without meaning are like a ship without a rudder.
Modern science would have us believe that life, consciousness, and intelligence somehow emerged from the mechanizations of the universe by random chance, however improbable. That they were essentially accidents, and hence have no deeper meaning. Yet there are those who believe that it is all deeply meaningful and by design, and hence purposeful.
The Primordial Energy Field and The Emergence of Consciousness
Modern science is beginning to embrace that all is energy and is moving towards a unified energetic field theory, but they still have no clue how deep the rabbit hole goes. When they figure out the deeper intricacies of atomic energetics and molecular and bio-molecular energetics amazing advancements in technologies will be possible. And as this unfolds they will begin to realize that consciousness is a process in the energetic field and we will finally bid farewell to the materialistic view of reality that’s has dominated our thinking for so long.
Exactly how consciousness could emerge in the energetic field is unclear but a branch of information and computational theory may ultimately have the answer. Cellular Automata Theory claims that highly complex and organized patterns and dynamics can emerge from very simple systems containing discrete cells, with a small sets of states, and rules that govern how nearby cells are affected. And this structure has an interesting similarity to the base predicates of a number of obscure but compelling unified field theories (Zero Point Field Theory, Reciprocal System Theory, and others). Presumably one of these complex dynamical patterns is the process of consciousness itself — the omni-present intelligence and awareness that permeates the energetic field, the fabric of the universe.
For a very interesting account of the scientific discoveries that have been unfolding over the past twenty years or so related to the energetic field and it’s connections with consciousness check the book The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe.
There are a number of groups doing scientific study of consciousness related physical phenomena and their findings are very interesting. Explore these organizations and their work to dive deeper into this subject; the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, the International Consciousness Research Laboratories, the Global Consciousness Project, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. An effort related to the Global Consciousness Project that is about to be launched is the Global Consciousness App. Check out the video below about this interesting App and project.
Everything is Energy, and Thoughts Are Energy
According to Guy Needler, in his book The History of God, consciousness emerged in a small part of the universal energetic field and gradually increased in awareness until it was fully sentient. At that point it decided to explore what it was by experimenting with what it could do. It quickly realized that its thoughts created energy patterns in the field that it existed in. It also discovered that it could divide its consciousness and focal point of awareness into many smaller parts and perceive from many different perspectives at the same time. We are each a one of these divisions. We are all threads of the universal consciousness, and it is experiencing everything we are experiencing.
In the universal mind thoughts are patterns of energy, and these patterns of energy are everything we see — light, matter, galaxies, stars, planets — and everything we can’t see. And there’s a lot more going on in the part that we can’t see than most of us imagine. The space that we think of as the one Universe, and with one reality actually holds many parallel realities, which are often referred to as the dimensions or planes of reality.
Because source consciousness is creating all that is with it thoughts and each of us is a thread of source consciousness, our thoughts are also creative. We don’t realize this because we have forgotten what we are, but we are creating our reality with our thoughts, on an individual and collective basis, all the time. This is not obvious because our thoughts are erratic and undisciplined, hence our creation is undirected and incoherent. If we embrace our creative power and consciously master our thoughts, we will begin to create coherently. And then it will become obvious that we are indeed creating our reality and we’ll begin to create the life of our dreams, and collectively the world of our dreams. Check out my article Are You Creating Your Reality? Manifesting 101 to learn more about conscious creation, often called manifesting.
“A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction.” ~R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Within the Mind-Scape
All that is — the galaxies, stars, planets, light, matter, you and me — everything we can see, and everything we can’t see are the inner workings of the cosmic mind — the universe is conscious in its very fabric, and we are inside of it! This consciousness, in fact, encompasses many universes and a vast number of parallel realities. It is the source of all that is, including our own consciousness and that of every sentient entity in the universe.
We exist in a mindscape, a realm of ideas made manifest. We exist inside of a cosmic mind that is creating a multitude of environments and experiences to explore all the possibilities of existence and expand its understanding of self. It is all constructions of thought within the cosmic mind. You are a construct we call a person, and you are within a construct that we call the universe and the world. You are a vehicle that source consciousness is experiencing through. You are an aperture that it is using to look out onto, and experience, one of the many environments that it has created.
