Even in absurdity, sacrament. Even in hardship, holiness. Even in doubt, faith. Even in chaos, realization. Even in paradox, blessedness
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"Life expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage." ~Anain Nin
Beauty is in the Processing-Time of the Beholder In the late 1870s, scientist and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton developed an image of the prototypical "face of crime" by creating composite photos of men convicted of serious offenses. Though Galton failed to discover anything abnormal in his composite criminal faces, he did find that the resulting visages were shockingly handsome... Studies have since established that people find prototypical faces—those with average features—to be attractive. A paper published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science proposes a new explanation for this phenomenon: Prototypical faces are pleasing because they're easy for the brain to process. "There is always this question in psychology or in experimental aesthetics: Is there some sort of psychological principle that can explain a lot of what people find attractive, not only in terms of faces or people, but things in general?" said Piotr Winkielman, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego and the study's lead author. "This idea of ease-of-processing seems like a good candidate." jaybird found this for you @ 14:09 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Scientists discover 'shadow person' Ever feel as though you're being followed? As if someone is behind you, shadowing your every move? It might be your ‘shadow person', created by unusual activity in a specific brain region, a new study shows. The paper, published in the British journal Nature, describes the case of a 22-year-old woman with no history of psychiatric problems who was being evaluated for treatment of epilepsy. When a region of her brain called the left temporoparietal junction was electrically stimulated, the woman described encounters with a ‘shadow person' who mimicked her bodily movements. "Electrical stimulation repeatedly produced a feeling of the presence of another person in her extra-personal space," said Olaf Blanke, co-author of the study conducted by a team of researchers from University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland. When the patient was lying down, stimulation of this brain region caused her to feel that someone was behind her. She described the person as young, of indeterminate sex, "a shadow who did not speak or move, and whose position beneath her back was identical to her own", according to the researchers. When the patient sat up, leaned forward and clasped her knees, she felt that the figure was also sitting, embracing her in its arms - a feeling she described as "unpleasant". jaybird found this for you @ 20:23 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
For the last 40 years, medical science has operated on the understanding that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in just about everything the mind does, thinks or feels. The theory is appealingly simple: sadness is simply a shortage of chemical happiness. The typical antidepressant—like Prozac or Zoloft—works by increasing the brain’s access to serotonin. If depression is a hunger for neurotransmitter, then these little pills fill us up. Unfortunately, the serotonergic hypothesis is mostly wrong. After all, within hours of swallowing an antidepressant, the brain is flushed with excess serotonin. Yet nothing happens; the patient is no less depressed. Weeks pass drearily by. Finally, after a month or two of this agony, the torpor begins to lift. But why the delay? If depression is simply a lack of serotonin, shouldn’t the effect of antidepressants be immediate? The paradox of the Prozac lag has been the guiding question of Dr. Ronald Duman’s career. Duman likes to talk with his feet propped up on his desk. He speaks with the quiet confidence of someone whose ideas once seemed far-fetched but are finally being confirmed. “Even as a graduate student,” Duman says, “I was fascinated by how antidepressants work. I always thought that if I can just figure out their mechanism of action—and identify why there is this time-delay in their effect—then I will have had a productive career.” When Duman began studying the molecular basis of antidepressants back in the early 90s, the first thing he realized was that the serotonin hypothesis made no sense. A competing theory, which was supposed to explain the Prozaz lag, was that antidepressants increase the number of serotonin receptors. However, that theory was also disproved. “It quickly became clear that serotonin wasn’t the whole story,” Duman says. “Our working hypothesis at the time just wasn’t right.” jaybird found this for you @ 14:25 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Ethics on the Brain Imagine two scenarios. In the first, you are driving down the street and are suddenly overcome by a fit of sneezing. You veer off to the right, and by the time you come to a stop, you realize, to your horror, that you have hit a young woman walking on the sidewalk. She is pinned against a brick wall and, despite emergency treatment, will be paralyzed below the waist for life. In the second scenario, you are driving a pickup truck on a fine summer morning when you suddenly notice a bee buzzing around inside. You are frightened because you think you might be allergic to bee stings, and while trying to kill the bee with a handy newspaper, you swerve into oncoming traffic, hitting a small car head-on. The driver, a young father of two, is killed. Are you morally responsible in either of these cases (both of which actually occurred), and should you be held legally responsible? In each case, you can honestly say you didn’t mean to cause harm, and it makes a difference that there was neither conscious nor unconscious intent. Still, could you have foreseen the potential consequences of your distraction? We expect people to exercise self-control. We all know that it is difficult but not impossible to stifle a sneeze; you might do so in a classroom, for instance. We could argue that we have even more control