Consciousness

Timothy Leary --The Man Who Turned On America

2016-07-18T17:11:00.002-07:00

from youtube

Nature of our consciousness

2016-07-18T06:50:00.001-07:00

from thelearningtree

All things that have consciousness may be divided into two categories — those that move and others that cause movement. That which moves is matter, and that which makes the matter move is awareness. In the atom, protons, electrons and neutrons move at great speed. The force that makes them move constantly must come from within the atom. That is consciousness, inherent in all things, including human beings. In humans, consciousness has a dual function. In addition to enabling our functioning on the physical plane, it assists in the process of evolution, in the actualisation of our transcendental destiny. According to ancient scriptures, only in human form can the meaning of creation, if there is any, be realised.

Most of our choices are based on what will give us the most happiness. One form of happiness is one that begins in suffering but which is beneficial as it leads to greater awareness. The other form of happiness, caused by contact of senses with material objects, appears delightful in the beginning, but turns out to be poisonous later. Those who prefer the former happiness are the ones who ascend the evolutionary ladder. Welcoming one’s present ordeal for future happiness requires vision. That vision enables man to see the ultimate that lies beyond the immediate, and the permanent that lies beyond the transient. This is the vision inherent in human consciousness, which has a double function.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

George Harrison - The Last Performance (John Fugelsang)

2015-10-02T17:48:00.003-07:00

from youtube

Staring Into Someone's Eyes For 10 Minutes Can Alter Your Consciousness Like Drugs

2015-08-27T20:56:00.002-07:00

from newseveryday.com

By R. Siva Kumar(writer@newseveryday.com) - 27 Aug '15 09:04AM

If you like taking drugs---then do it. Not by ingesting the substance abuse materials, but just by staring into someone's eyes in a dim room for 10 minutes, according to newser.

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This is what Jenni Avins says. She sat with someone else in a supply closet, got into a staring match and saw the other person's face morph into a mountain lion.

"I cried the whole time," Avins writes at Quartz. "Then we went back to work."

Her colleague repeated her story---in fact, she thought Avins looked like a lioness.

This was what Italian researcherGiovanni Caputo from the University of Urbino said. He collected 40 people in a room with "low illumination" and kept them all looking at a group's eyes, while the other half stared at walls while sitting back-to-back, IFL Science reports.

What happened to the 'staring' group was weird. They said that "time slowed down, they felt spacey and went through some strange hallucinations".

So 90% of them saw faces deform, while 75% encountered "monster-like beings", and 30% saw animals.

This is all about "dissociation," or a person moving away reality. Hence, monsters might be springing up after a person comes back from a "dissociative state brought on by minimal sensory stimulation".

Another theory is that of "Troxler fading," or the effect of just staring at one point for long, according to Scientific American.

Says IFL Science: "If this were to explain" the latest study, it says, "then we would expect facial features to gradually vanish, rather than having strange things appear. ... We clearly still have a lot to learn about these strange phenomena."

Read more at http://www.newseveryday.com/articles/24289/20150827/staring-someones-eyes-10-minutes-alter-consciousness-drugs.htm#roD2L0CRxtIecx9e.99

Our Parents' Level of Consciousness

2015-08-09T17:55:00.000-07:00

from huffpost

Suza Scalora Become a fan

Life Empowerment Coach, Author of "The Fairies" and Founder of LOVE 365

Posted: 08/06/2015 8:43 pm EDT Updated: 08/06/2015 10:59 pm EDT

In this video, Eckhart Tolle and physical chemist Lothar Schäfer discuss that no one can act beyond their level of consciousness, including our parents. When we want our parents or anyone else to act more consciously, we are unconscious, creating suffering for ourselves because we are denying the 'isness' of the present moment. We are conscious when we can allow people, including our parents, to experience whatever state of consciousness is arising in the moment, without imposing our expectations and demands on them. This is the state of compassion, kindness and empathy for the humanness of the other.

For more information on Eckhart Tolle, please click here.

For more information on Lothar Schäfer, please click here.

Follow Suza Scalora on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@suzascalora

A New Hot Button: Consciousness-Driven Evolution

2015-07-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

from beliefnet.com

Science is meant to be the opposite of a belief system. No one underlined this point more securely than Charles Darwin, who devised a theory of evolution that defied the strongest belief of his time, the all but universal belief in the bible version of the origins of man. The fossil record supported a notion contrary to the Bible, that creation was a process, not a single event dictated by a divine Creator. Despite a century and a half of proof that Darwin was right, taking God out of evolution still sticks in the throat of many people.