You are a focal point of source consciousness’s awareness looking out from inside of one of its own thoughts and experiencing them. Through its thoughts, it is forming a multitude of parallel realities, and then diving in and exploring them, experiencing them. All realities, all worlds, are INNER WORLDS. This why it is said that to know thyself and know the truth you only need to GO WITHIN. Everything is within the unbounded mind of source consciousness, and it is all within you because you are it. You are a thought within a thought within a thought experiencing itself.
“We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.” ~Bill Hicks
“All that we see or seem, Is but a dream within a dream.” ~Edgar Allen Poe
The Universal Mind is Infinite, And What it Can Create is Limitless
The universe is infinite simply because it is a conceptual space, a realm of ideas and imagination, which makes it inherently unbounded. What it can create is only limited by its imagination, and it’s imagination is limitless.
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” ~Albert Einstein
Each and everyone one of us is a part of this infinite mind, and we all potentially wield its unlimited creative power because we are it. The only thing that limits us is our beliefs and imagination! Wake up to what you truly are and be amazed at what you can create.
We are limitless!
About the Author
Jeff Street awakened about a year and a half ago, after having been an atheist/agnostic scientist type with absolutely no spiritual beliefs for most of his life. After many ‘magical’ new experiences, he is now passionate about learning and sharing his insights about spirituality and metaphysics on his blog www.divine-cosmos.net. You can also follow Jeff on Facebook via www.Facebook.com/DivineCosmoz
“We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery.”
– Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate of the twentieth century (Radin, Dean. Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences In A Quantum Reality. New York, Paraview Pocket Books, 2006.)
The concept of “time” is a weird one, and the world of quantum physics is even weirder. There is no shortage of observed phenomena that defy our understanding of logic, bringing into play thoughts, feelings, emotions — consciousness itself — and a post-materialist view of the universe. This fact is no better illustrated than by the classic double slit experiment, which has been used by physicists to explore the role of consciousness in shaping/affecting physical reality. The dominant role of a physical material (Newtonian) universe was dropped the second quantum mechanics entered into the equation and shook up the very foundation of science, as it continues to do today.
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulating consciousness.”
– Max Planck, theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918
There is another groundbreaking experiment that has tremendous implications for understanding the nature of our reality, and more specifically, the nature of what we call “time.”
It’s known as the “delayed-choice” experiment, or “quantum eraser,” and it can be considered a modified version of the double slit experiment.
To understand the delayed choice experiment, you have to understand the quantum double slit experiment.
Tiny bits of matter (photons, electrons, or any atomic-sized object) are shot toward a screen that has two slits in it. On the other side of the screen, a video camera records where each photon lands. When scientists close one slit, the camera will show us an expected pattern, as seen in the video below. But when both slits are opened, an “interference pattern” emerges — they begin to act like waves. This doesn’t mean that atomic objects are observed as a wave (even though they recently have been observed as a wave), they just act that way. It means that each photon individually goes through both slits at the same time and interferes with itself, but it also goes through one slit, and it goes through the other. Furthermore, it goes through neither of them. The single piece of matter becomes a “wave” of potentials, expressing itself in the form of multiple possibilities, and this is why we get the interference pattern.
How can a single piece of matter exist and express itself in multiple states, without any physical properties, until it is “measured” or “observed”? Furthermore, how does it choose which path, out of multiple possibilities, it will take?
Then, when an “observer” decides to measure and look at which slit the piece of matter goes through, the “wave” of potential paths collapses into one single path. The particle goes from becoming a “wave” of potentials and turns into one particle taking a single route. It’s as if the particle knows it’s being watched. The observer has some sort of effect on the behaviour of the particle.
You can view a visual demonstration/explanation of the double slit experiment here.
This quantum uncertainty is defined as the ability, “according to the quantum mechanic laws that govern subatomic affairs, of a particle like an electron to exist in a murky state of possibility — to be anywhere, everywhere or nowhere at all — until clicked into substantiality by a laboratory detector or an eyeball.”
According to physicist Andrew Truscott, lead researcher from a study published by the Australian National University, the experiment suggests that “reality does not exist unless we are looking at it.” It suggests that we are living in a holographic-type of universe. (source)
Continue:
Source link
Below is one video out of thousands floating around on the internet of supposed footage of unidentified flying objects. Keep in mind, many pictures and videos of these crafts have been published and analyzed thoroughly, so there is no shortage of verified footage and pictures. (More information on that can be found below the video.)