over how we respond to our fears than we do to our impulses. Shouldn’t we be expected, then, to not allow ourselves to be distracted by fear of a bee sting when engaged in something as risky as driving? We could imagine a spectrum of situations in which the degrees of self-control and personal responsibility would be up for debate. Consider one final scenario: In a fit of anger, a man hits his girlfriend’s young daughter for accidentally spilling a drink on him. He is arrested, but while in jail awaiting trial, doctors discover he has a tumor in a brain region linked to emotional behavior. The tumor is surgically removed, and the man’s angry outbursts diminish. At his trial, the judge declares that the insanity defense was created for this type of situation, and the man is released. Did the judge do the right thing? Should we make allowances when there is evidence that biological factors have led a person to act in a particular way? jaybird found this for you @ 20:18 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Robert Anton Wilson Needs Our Help
I ponied up, fnord, and was indeed a bit misty eyed. jaybird found this for you @ 14:07 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Living Without Ultimate Moral Responsibility Imagine for a moment that instead of Timothy McVeigh destroying the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it had been a mouse. Suppose this mouse got into the wiring of the electrical system, tangled the circuits, and caused a big fire killing all those inside. Now think of the victims’ families. There would of course still be tremendous grief and suffering, but there would be one significant difference. There would no extra bit of resentment, no consuming anger, no hatred, no need to see the perpetrator punished (even if the mouse somehow got out of the building) in order to experience “closure.” Why the difference? Because McVeigh, we think, committed this terrible act out of his own free will. He chose to do it, and he could have chosen not to. McVeigh, then, is morally responsible for the death of the victims in a way that the mouse is not. And our sense of justice demands that he pay for this crime. There is an undeniable human tendency to see ourselves as free and morally responsible beings. But there’s a problem. We also believe—most of us anyhow—that our environment and our heredity entirely shape our characters (what else could?). But we aren’t responsible for our environment, and we aren’t responsible for our heredity. So we aren’t responsible for our characters. But then how can we be responsible for acts that arise from our characters? There’s a simple but extremely unpopular answer to this question: we aren’t. We are not and cannot be ultimately responsible for our behavior. On this view, while it may be of great pragmatic value to hold people responsible for their actions, and to employ systems of reward and punishment, no one is really deserving of blame or praise for anything. This answer has been around for over two thousand years, and it is backed by solid arguments with premises that are consistent with how most of us view the world. Yet few today give this position the serious consideration it deserves. The view that free will is a fiction is called counterintuitive, absurd, pessimistic, pernicious, and most commonly “unacceptable,” even by those who recognize the force of the arguments behind it. Philosophers who reject God, an immaterial soul, even absolute morality, cannot bring themselves to do the same for the concept of free will—not just in their day to day lives, but in books and articles and extraordinarily complex theories. jaybird found this for you @ 08:03 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Just why are human beings hard-wired to appreciate music? The fact that music is universal across cultures and has been part of human life for a very long time-archeologists have found musical instruments dating from 34,000 BC, and some believe that a 50,000-year-old hollowed-out bear bone from a Neanderthal campsite is an early flute-does suggest that it may indeed be an innate human tendency. And yet it's unclear what purpose it serves. The evolutionary benefits of our affinity for food (nutrition) and sex (procreation) are easy enough to explain, but music is trickier. It has become one of the great puzzles in the field of evolutionary psychology, a controversial discipline dedicated to determining the adaptive roots of aspects of modern behavior, from child-rearing to religion. Some evolutionary psychologists suggest that music originated as a way for males to impress and attract females. Others see its roots in the relationship between mother and child. In a third hypothesis, music was a social adhesive, helping to forge common identity in early human communities. And a few leading evolutionary psychologists argue that music has no adaptive purpose at all, but simply manages, as the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has written, to ``tickle the sensitive spots" in areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes. In his 1997 book ``How the Mind Works," Pinker dubbed music ``auditory cheesecake," a phrase that in the years since has served as a challenge to the musicologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists who believe otherwise. jaybird found this for you @ 20:04 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Living Without Ultimate Moral Responsibility Is it even possible? There is an undeniable human tendency to see ourselves as free and morally responsible beings. But there’s a problem. We also believe—most of us anyhow—that our environment and our heredity entirely shape our characters (what else could?). But we aren’t responsible for our environment, and we aren’t responsible for our heredity. So we aren’t responsible for our characters. But then how can we be responsible for acts that arise from our characters? jaybird found this for you @ 14:57 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