Pollsters find, to the dismay of trained scientists, that God remains in play for many when it comes to our origins. For example, a 2013 Pew Research poll found that one-third of respondents believe that human beings have always existed in their present form. When broken down by religion, this anti-Darwin, pro-Bible view is held by 64% of white evangelical Protestants and 50% of black Protestants broken down by political party, only 43% of Republicans believe that human beings evolved over time versus 67% of Democrats and 65% of independents.

With this as background, it’s no wonder that evolution as a public debate causes heated divisions, even though among scientists there has been no serious challenge to Darwinism. But now it seems that a new hot-button issue, actually rooted in science, has caused evolutionists to react as if their own belief system has been attacked. This is the issue of mind and consciousness and the part they played in human evolution. Specifically, did early humans make choices that facilitated our evolution outside the framework of random mutations and natural selection, which are the two pillars of Darwinian theory?

Natural selection, often tagged as “survival of the fittest” (a phrase Darwin himself never used), is about gaining an advantage in the two things that matter for survival: getting enough food and passing on genes through mating rituals. The food part is self-evident, since a species will dwindle and die out if it loses the competition for food. Random mutation is a bit more technical. Species evolve by changing in ways that adapt better or worse to their environment, and such changes occur at the genetic level. Genes mutate at a predictable rate in an apparently random manner. In other words, an early giraffe might exhibit a longer neck, thanks to a random genetic mutation, and if this longer neck allows it to compete more successfully for food and mating rights, the new mutation has a chance, over time, to allow all giraffes to have longer necks.

Darwinism, as it is presently taught, is very careful to make this process totally random and mindless. In other words, giraffes didn’t desire longer necks. They only sprung up by accidental mutation, not through any intent or purpose, which are both mental traits. Going back to the original step of tossing out the divine mind, evolutionary theory also excluded all minds from the process, including the human mind. Our ancestors, so the theory dictates, had no say in how they evolved, despite possessing a state of elevated consciousness far beyond that of any other primate. Primitive hominids and early humans were bound by random mutation and natural selection, along with the rest of life on the planet.

But several factors have raised two possibilities, and depending on which one you support, you find yourself pressing a hot button. The first possibility is that the mind or consciousness must be included in the evolutionary mix. Evolution is a field where data are constantly argued over, but it appears that Homo sapiens has evolved with unprecedented speed over the last 8,000 to 30,000 years, which seems to many scientists, to be too fast for the operation of random mutation and natural selection alone, especially since they take millions of years to create major alterations in a species. To account for this sped-up timeline, the X factors that could make a difference are culture and making choices, both of which are conscious activities.

If a culture values basketball, for example, it quite possibly would choose to feed its basketball players well. Women might find tall men more desirable, and thus an intervention has taken place. Nature isn’t the only factor selecting who survives and who doesn’t. Conscious choice has stuck its thumb into the genetic mix. This is obviously true when it comes to modern Homo sapiens. We long ago escaped the rigid constraints of Darwinism in various ways. Here are a few undeniable ones:

— We take care of the sick and weak. They don’t die off as the result of losing out in the competition for food.

— We treat and cure diseases. Adverse mutations don’t simply run their course. They are countered by medical knowledge.

— — We artificially tamper with the breeding pool by treating childhood diseases, insuring the survival of children whom Nature has condemned to death if the disease in question is fatal.

— We give food and shelter freely or at drastically reduced expense to those who cannot get them for themselves.

— We choose mates for mental reasons that have nothing to do with food procurement or the ability to physically defeat male rivals.

Simple logic tells us that these traits had to evolve over time; therefore, the real question isn’t whether consciousness plays a part in human evolution but how and when it began to. Totally excluding mind from evolution is not science but the exercise of a belief system. Current evidence doesn’t support the belief, and yet the belief blindly wins out. But the rising field of epigenetics is on the side of the mind, because it indicates that lifestyle, behavior, experience and stress level can be passed on, not through genetic mutations but by chemical modifications of your DNA (called “marks”) that change the activities of existing genes. These marks can occur during calamitous events (i.e., if your ancestors went through a famine) and are hypothesized to be passed on to future generations (as the result of a past famine, you may be statistically more prone to diabetes). For example, children born to parents during the horrible Dutch famine during WWII, are more prone to obesity and diabetes.

This form of “soft” inheritance is being widely validated at many levels of biology, from microbes to water fleas to mice. Epigenetic marks on specific genes have been associated with risk for diseases like Alzheimer’s disease as part of the recently published national Epigenome Roadmap project. Once culture has been allowed into the evolutionary picture, with the support of epigenetics to indicate how life experiences can change our gene activities and perhaps even be passed on to the next generation, the opening for the role of mind and consciousness in the process is undeniable.