This one in particular comes from Dr. Steven Greer, founder of The Disclosure Project and the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI). Known to some as the “Father of the Disclosure Movement,” he was instrumental in bringing forth hundreds of military whistleblowers of all ranks, with verified backgrounds, to share their experience and testify on the UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon.
There is, admittedly, plenty of disinformation being spread within the UFOlogy field, and many people seeking to manipulate the evidence and public opinion, which makes it difficult to assess what information is legitimate and what is not. It unfortunately comes down to doing your own research and using your best judgement.
Greer has had meetings with high level people in the Pentagon, according to himself, Dr. Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14, who accompanied him on some of these meetings), and many more.
Dr. Greer has been doing these types of outings for quite a while, and he’s not the only one. Last year, a couple of CE members made a trip out to a gathering of researchers, whistleblowers. and enthusiasts, and witnessed something similar.
When you get to that level, and hang around those types of people, your going to draw attention, and anybody who draws massive amounts of attention will be praised, as well as vilified. Within the UFO movement, there are those that disagree and don’t associate with each other, which is very weird and shouldn’t be happening.
Interesting footage.
I think it’s safe to say that UFOs are no longer a fringe topic, as their existence has been verified in the mainstream world, but beyond that, most people are still in the dark. It’s important to keep in mind that a decade ago you were considered a conspiracy theorist for even believing in the existence of UFOs. Things have changed since then, but believing that some of these craft are extraterrestrial in origin is still considered ‘out there.’
This is why so many scientists around the world have been urging the scientific study of UFOs for decades. The Sturrock Report, for example, an effort that gathered the world’s top minds, was put together in the form of a paper urging that, if “the analysis of physical evidence turns up very strong evidence that objects related with UFO reports were manufactured outside the solar system, then one must obviously consider very seriously that the phenomenon involves not only extraterrestrial vehicles, but probably also extraterrestrial beings.”
Their main objective was to examine any possible physical evidence, and have it carefully collected and analyzed. These objects have been commonly photographed, as well as tracked on air/ground radar.
Continue:
Source link
(Natural News) In 20 years, humans will have robot doubles containing digital copies of their consciousness. That’s the future envisioned by Microsoft executives Brad Smith and Harry Shum. According to the two men, artificial intelligence (AI) alter egos are inevitable.
This is just one of the predictions they’ve outlined in their book, “The Future Computed.” In the pages, Smith and Shum discussed how the future version of Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana will integrate with the other smart devices around your home to make everyday living a simpler affair. From setting up meetings to replying to emails to booking reservations at restaurants, Cortana will be doing all that for you without you having to ask. In essence, she will become an extension of your consciousness — only digitized.
Microsoft already seems to be heading in that direction. Last summer, the company announced that they would be collaborating with Amazon to cross-integrate Cortana with Alexa, Amazon’s own digital assistant. This was slated to come out at the end of 2017, but nothing has come of it so far. However, that doesn’t mean the two tech giants have put the kibosh on the project. Announcements regarding the Cortana-Alexa cross should be coming out in due time. As reported by TheInquirer.net, Microsoft has said that it will “have more to share soon,” whereas Amazon commented that “we’re working on it and expect to begin rolling it out soon.”
Speaking to UK.BusinessInsider.com, Shum remarked: “I think predicting the future is always hard, but one thing [Smith] and I firmly believe is that the ultimate form of AI is a digital assistant — a digital assistant that really understands you, and with your permission knows everything about you.
“Internally we use the words ‘alter ego’ — really a second self. I think that a lot of AI capabilities will be developed in 20 years. There’s already so much progress with reading and writing, and things like guiding people through solving math equations, and AI will be able to help us do a lot more.”
Shum and Smith further asserted that the amalgamation of AI is a certainty that must be welcomed with open arms. Companies and countries that fail to do so will be left in the dust. (Related: Artificial Intelligence – Our Brave New Future?)
But not everyone agrees with this vision of the future. Elon Musk, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Tesla Inc., has warned against the capabilities of AI, which he once compared to “summoning the devil.” Left improperly regulated, Musk claimed that AI will pose a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”
As is, AI is evolving at an unprecedented rate. Putting strict regulations in place will ensure that humanity will not be manipulated into performing unspeakable acts. Musk added that governments must gain a better understanding of AI to fully know its risks.
“Once there is awareness, people will be extremely afraid, as they should be. By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’ll be too late,” he said.
Visit Robots.news to read up on all things AI and robotics.
Sources include:
Tales from the Conspiratum 