The Experiential Life: Sense of Time, Sense of Place It is possible though, to work with any numinous experience that one has in nature and translate it or adapt it to ones daily life. When I returned from that trip to the British Isles, the new sense I had about the landscape continued; as I hiked my local trails in the Santa Monica Mountains, I looked at every tree, boulder, and chaparral bush with new eyes. I wanted to know, what was behind what I was seeing here? Was it possible to have a similar experience such as I had on Glastonbury Tor? I’ve not experienced anything like that time in Somerset twelve years ago, but I set out on a program to hike the same canyon every week for a year in order to observe the changes over time. And there are changes, even if the freeway-laden horizon doesn’t seem to change. I noted the flowering of different trees and wildflowers, when the streams held water and when they dried up, when the grasses reached their tallest, and when the coyote pups arrived and the rattlesnakes became active. I watched the continued natural repair from a large wildfire that had burned the area a year earlier and saw migratory birds traverse the area in their seasons. I even found a place near a seasonal spring that some people have designated as a special or even sacred spot. On a tree branch near the stream was a collection of colored ribbons and torn fabric strips, some attached to shells or pieces of carved wood. The spot was lovely to sit in during a hot dry day and the water sounds were soothing, the nature spirits of the area were welcoming. So I added offerings of my own after a time and I assume that people are still doing so. jaybird found this for you @ 20:48 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
The Ecology of Magic The traditional magician, I came to discern, commonly acts as an intermediary between the human collective and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants but from the human community back to the local Earth. By their rituals, trances, ecstasies, and 'journeys," magicians ensure that the relation between human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land than it returns to it-not just materially, but with prayers, propitiations, and praise. The scale ofa harvest or the size of a hunt is always negotiated between the tribal community and the natural world it inhabits. To some extent every adult in the community is engaged in this process of listening and attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life. But the shaman or sorcerer is the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the human and the more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and negotiator in any dealings with the Others. And it is only as a result of his ongoing engagement with the animate powers that dwell beyond the strictly human community that the traditional magician is able to alleviate many individual illnesses that arise within that community. Disease, in most such cultures, is conceptualized as a disequilibrium within the sick person, or as the intrusion of a demonic or malevolent presence into his body. There are, at times, malevolent influences within the village that disrupt the health and emotional well-being of susceptible individuals within the community. Yet such destructive influences within the human group are commonly traceable to an imbalance between the human collective and the larger field of forces in which it is embedded. Only those persons who, by their everyday practice, are involved in monitoring and modulating the relations between the human village and the larger animate environment, are able to appropriately diagnose, treat, and ultimately relieve personal ailments and illnesses arising within the village. Any healer who was not simultaneously attending to the complex relations between the human community and the larger more-than-human field will likely dispel an illness from one person only to have the same problem arise (perhaps in a new guise) somewhere else in the village. Hence, the traditional magician or "medicine person" functions primarily as an intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds, and only secondarily as a healer. Without a continually adjusted awareness of the relative balance or imbalance between the local culture and its nonhuman environment, along with the skills necessary to modulate that primary relation, any "healer" is worthless-indeed, not a healer at all. The medicine person's primary allegiance, then, is not to the human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which that community is embedded--it is from this that her or his power to alleviate human illness derives. [via mefi] jaybird found this for you @ 14:42 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Confronting the New Misanthropy The big question today is not whether humans will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our faith in humanity will survive it. Discussions about the future increasingly tend to focus on whether humans will survive. According to green author and Gaia theorist James Lovelock, 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be kept in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable' (1). More and more books predict there will be an unavoidable global catastrophe; there is James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, and Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change: Weather and the Destruction of Civilisations. Kunstler's book warns that 'this is a much darker time than 1938, the eve of World War II' (2). In the media there are alarming stories about a mass 'die-off' in the near future and of cities engulfed by rising oceans as a consequence of climate change. Today we don't just have Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but an entire cavalry regiment of doom-mongers. It is like a secular version of St John's Revelations, except it is even worse - apparently there is no future for humanity after this predicted apocalypse. Instead of being redeemed, human beings will, it seems, disappear without a trace. Anxieties about human survival are as old as human history itself. Through catastrophes such as the Deluge or Sodom and Gomorrah, the religious imagination fantasised about the end of the world. More recently, apocalyptic ideas once rooted in magic and theology have been recast as allegedly scientific statements about human destructiveness and irresponsibility. Elbowing aside the mystical St John, Lovelock poses as a prophet-scientist when he states: 'I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news….' (3) Today, the future of the Earth is said to be jeopardised by human consumption, technological development or by 'man playing God'. And instead of original sin leading to the Fall of Man, we fear the degradation of Nature by an apparently malevolent human species. All of today's various doomsday scenarios - whether it's the millennium bug, oil depletion, global warming, avian flu or the destruction of biodiversity - emphasise human culpability. Their premise is that the human species is essentially destructive and morally bankrupt. 