But we said there was a second position that can be taken on the issue. This is the contention that consciousness is the most important ingredient in the mix. Instead of being one factor out of many that must be considered, consciousness may drive evolution. This brings in banned words like purpose, meaning, and intention. Thanks to the anti-science, pro-Bible camp, many geneticists feel that they are defending the Alamo in a knee-jerk reaction against attack whenever the words “mind” or “consciousness” are raised. Science isn’t meant to have radioactive words or strict dogma. The seeker of truth must go where the data lead.

We feel that the data lead to a place where pure randomness isn’t viable and where blind natural selection must take mind and culture into account. Certainly these two points hold true for modern Homo sapiens, as we just saw. How far the argument can be expanded into the entire process of evolution will be the subject of the next post. (Our forthcoming book Super Genes covers each point in great detail, for anyone who wants further scientific validation.)

(To be cont.)

DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. Chopra is the co-author with Rudolph Tanzi of the New York Times bestseller, Super Brain. He serves as an Adjunct Professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, Columbia University, Assistant Clinical Professor, in the Family and Preventive Medicine Department at the University of California, San Diego, Health Sciences, and Senior Scientist with The Gallup Organization.

RUDOLPH E. TANZI is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the New York Times bestseller, Super Brain, and an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer disease. He was included in TIME Magazine’s “TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World”.

A New Hot Button: Consciousness-Driven Evolution

2015-07-06T22:31:00.001-07:00

from sfgate

Deepak Chopra

Updated 3:36 pm, Monday, July 6, 2015

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

Science is meant to be the opposite of a belief system. No one underlined this point more securely than Charles Darwin, who devised a theory of evolution that defied the strongest belief of his time, the all but universal belief in the bible version of the origins of man. The fossil record supported a notion contrary to the Bible that creation was a process, not a single event dictated by a divine Creator. Despite a century and a half of proof that Darwin was right, taking God out of evolution still sticks in the throat of many people.

With this as background, it's no wonder that evolution as a public debate causes heated divisions, even though among scientists there has been no serious challenge to Darwinism. But now it seems that a new hot-button issue, actually rooted in science, has caused evolutionists to react as if their own belief system has been attacked. This is the issue of mind and consciousness and the part they played in human evolution. Specifically, did early humans make choices that facilitated our evolution outside the framework of random mutations and natural selection, which are the two pillars of Darwinian theory?

Natural selection, often tagged as "survival of the fittest" (a phrase Darwin himself never used), is about gaining an advantage in the two things that matter for survival: getting enough food and passing on genes through mating rituals. The food part is self-evident, since a species will dwindle and die out if it loses the competition for food. Random mutation is a bit more technical. Species evolve by changing in ways that adapt better or worse to their environment, and such changes occur at the genetic level. Genes mutate at a predictable rate in an apparently random manner. In other words, an early giraffe might exhibit a longer neck, thanks to a random genetic mutation, and if this longer neck allows it to compete more successfully for food and mating rights, the new mutation has a chance, over time, to allow all giraffes to have longer necks.

Darwinism, as it is presently taught, is very careful to make this process totally random and mindless. In other words, giraffes didn't desire longer necks. They only sprung up by accidental mutation, not through any intent or purpose, which are both mental traits. Going back to the original step of tossing out the divine mind, evolutionary theory also excluded all minds from the process, including the human mind. Our ancestors, so the theory dictates, had no say in how they evolved, despite possessing a state of elevated consciousness far beyond that of any other primate. Primitive hominids and early humans were bound by random mutation and natural selection, along with the rest of life on the planet.

If a culture values basketball, for example, it quite possibly would choose to feed its basketball players well. Women might find tall men more desirable, and thus an intervention has taken place. Nature isn't the only factor selecting who survives and who doesn't. Conscious choice has stuck its thumb into the genetic mix. This is obviously true when it comes to modern Homo sapiens. We long ago escaped the rigid constraints of Darwinism in various ways. Here are a few undeniable ones:

-- We take care of the sick and weak. They don't die off as the result of losing out in the competition for food.

-- We treat and cure diseases. Adverse mutations don't simply run their course. They are countered by medical knowledge.

-- We artificially tamper with the breeding pool by treating childhood diseases, insuring the survival of children whom Nature has condemned to death if the disease in question is fatal.

-- We give food and shelter freely or at drastically reduced expense to those who cannot get them for themselves.

-- We choose mates for mental reasons that have nothing to do with food procurement or the ability to physically defeat male rivals.

