“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time.
There are roughly 200,000 patients in the United States trapped in the borderlands between consciousness and oblivion. Until recently, most doctors believed that recovering from this condition was not possible. Vegetative states were considered permanent after three months if the injury was caused by oxygen deprivation, or one year if it was caused by blunt trauma. And since minimally conscious patients did not fare much better than those who were vegetative, most doctors did not bother to draw the distinction.
But in the past decade, a series of developments have coalesced into a far more complicated picture than previously imagined. In 2003, an Arkansas man named Terry Wallis emerged, after 19 years, from a minimally conscious state. Neuroimaging suggested that his brain had essentially reconfigured itself — surviving neurons bypassed dead ones and forged new connections to one another.
You can’t put this book safely in a genre: there’s a brief social history of psilocybin: Maria Sabina, Wasson, Leary, Koestler, Huxley. There’s neuroscience, a ride through the neuronal network, the vast electrochemical signaling system that produces the spectrum of conscious experience across multiple states. Powell covers in general terms the actions of psychedelics as neurotransmitters, binding to the same receptors as serotonin and other neurotransmitters with major changes in one’s state of consciousness as a result.
What would a month of meditation do for you? In the portrait series “Before and After,” Peter Seidler photographs participants on their first and last days of dathun, a 30-day group meditation retreat.
So the researchers will ask troops to take control of the “creation of the customized healing imagery (therapeutic dreams) to counter the impact of nightmares,” according to a military contracting document.
A brief, fast paced overview of dreaming.
It's hard to know what to make of these claims. On the one hand, we know that the brain is easily coaxed into hallucinatory states that are taken to be reality: just think of your visually rich, bizarre-but-fully-believed nighttime dreams. On the other hand, although we know a great deal about the details of neurobiology, we have little scientific insight into the existence of private subjective experience -- that is, how cells and chemicals achieve consciousness.
Neurologist Robert Sapolsky puts an interesting twist on this old story, though. What if it isn't the burst of dopamine that we get addicted to, but the anticipation of a burst of dopamine? It's a small distinction. But it matters, he says, if our reward system is based less on happiness than on the pursuit of happiness.
Many times I get asked, “So what have you learned from psychedelics?” Paradoxically what I learned is how little I know, that all my assumptions are open to question, all I thought I knew I have to make provisional. It makes you realize there are limitations in human knowledge, and we shouldn’t assume that we know very much, because we don’t. In some ways that’s very liberating. My training is in science, and in science it’s aright to suspend your judgment. To say, we don’t really know enough to make a statement about something until we have more data opens you up to the possibility of learning. I really think that’s one of the main benefits of it.
Intelligence, Hawking believes contrary to our human-centric existece, may not have any long-term survival value. In comparison the microbial world, will live on, even if all other life on Earth is wiped out by our actions. Hawking's main insight is that intelligence was an unlikely development for life on Earth, from the chronology of evolution: "It took a very long time, two and a half billion years, to go from single cells to multi-cell beings, which are a necessary precursor to intelligence. This is a good fraction of the total time available, before the Sun blows up. So it would be consistent with the hypothesis, that the probability for life to develop intelligence, is low. In this case, we might expect to find many other life forms in the galaxy, but we are unlikely to find intelligent life."
Minute Physics is a YouTube channel by Henry Reich that explains the concepts and theories of physics in simple one minute animations.
Have you ever been primed? I mean has anyone ever deliberately influenced your subconscious mind and altered your perception of reality without your knowing it? Whole Foods Market, and others, are doing it to you right now.
Even if you believe in God, you might still be atheist. That's what Penn Jillette argues in his new book God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales.
Dr. Lloyd Rudy, a pioneer of cardiac surgery, tells stories of two patients who came back to life after being declared dead, and what they told him.
Eat the Sun is a feature length documentary that focuses on a young man's journey into the little known world of sun gazing--an ancient practice of looking directly into the sun for long periods of time. Today, with the help of the Internet, this revived practice is gathering global momentum. Modern day sun gazers claim a multitude of health benefits including better eyesight, increased vitality, weight loss, and in more profound cases a total loss of the desire and need to eat food.