'With breathtaking insolence', warns Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia, 'humans have taken the stores of carbon that Gaia buried to keep oxygen at its proper level and burnt them'. jaybird found this for you @ 08:08 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Study provides new insights into brain organization Scientists have provided new insights into how and why the brain is organised - knowledge which could eventually inform diagnosis of and treatments for conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and autism. A study by Newcastle University, UK, and the International University Bremen, Germany, debunked a prevailing theory that the nervous system should have mainly very short nerve fibre connections between nerve cells, or neurons, to function at its most effective. Instead the study, which carried out a sophisticated computer analysis of public databases containing detailed information of worldwide anatomical studies on primate and worm brains, found that long nerve fibre connections were just as vital to overall brain function as short ones. Much of what we know about the human brain derives from neuroscience research on primates, which are used because they have have experienced similar evolutionary stages to humans. Brain scans of Alzheimer’s patients and people with autism have shown that they are lacking certain long-distance neural interactions, although experts have yet to discover their specific purpose. The new study, published in the academic journal PLoS Computational Biology, found that long fibres are important because they can send messages quickly over a longer distance compared with if the same message was sent over the same distance via lots of short fibres. It also found that long fibres are more reliable for transmission of messages over longer distances. “You can draw parallels with a train journey from Newcastle to London,” said lead researcher, Dr Marcus Kaiser, of Newcastle University’s School of Computing Science and the University’s Institute of Neuroscience. “For example, you would get to London much more quickly and easily if you took a direct train there. However, if you had to make the journey via Durham, Leeds and Stevenage, changing trains each time, then it will take you longer to get there, and there is the possibility you would miss a connection at some point. It’s the same in the human brain.” jaybird found this for you @ 20:53 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Spock and Roll: Emotions 'fuel irrational acts' People who make irrational decisions when faced with problems are at the mercy of their emotions, a study says. Researchers traced the origin of such decisions to the brain's emotion centre, the amygdala, in a study of 20 people using a gambling game. That brain region fires up in people faced with a difficult situation but reactions to its effects vary, the University College London team found... The researchers found some people kept a cool head and managed to keep their emotions in check, while others were led by their emotional response. jaybird found this for you @ 14:45 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Aldous Huxley jaybird found this for you @ 20:58 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: G.I. Gurdjieff jaybird found this for you @ 14:45 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Carl Jung jaybird found this for you @ 08:56 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Oddballs abound when you're a freak magnet “A freak magnet is basically someone who attracts bizarre, unwanted attention,” says Ginger, who asked that her real name not be used due to the number of times she’s been stalked. “You’re minding your own business and then you suddenly have some encounter that you didn’t invite in any way. It just happens to some people more than others.” But the burning question is why? Why do some people walk through a public garden and see beautiful flowers and other people, like Ginger, see a naked guy standing in his picture window masturbating? Do freak magnets emit some kind of special scent? Use different body language? Are they more open and approachable than other people? Or do they just like all the crazy attention or perhaps attract it because they’re a little freaky themselves? "Being a freak magnet sounds to me like half-complaint and half-boast,” says Dr. Doe Lang, psychotherapist and author of "The New Secrets of Charisma." “There is a sort of suggestive glamour about it. Even if you’re magnetizing freaks, you’re still magnetizing somebody. You’ve got the power to attract.” But it’s what some folks attract that’s the problem. Beth Duddy, 46, a restaurant server/artist from San Francisco tends to pull from the paranoid schizophrenic end of the spectrum, i.e., “intense people who like to talk,” often, as it turns out, about their “enemy lists”. Duddy, whose mother suffered from mental illness, calls herself freak tolerant and admits to being a bit outside the norm, herself. “I’m college-educated and can put on a business suit and pumps and all that,” she says. “But I’m not afraid to talk to strangers on the street. And it seems that I attract these amusing oddballs and losers. It feels like once I make eye contact with them, it’s all over. They pick up on whatever it is that tells them they can open up their freaky baggage.” jaybird found this for you @ 14:23 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Robert Anton Wilson jaybird found this for you @ 20:11 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Ken Wilber jaybird found this for you @ 14:08 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Viddy Thursday: Terrence McKenna jaybird found this for you @ 08:05 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