Simple logic tells us that these traits had to evolve over time; therefore, the real question isn't whether consciousness plays a part in human evolution but how and when it began to. Totally excluding mind from evolution is not science but the exercise of a belief system. Current evidence doesn't support the belief, and yet the belief blindly wins out. But the rising field of epigenetics is on the side of the mind, because it indicates that lifestyle, behavior, experience and stress level can be passed on, not through genetic mutations but by chemical modifications of your DNA (called "marks") that change the activities of existing genes. These marks can occur during calamitous events (i.e., if your ancestors went through a famine) and are hypothesized to be passed on to future generations (as the result of a past famine, you may be statistically more prone to diabetes). For example, children born to parents during the horrible Dutch famine during WWII, are more prone to obesity and diabetes.

This form of "soft" inheritance is being widely validated at many levels of biology, from microbes to water fleas to mice. Epigenetic marks on specific genes have been associated with risk for diseases like Alzheimer's disease as part of the recently published national Epigenome Roadmap project. Once culture has been allowed into the evolutionary picture, with the support of epigenetics to indicate how life experiences can change our gene activities and perhaps even be passed on to the next generation, the opening for the role of mind and consciousness in the process is undeniable.

But we said there was a second position that can be taken on the issue. This is the contention that consciousness is the most important ingredient in the mix. Instead of being one factor out of many that must be considered, consciousness may drive evolution. This brings in banned words like purpose, meaning, and intention. Thanks to the anti-science, pro-Bible camp, many geneticists feel that they are defending the Alamo in a knee-jerk reaction against attack whenever the words "mind" or "consciousness" are raised. Science isn't meant to have radioactive words or strict dogma. The seeker of truth must go where the data lead.

We feel that the data lead to a place where pure randomness isn't viable and where blind natural selection must take mind and culture into account. Certainly these two points hold true for modern Homo sapiens, as we just saw. How far the argument can be expanded into the entire process of evolution will be the subject of the next post. (Our forthcoming book Super Genes covers each point in great detail, for anyone who wants further scientific validation.)

(To be cont.)

DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. Chopra is the co-author with Rudolph Tanzi of the New York Times bestseller, Super Brain. He serves as an Adjunct Professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, Columbia University, Assistant Clinical Professor, in the Family and Preventive Medicine Department at the University of California, San Diego, Health Sciences, and Senior Scientist with The Gallup Organization.

DR. RUDOLPH E. TANZI is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and Vice Chair of Neurology at Mass. General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi is the co-author with Deepak Chopra of the instant New York Times bestseller, Super Brain, and an internationally acclaimed expert on Alzheimer disease. He was included in TIME Magazine's "TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World".

Perhaps the greatest American Psychologist

2015-06-24T17:28:00.002-07:00

from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/

Classics in the History of Psychology

An internet resource developed byChristopher D. Green
York University, Toronto, Ontario

(Return to Classics Index)

The Stream of Consciousness
William James (1892).

First published in Psychology, Chapter XI.
(Cleveland & New York, World).

The order of our study must be analytic. We are now prepared to begin the introspective study of the adult consciousness itself. Most books adopt the so-called synthetic method. Starting with 'simple ideas of sensation,' and regarding these as so many atoms, they proceed to build up the higher states of mind out of their 'association,' 'integration,' or 'fusion,' as houses are built by the agglutination of bricks. This has the didactic advantages which the synthetic method usually has. But it commits one beforehand to the very questionable theory that our higher states of consciousness are compounds of units; and instead of starting with what the reader directly knows, namely his total concrete states of mind, it starts with a set of supposed 'simple ideas' with which he has no immediate acquaintance at all, and concerning whose alleged interactions he is much at the mercy of any plausible phrase. On every ground, then, the method of advancing from the simple to the compound exposes us to illusion. All pedants and abstractionists will naturally hate to abandon it. But a student who loves the fulness [sic] of human nature will prefer to follow the 'analytic' method, and to begin with the most concrete facts, those with which he has a daily acquaintance in his own inner life. The analytic method will discover in due time the elementary parts, if such exist, without danger of precipitate assumption. The reader will bear in mind that our own chapters on sensation have dealt mainly with the physiological conditions thereof. They were put first as a mere matter of convenience, because incoming currents come first. Psychologically they might better have come last. Pure sensations were described on page 12 [of James' Psychology] as processes which in adult life are well-nigh unknown, and nothing was said which could for a moment lead the reader to suppose that they were the elements of composition of the higher states of mind.

The Fundamental Fact. -- The first and foremost concrete fact which every one will affirm to belong to his inner experience is the fact that consciousness of some sort goes on. 'States of mind' succeed each other in him. If we could say in English 'it thinks,' as we say 'it rains' or 'it blows,' we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought goes on.

Four Characters in Consciousness. -- How does it go on? We notice immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way :
1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal consciousness.
2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing.
3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.
4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects -- chooses from among them, in a word -- all the while.
In considering these four points successively, we shall have to plunge in medias res as regards our nomenclature and use psychological terms which can only be adequately defined in later chapters of the book. But every one knows what the terms mean in a rough way; and it is only in a rough way that we are now to take them. This chapter is like a painter's first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear.
When I say every 'state' or 'thought' is part of a personal consciousness, 'personal consciousness' is one of the terms in question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it, but to give an accurate account of it is the most difficult of philosophic tasks. This task we must, confront in the next chapter; here a preliminary word will suffice.
In this room -- this lecture-room, say -- there are a multitude of thoughts, yours and mine, some of which cohere mutually, and some not. They are as little each-for-itself and reciprocally independent as they are all-belonging-together. They are neither: no one of them is separate, but each belongs with certain others and with none beside. My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody's thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no experience of its like. The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousness, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and you's.

Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought orthat thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature. Every one will recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of something corresponding to the term 'personal mind' is all that is insisted on, without any particular view of its nature being implied. On these terms the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not 'feelings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.' No psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of personal selves. Thoughts connected as we feel them to be connected are what we mean by personal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their worth.

Consciousness is in constant change. I do not mean by this to say that no one state of mind has any duration -- even if true, that would be hard to establish. What I wish to lay stress on is this, that no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before. Now we are seeing, now hearing; now reasoning, now willing; now recollecting, now expecting; now loving, now hating; and in a hundred other ways we know our minds to be alternately engaged. But all these are complex states, it may be said, produced by combination of simpler ones; -- do not the simpler ones follow a different law? Are not the sensations which we get from the same object, for example, always the same? Does not the same piano-key, struck with the same force, make us hear in the same way? Does not the same grass give us the same feeling of green, the same sky the same feeling of blue, and do we not get the same olfactory sensation no matter how many times we put our nose to the same flask of cologne? It seems a piece of metaphysical sophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet a close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily sensation twice.

What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We hear the same note over and over again; we see the same quality of green, or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the same species of pain. The realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up again before our thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our 'ideas' of them are the same ideas. When we come, some time later, to the chapter [20] on Perception, we shall see how inveterate is our habit of simply using our sensible impressions as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal. The grass out of the window now looks to me of the same green in the sun as in the shade, and yet a painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown, another part bright yellow, to give its real sensational effect. We take no heed, as a rule, of the different way in which the same things look and sound and smell at different distances and under different circumstances. The sameness of the things is what we are concerned to ascertain; and any sensations that assure us of that will probably be considered in a rough way to be the same with each other. This is what makes off-hand testimony about the subjective identity of different sensations well-nigh worthless as a proof of the fact. The entire history of what is called Sensation is a commentary on our inability to tell whether two sensible qualities received apart are exactly alike. What appeals to our attention far more than the absolute quality of an impression is its ratio to whatever other impressions we may have at the same time. When everything is dark a somewhat less dark sensation makes us see an object white. Helmholtz calculates that the white marble painted in a picture representing an architectural view by moonlight is, when seen by daylight, from ten to twenty thousand times brighter than the real moonlit marble would be.

Such a difference as this could never have been sensibly learned; it had to be inferred from a series of indirect considerations. These make us believe that our sensibility is altering all the time, so that the same object cannot easily give us the same sensation over again. We feel things differently accordingly as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and in winter; and above all, differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. And yet we never doubt that our feelings reveal the same world, with the same sensible qualities and the same sensible things occupying it. The difference of the sensibility is shown best by the difference of our emotion about the things from one age to another, or when we are in different organic moods, What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The bird's song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky is sad.

To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, following the mutations of our capacity for feeling, are always undergoing an essential change, must be added another presumption, based on what must happen in the brain. Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an impossibility; for to every brain-modification, however small, we suppose that there must correspond a change of equal amount in the consciousness which the brain subserves.

But if the assumption of 'simple sensations' recurring in immutable shape is so easily shown to be baseless, how much more baseless is the assumption of immutability in the larger masses of our thought!

For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never precisely the same. Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is the thought of it-in-those-relations, a thought suffused with the consciousness of all that dim context. Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our successive views of the same thing. We wonder how we ever could have opined as we did last month about a certain matter.