A Nation of Wimps? Maybe it's the cyclist in the park, trim under his sleek metallic blue helmet, cruising along the dirt path... at three miles an hour. On his tricycle. Or perhaps it's today's playground, all-rubber-cushioned surface where kids used to skin their knees. And... wait a minute... those aren't little kids playing. Their mommies—and especially their daddies—are in there with them, coplaying or play-by-play coaching. Few take it half-easy on the perimeter benches, as parents used to do, letting the kids figure things out for themselves. Then there are the sanitizing gels, with which over a third of parents now send their kids to school, according to a recent survey. Presumably, parents now worry that school bathrooms are not good enough for their children. Consider the teacher new to an upscale suburban town. Shuffling through the sheaf of reports certifying the educational "accommodations" he was required to make for many of his history students, he was struck by the exhaustive, well-written—and obviously costly—one on behalf of a girl who was already proving among the most competent of his ninth-graders. "She's somewhat neurotic," he confides, "but she is bright, organized and conscientious—the type who'd get to school to turn in a paper on time, even if she were dying of stomach flu." He finally found the disability he was to make allowances for: difficulty with Gestalt thinking. The 13-year-old "couldn't see the big picture." That cleverly devised defect (what 13-year-old can construct the big picture?) would allow her to take all her tests untimed, especially the big one at the end of the rainbow, the college-worthy SAT. Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. "Kids need to feel badly sometimes," says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. "We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope." Messing up, however, even in the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation. "Life is planned out for us," says Elise Kramer, a Cornell University junior. "But we don't know what to want." As Elkind puts it, "Parents and schools are no longer geared toward child development, they're geared to academic achievement." No one doubts that there are significant economic forces pushing parents to invest so heavily in their children's outcome from an early age. But taking all the discomfort, disappointment and even the play out of development, especially while increasing pressure for success, turns out to be misguided by just about 180 degrees. With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they're robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we're on our way to creating a nation of wimps. jaybird found this for you @ 14:00 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Neural bases for language existed already 25-30 million years ago The origin of the brain mechanisms involved in human language is a much debated subject, especially whether these mechanisms appeared independently in humans or were already present in a common ancestor of human and non-human primates. But now, research just published in the advanced online issue of Nature Neuroscience, found that Rhesus macaques when listening to other monkeys’ calls activate brain areas equivalent to the ones used for language in humans supporting the hypothesis that the neural basis for language existed already in a common ancestral. The discovery is a major step in understanding better language origins and evolution. jaybird found this for you @ 14:12 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
AN INTEGRAL THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS Ken Wilber, blowing your mind again: jaybird found this for you @ 08:07 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Why our intuitions about how the world works are often wrong The reason folk science so often gets it wrong is that we evolved in an environment radically different from the one in which we now live. Our senses are geared for perceiving objects of middling size--between, say, ants and mountains--not bacteria, molecules and atoms on one end of the scale and stars and galaxies on the other end. We live a scant three score and 10 years, far too short a time to witness evolution, continental drift or long-term environmental changes. Causal inference in folk science is equally untrustworthy. We correctly surmise designed objects, such as stone tools, to be the product of an intelligent designer and thus naturally assume that all functional objects, such as eyes, must have also been intelligently designed. Lacking a cogent theory of how neural activity gives rise to consciousness, we imagine mental spirits floating within our heads. We lived in small bands of roaming hunter-gatherers that accumulated little wealth and had no experience of free markets and economic growth. Folk science leads us to trust anecdotes as data, such as illnesses being cured by assorted nostrums based solely on single-case examples. Equally powerful are anecdotes involving preternatural beings, compelling us to make causal inferences linking these nonmaterial entities to all manner of material events, illness being the most personal. Because people often re-cover from sickness naturally, whatever was done just before recovery receives the -credit, prayer being the most common. jaybird found this for you @ 14:23 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
You live in the big here Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome... At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital. The following exercise in watershed awareness was hatched 30 years ago by Peter Warshall, naturalist extraordinaire. Variations of this list have appeared over the years with additions by Jim Dodge, Peter Berg, and Stephanie Mills among others. I have recently added new questions from Warshall and myself, and I have edited or altered most of the rest. It's still a work in progress. If you have a universal question you think fits, submit it to me. I am extremely interested in hearing from anyone who scores a 25 or better on the quiz on their first unassisted try. I'd like to know how you got your Big Here education. I have a few small prizes for anyone who scores (on the honor system) a perfect 30, without Googling. The intent of this quiz is to inspire you to answer the questions you can't initially... jaybird found this for you @ 20:47 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