We have outgrown the possibility of that state of mind, we know not how. From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows; the women once so divine, the stars, the woods, and the waters, how now so dull and common! -- the young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books, what was there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more zestful than ever is the work, the work; and fuller and deeper the import of common duties and of common goods.
I am sure that this concrete and total manner of regarding the mind's changes is the only true manner, difficult as it may be to carry it out in detail. If anything seems obscure about it, it will grow clearer as we advance. Meanwhile, if it be true, it is certainly also true that no two 'ideas' are ever exactly the same, which is the proposition we started to prove.

The proposition is more important theoretically than it at first sight seems. For it makes it already impossible for us to follow obediently in the footprints of either the Lockian or the Herbartian school, schools which have had almost unlimited influence in Germany among ourselves. No doubt it is oftenconvenient to formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sort of way, and to treat the higher states of consciousness as if they were all built out of unchanging simple ideas which 'pass and turn again.' It is convenient often to treat curves as if they were composed of small straight lines, and electricity and nerve-force as if they were fluids. But in the one case as in the other we must never forget that we are talking symbolically, and that there is nothing in nature to answer to our words. A permanentlyexisting 'Idea' which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.

Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous. I can only define 'continuous' as that which is without breach, crack, or division. The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within the limits of a single mind would either be interruptions, time-gaps during which the consciousness went out; or they would be breaks in the content of the thought, so abrupt that what followed had no connection whatever with what went before. The proposition that consciousness feels continuous, means two things:
a. That even where there is a time-gap the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self;
b. That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.

The case of the time-gaps, as the simplest, shall be taken first.
a. When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and recognize that they have been asleep, each one of them mentally reaches back and makes connection with but oneof the two streams of thought which were broken by the sleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried in the ground unerringly finds its way to its own similarly buried mate, across no matter how much intervening earth; so Peter's present instantly finds out Peter's past, and never by mistake knits itself on to that of Paul. Paul's thought in turn is as little liable to go astray. The past thought of Peter is appropriated by the present Peter alone. He may have a knowledge, and a correct one too, of what Paul's last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep, but it is an entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he has of his own last states. Heremembers his own states, whilst he only conceives Paul's. Remembrance is like direct feeling; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains. This quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what Peter's present thought also possesses for itself. So sure as this present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything else that comes with the same warmth and intimacy and immediacy, me and mine. What the qualities called warmth and intimacy may in themselves be will have to be matter for future consideration. But whatever past states appear with those qualities must be admitted to receive the greeting of the present mental state, to be owned by it, and accepted as belonging together with it in a common self. This community of self is what the time-gap cannot break in twain, and is why a present thought, although not ignorant of the time-gap, can still regard itself as continuous with certain chosen portions of the past.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.
b. But now there appears, even within the limits of the same self, and between thoughts all of which alike have this same sense of belonging together, a kind of jointing and separateness among the parts, of which this statement seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are produced by sudden contrasts in the quality of the successive segments of the stream of thought. If the words 'chain' and 'train' had no natural fitness in them, how came such words to be used at all? Does not a loud explosion rend the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks, in twain? No; for even into our awareness of the thunder the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness or man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went before.

'Substantive' and 'Transitive' States of Mind. -- When we take a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is the different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.

Let us call the resting-places the 'substantive parts,' and the places of flight the 'transitive parts,' of the stream of thought. It then appears that our thinking tends at all times towards some other substantive part than the one from which it has just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another.

Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it so exceeds them in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and swallows them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is. The rush of the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before we can rest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to itself. As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. And the challenge to produce these transitive states of consciousness, which is sure to be thrown by doubting psychologists at anyone who contends for their existence, is as unfair as Zeno's treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them to point out in what place an arrow is when it moves, he argues the falsity of their thesis from their inability to make to so preposterous a question an immediate reply.

The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful. If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of thought's stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be the failure to register them, and the undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the stream. Now the blunder has historically worked in two ways. One set of thinkers have been led by it to Sensationalism. Unable to lay their hands on any substantive feelings corresponding to the innumerable relations and forms of connection between the sensible things of the world, finding no named mental states mirroring such relations, they have for the most part denied that any such states exist; and many of them, like Hume, have gone on to deny the reality of most relations out of the mind as well as in it. Simple substantive 'ideas,' sensations and their copies, juxtaposed like dominoes in a game, but really separate, everything else verbal illusion, -- such is the upshot of this view.