NEW MODEL OF BRAIN SHEDS LIGHT ON CAUSES OF AUTISM “Autism involves multiple genes and correspondingly, people with autism are known to have multiple cognitive, emotional, and motor symptoms – such as impaired development of speech and difficulty expressing emotions,” said Dr. Grossberg. “The iSTART model describes the various brain mechanisms that underlie autism and how they may give rise to the symptoms of the condition.” iSTART, which stands for Imbalanced Spectrally Timed Adaptive Resonance Theory, is derived from the earlier START model developed by Grossberg to explain how the brain controls normal behaviors. The new model describes how brain mechanisms that control normal emotional, timing, and motor processes may become imbalanced and lead to symptoms of autism. START and its imbalanced version iSTART are a combination of three models, each one of which tries to explain fundamental issues about human learning and behavior. The first, called Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, proposes how the brain learns to recognize objects and events. Recognition is accomplished through interactions between perceptually-driven inputs and learned expectations. Inputs attempt to match expectations which helps prompt the brain to anticipate input/expectation patterns. “When a match occurs, the system locks into a resonant state that drives how we learn to recognize things; hence the term adaptive resonance,” explained Grossberg. The degree of match that is required for resonance to occur is set by a vigilance parameter which controls whether a particular learned representation will be concrete or abstract. Low vigilance allows for learning of broad abstract recognition categories, such as a category that is activated by any face; high vigilance forces the learning of specific concrete categories, such as a category that is activated by a particular view of a familiar friend’s face. iSTART proposes that individuals with autism have their vigilance fixed at such a high setting that their learned representations are very concrete, or hyperspecific. “Hypervigilance leads to hyperspecific learning which perpetuates a multitude of problems with learning, cognition, and attention,” said Grossberg. jaybird found this for you @ 20:42 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Some scientists take the position that dreaming probably has no function. They feel that sleep, and within it REM sleep, have biological functions (though these are not totally established) and that dreaming is simply an epiphenomenon that is the mental activity that occurs during REM sleep. I do not believe this is the most fruitful approach to the study of dreaming. Would we be satisfied with the view that thinking has no function and is simply an epiphenomenon--the kind of mental activity that occurs when the brain is in the waking state? Therefore I will try to explain a current view of dreaming and its possible functions, developed by myself and many collaborators, which we call the Contemporary Theory of Dreaming. The basic idea is as follows: activation patterns are shifting and connections are being made and unmade constantly in our brains, forming the physical basis for our minds. There is a whole continuum in the making of connections that we subsequently experience as mental functioning. At one end of the continuum is focused waking activity, such as when we are doing an arithmetic problem or chasing down a fly ball in the outfield. Here our mental functioning is focused, linear and well-bounded. When we move from focused waking to looser waking thought--reverie, daydreaming and finally dreaming--mental activity becomes less focused, looser, more global and more imagistic. Dreaming is the far end of this continuum: the state in which we make connections most loosely. Some consider this loose making of connections to be a random process, in which case dreams would be basically meaningless. The Contemporary Theory of Dreaming holds that the process is not random, however, and that it is instead guided by the emotions of the dreamer. When one clear-cut emotion is present, dreams are often very simple. Thus people who experience trauma--such as an escape from a burning building, an attack or a rape--often have a dream something like, "I was on the beach and was swept away by a tidal wave." This case is paradigmatic. It is obvious that the dreamer is not dreaming about the actual traumatic event, but is instead picturing the emotion, "I am terrified. I am overwhelmed." When the emotional state is less clear, or when there are several emotions or concerns at once, the dream becomes more complicated. We have statistics showing that such intense dreams are indeed more frequent and more intense after trauma. In fact, the intensity of the central dream imagery, which can be rated reliably, appears to be a measure of the emotional arousal of the dreamer. Therefore, overall the contemporary theory considers dreaming to be a broad making of connections guided by emotion. But is this simply something that occurs in the brain or does it have a purpose as well? jaybird found this for you @ 14:35 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Consciousness: East & West Looking at computers as metaphor, where did computer technology come from that gave these new more powerful ideas? Obviously it emerged out of ongoing historical technological trends. However, all of this progress is the result of scientific minds working on things. Whose minds were they, and what was inspiring them to work on the things they did? I think this is the more important question. When you examine the historical roots of the PC revolution you'll find that things like PC's and the