The Intellectualists, on the other hand, unable to give up the reality of relations extra mentem, but equally unable to point to any distinct substantive feelings in which they were known, have made the same admission that such feelings do not exist. But they have drawn an opposite conclusion. The relations must be known, they say, in something that is no feeling, no mental 'state,' continuous and consubstantial with the subjective tissue out of which sensations and other substantive conditions of consciousness are made. They must be known by something that lies on an entirely different plane, by an actus purus of Thought, Intellect, or Reason, all written with capitals and considered to mean something unutterably superior to any passing perishing fact of sensibility whatever.
But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sensationalists are wrong. If there be such things as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects existin rerum naturâ [sic], so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known. There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use. Consider once again the analogy of the brain. We believe the brain to be an organ whose internal equilibrium is always in a state of change -- the change affecting every part. The pulses of change are doubtless more violent in one place than in another, their rhythm more rapid at this time than at that. As in a kaleidoscope revolving at a uniform rate, although the figures are always rearranging themselves, there are instants during which the transformation seems minute and interstitial and almost absent, followed by others when it shoots with magical rapidity, relatively stable forms thus alternating with forms we should not distinguish if seen again; so in the brain the perpetual rearrangement must result in some forms of tension lingering relatively long, whilst others simply come and pass. But if consciousness corresponds to the fact of rearrangement itself, why, if the rearrangement stop not, should the consciousness ever cease? And if a lingering rearrangement brings with it one kind of consciousness, why should not a swift rearrangement bring another kind of consciousness as peculiar as the rearrangement itself?

The object before the mind always has a 'Fringe.' There are other unnamed modifications of consciousness just as important as the transitive states, and just as cognitive as they. Examples will show what I mean.

Suppose three successive persons say to us: 'Wait! 'Hark!' 'Look!' Our consciousness is thrown into three quite different attitudes of expectancy, although no definite object is before it in any one of the three cases. Probably no one will deny here the existence of a real conscious affection, a sense of the direction from which an impression is about to come, although no positive impression is yet there. Meanwhile we have no names for the psychoses in question but the names hark, look, and wait.

Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit into its mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps. When I vainly try to recall the name of Spalding, my consciousness is far removed from what it is when I vainly try to recall the name of Bowles. There are innumerable consciousnesses of want, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each other. Such feeling of want is tota cœlo other than a want of feeling: it is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without growing -more distinct. Every one must know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's mind, striving to be filled out with words.

What is that first instantaneous glimpse of some one's meaning which we have, when in vulgar phrase we say we 'twig' it? Surely an altogether specific affection of our mind. And has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore; and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and things come into the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination is there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them successively and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they do not. The intention to-say-so-and-so is the only name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate. How comes it about that a man reading something aloud for the first time is able immediately to emphasize all his words aright, unless from the very first he have a sense of at least the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense is fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modifies its emphasis in his mind so as to make him give it the proper accent as he utters it? Emphasis of this kind almost altogether depends on grammatical construction. If we read 'no more' we expect presently a 'than'; if we read 'however,' it is a 'yet,['] a 'still,' or a 'nevertheless,' that we expect. And this foreboding of the coming verbal and grammatical scheme is so practically accurate that a reader incapable of understanding four ideas of the book he is reading aloud can nevertheless read it with the most delicately modulated expression of intelligence.
It is, the reader will see, the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have, as we shall see in the chapter [19] on Imagination, made one step in advance in exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things. Another is made if we overthrow the equally ridiculous notion that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed to our knowledge in 'states of consciousness,' relations are not. But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough. What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, -- or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.
Let us call the consciousness of this halo of relations around the image by the name of 'psychic overtone' or 'fringe.''

Cerebral Conditions of the 'Fringe.' -- Nothing is easier than to symbolize these facts in terms of brain-action. just as the echo of the whence, the sense of the starting point of our thought, is probably due to the dying excitement of processes but a moment since vividly aroused: so the sense of the whither, the foretaste of the terminus, must be due to the waxing excitement of tracts or processes whose psychical correlative will a moment hence be the vividly present feature of our thought. Represented by a curve, the neurosis underlying consciousness must at any moment be like this:

Let the horizontal in Fig. 52 be the line of time, and let the three curves beginning at a,b, and c respectively stand for the neural processes correlated with the thoughts of those three letters. Each process occupies a certain time during which its intensity waxes, culminates, and wanes The process for a has not yet died out, the process for chas already begun, when that for b is culminating. At the time-instant represented by the vertical line all three processes are present, in the intensities shown by the curve. Those before c's apex were more intense a moment ago; those after it will be more intense a moment hence. If I recite a, b, c, then, at the moment of uttering b, neither anor c is out of my consciousness altogether, but both, after their respective fashions, 'mix their dim lights' with the stronger b, because their processes are both awake in some degree.
It is just like 'overtones' in music: they are not separately heard by the ear; they blend with the fundamental note, and suffuse it, and alter it; and even so do the waxing and waning brain-processes at every moment blend with and suffuse and alter the psychic effect of the processes which are at their culminating point.