World Wide Web came from a very particular group of people. As pointed out in What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, it was the insights gained from higher states of consciousness, specifically those unique to LSD, that gave rise to the PC revolution. As many people who have taken LSD, you experience your brain has a large set of programs, that you in turn can program, and better still, metaprogram "who" and "what" you want to become. Please read our online book by John Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer, for a pioneering work in this area. It's also no secret that the 60's is often equated with a turn to Eastern mysticism for guidance. There's was good reason for this embrace, as many very intelligent people felt current Western ideas on the nature of reality were woefully incomplete in describing, let alone assisting in integrating these sometimes powerful and overwhelming transpersonal experiences. When I was 17 I experienced a profound and spontaneous (non drug) shift in consciousness myself. It lasted all of about 10 seconds. At the time I had no knowledge of eastern thought. I made every attempt to recapture the experience. Having read Gödel, Escher, Bach my sophomore year of high school, I often resorted to using Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem as a launching pad into understanding this transcendent state of consciousness. One night while trying, in a rather ridiculous and humorous way, to describe all of this to one my friends, I somehow "tricked" my brain back into this state. For the next hour I laughed my ass off at the cosmic joke of it all. I've tried unsuccessfully many times since to explain this state. I believe my failure to adequate explain this state is rooted in our language and way of looking at the world, which itself is rooted in the Greek ideas of atomism, reductionism and materialism. This way of perceiving and understanding the universe eventually became what we now call science and forms the bedrock of Western philosophy. Barring the recent emergence of Eastern thought into this dialog, the only other alternative explanation of the universe are the beliefs of religious extremism of various stripes. (be it Christian, Islam or New Age). Scientists, being all too human that they are, seeing the believers at the gates, understandably defend their turf with as much zeal. However, this citadel of science as RAW liked to call it, similar to the Catholic Inquisition before it, believes, just like the religious extremism they oppose, that they, and they alone, have a monopoly on all knowledge. If it can't be objectively verified scientifically, then it doesn't really exist. Yet, ironically science has *created* just as many ephemeral concepts as any religion. Energyfor example is a fantastic and highly useful and utilitarian concept, but that's all it really is. The difference in this case, is western concepts like energy have "real-world" objectively verified effects. Understanding these effects and knowing how to predict and utilize them has tremendous power as evidenced by our current technological civilization. jaybird found this for you @ 14:13 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Couch: Anarchist Therapy It was during the dictatorship that a clandestine anarchist activist named Roberto Freire, who also was a psychoanalyst, (anti)psychiatrist and author of books and plays, confirmed the destructive effects of repression on people’s behavior and psychological and mental health. Freire believed that micro-social relationships are the genesis for macro-social authoritarianism and he aimed for understanding the politics of modern society through people’s behavior in their everyday life. He realized that the fact that one believes in a certain ideology and has a libertarian view of the world doesn’t always lead one to have a libertarian behavior in his/her personal relationships with his/her fellows – there is something else, like an unconscious barrier, that determines the attitudes of the individuals towards life and other people. Freire, then, broke with psychoanalysis and over the next decades researched and developed Somatherapy – a therapy form in shape of a pedagogy, or a kind of pedagogy with therapeutic effects. That means that the way of dealing with neurosis is shifted from a medical perspetive to an educational one. The goal is to liberate those who have been subjected to repression (all of us). Somatherapy supports itself in theory and praxis with the social and corporeal psychology of Wilhelm Reich, Antipsychiatry, Gestalt Therapy, Anarchism and with the Afro-Brazilian art form of the people called Capoeira Angola. The technique that he created consists of assembling a group of people to form a collective with limited duration (about a year and a half) that, through self-managed and non-hierarchical dynamics, will search to explore, understand and develop their capabilities to be creative, self-regulated, to love and to be loved and to be confident in the defense of their own desires and needs towards a society hostile to independent individuals. All of this happens in a methodology composed of four elements: (1) experience of exercises created by Freire and carried out by the therapist in charge of the group (Freire or a disciple of him); (2) meetings of the group without the presence of the therapist (that guarantees the group’s and each person’s independence and responsibility for the therapeutic process); (3) practice of Capoeira Angola; (4) interaction of the group’s members in various social activities, either for fun or any kind of collective work. jaybird found this for you @ 08:10 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Dodging punishment may be its own reward Is the carrot or the stick the more effective encouragement? Both are equally effective, suggests a new study that found an important reward centre in the brain responds similarly to avoiding punishment or gaining a prize. The brain area is known as the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Damage to this area – caused by anything from car accidents to tumours – can cause a person to develop behavioural problems, explains John O’Doherty of Caltech in Pasadena, California, US. He recalls one patient, a karate expert, who after damage to the medial OFC began inappropriately practicing karate moves on hospital staff. The new insight into how the undamaged medial OFC reacts in people may pave the way for researchers to explore whether habitual rule breakers, such as career criminals, have abnormal activity in that part of the brain. Behavioural experiments had previously suggested that dodging punishment is a reward in itself. But researchers had not verified that punishment avoidance registers as an actual reward in the brain. jaybird found this for you @ 08:04 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Not Your Average Summer Camp In the summer of 1954, twenty-two fifth-grade boys were taken out to a campground at Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. Admittance had been quite selective. None of the boys knew each other. They were taken to the park in two separate groups of eleven. Ostensibly it was an unremarkable summer camp. In fact, what the boys were heading to wasn't that at all. They did have a very normal camp experience, certainly, but what they had really done for two and a half weeks was unwittingly take part in an elaborate and fascinating psychological experiment. Their parents had okayed it: the twenty-two boys of Robbers Cave were actually the basis of social psychologist Muzafer Sherif's landmark study of group conflict. There were two parts to Sherif's hypothesis: (2) If two in-groups thus formed are brought into a functional relationship under conditions of competition and group frustration, attitudes and appropriate hostile actions in relation to the out-group and its members will arise and will be standardized and shared in varying degrees by group members. After conceiving of the experiment and working out the logistics of its program and setting– a Boy Scouts' campground– Sherif and his colleagues had chosen their campers carefully. To decrease the potential impact of variables (other factors that could prompt hostility), Sherif and his colleagues had looked for boys of similar age and intelligence, all Caucasian and Protestant, all middle-class, none from insecure homes and none known to be troublemakers. They had aimed for a balance of different kinds of mental and physical strengths. It was also very deliberate that the boys had never met before; this was in accordance with the first part of Sherif's hypothesis. Any preformed alliances would throw off the study. The aim was to establish immediately a sense of group unity within each group of eleven boys. Taking the two groups to Robbers Cave separately was a major part of this; it also kept the other side wholly unknown. None of the boys were even aware yet that there was a second group. That would only be revealed once a strong sense of group identity had been forged. Once at the park, the activities continued to encourage the groups to work together. These were typical aspects of camp: preparing food, putting up the tents, etc. They also played sports, went swimming, and performed for each other. This was all very successful - in fact, as the boys bonded each of the two groups chose to give itself a name, which was not an intentional part of the experiment. One became the Eagles, the other the Rattlers. Precisely as Sherif had hypothesized, there came to be a social order very quickly in each group. Clear leaders emerged from both. And, as the boys became vaguely aware that theirs was not the only group, they actually asked to be put into competition with them. This, of course, was exactly what the psychologists had planned to happen. jaybird found this for you @ 08:01 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Sexual Success And The Schizoid Factor Ever wondered why uncouth, scruffy rock musicians are pursued by legions of doting, lovelorn female fans? Or why women threw themselves at Pablo Picasso? Well, a new study suggests that creativity may confer an evolutionary advantage in finding a mate; indicating that creative types have increased sexual appeal. But paradoxically, people who have certain traits predictive of schizophrenia - a condition not normally associated with evolutionary fitness - also have a higher propensity toward artistic ability. This creative ability, say some evolutionary experts, is far from being a disadvantage, as creativity is highly attractive when it comes to mate choice. Like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller considers sexual selection to be right up there in importance with natural selection. Advocates of sexual selection argue that competition between members of the same sex drives the evolution of particular traits that mates of the opposite sex find attractive. Miller, author of The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, claims that traits like morality, art, language and creativity, influence the way in which the human mind evolves. It may sound like a stretch, but recent studies show that reliable predictions of mate choice can be made using these kinds of traits as a guide. Before looking more closely at these studies, however, it's worth first considering whether creativity is actually quantifiable. Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran's musings on savants, who display exceptional skills in a very specific field, is illuminating in this respect, as he "unashamedly speculates" that a savant's talents may stem from an enlarged section of the brain called the angular gyrus. "You can imagine an explosion of talent resulting from this simple but 'anomalous' increase in brain volume," says Ramachandran, adding: "The same argument might hold for drawing, music, language, indeed any human trait." Ramachandran explains that this theory is at least in part testable, and points to examples where damage to the right parietal cortex "c |
Rushkoff: I hope people I've inspired with my work would band together to help me out in my later years if I needed it. Which is at least part of the reason why I'm sending what I can to support cosmic thinking patriarch Robert Anton Wilson, whose infirmity and depleted finances have put him in the precarious position of not being able to meet next month's rent.