The 'Topic' of the Thought. -- If we then consider the cognitive function of different states of mind, we may feel assured that the difference between those that are mere 'acquaintance' and those that are 'knowleges-about' is reducible almost entirely to the absence or presence of psychic fringes or overtones. Knowledge about a thing is knowledge of its relations. Acquaintance with it is limitation to the bare impression which it makes. Of most of its relations we are only aware in the penumbral nascent way of a 'fringe' of unarticulated affinities about it. And, before passing to the next topic in order, I must say a little of this sense of affinity, as itself one of the most interesting features of the subjective stream.

Thought may be equally rational in any sort of terms. In all our voluntary thinking there is some TOPIC or SUBJECT about which all the members of the thought revolve. Relation to this topic or interest is constantly felt in the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony and discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. Any thought the quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves 'all right,' may be considered a thought that furthers the topic. Provided we only feel its object to have a place in the scheme of relations in which the topic also lies, that is sufficient to make of it a relevant and appropriate portion of our train of ideas.

Now we may think about our topic mainly in words, or we may think about it mainly in. visual or other images, but this need make no difference as regards the furtherance of our knowledge of the topic. If we only feel in the terms, whatever they be, a fringe of affinity with each other and with the topic, and if we are conscious of approaching a conclusion, we feel that our thought is rational and right. The words in every language have contracted by long association fringes of mutual repugnance or affinity with each other and with the conclusion, which run exactly parallel with like fringes in the visual, tactile, and other ideas. The most important element of these fringes is, I repeat, the mere feeling of harmony or discord, of a right or wrong direction in the thought.

If we know English and French and begin a sentence in French, all the later words that come are French; we hardly ever drop into English. And this affinity of the French words for each other is not something merely, operating mechanically as a brain-law, it is something we feel at the time. Our understanding of a French sentence heard never falls to so low an ebb that we are not aware that the words linguistically belong together. Our attention can hardly so wander that if an English word be suddenly introduced we shall not start at the change. Such a vague sense as this of the words belonging together is the very minimum of fringe that can accompany them, if 'thought' at all. Usually the vague perception that all the words we hear belong to the same language and to the same special vocabulary in that language, and that the grammatical sequence is familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that what we hear is sense. But if an unusual foreign word be introduced, if the grammar trip, or if a term from an incongruous vocabulary suddenly appear, such as 'rat-trap' or 'plumber's bill' in a philosophical discourse, the sentence detonates as it were, we receive a shock from the incongruity, and the drowsy assent is gone. The feeling of rationality in these cases seems rather a negative than a positive thing, being the mere absence of shock, or sense of discord, between the terms of thought.

Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. Discourses at prayer-meetings, reshuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and the whole genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-reporter's flourishes give illustrations of this. "The birds filled the tree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried reporter, and read uncritically by many readers.

We see, then, that it makes little or no difference in what sort of mind-stuff, in what quality of imagery, our thinking goes on. The only images intrinsically important are the halting-places, the substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought. Throughout all the rest of the stream, the feelings of relation are everything, and the terms related almost naught. These feelings of relation, these psychic overtones, halos, suffusions, or fringes about the terms, may be the same in very different systems of imagery. A diagram may help to accentuate this indifference of the mental means where the end is the same. Let A be some ex-experience [sic] from which a number of thinkers start. Let Z be the practical conclusion rationally inferrible [sic] from it. One gets to this conclusion by one line, another by another; one follows a course of English, another of German, verbal imagery. With one, visual images predominate; with another, tactile. Some trains are tinged with emotions, others not; some are very abridged, synthetic and rapid; others, hesitating and broken into many steps. But when the penultimate terms of all the trains, however differing inter se,finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say, and rightly say, that all the thinkers have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.

The last peculiarity to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of thought's stream is that --

Consciousness is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
The phenomena of selective attention and of deliberative will are of course patent examples of this choosing activity. But few of us are aware how incessantly it is at work in operations not ordinarily called by these names. Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every perception we have. We find it quite impossible to disperse our attention impartially over a number of impressions. A monotonous succession of sonorous strokes is broken up into rhythms, now of one sort, now of another, by the different accent which we place on different strokes. The simplest of these rhythms is the double one, tick-tóck, tick-tóck, tick-tóck. Dots dispersed on a surface are perceived in rows and groups. Lines separate into diverse figures. The ubiquity of the distinctions, this and that, here and there, now and then, in our minds is the result of our laying the same selective emphasis on parts of place and time

But we do far more than emphasize things, and unite some, and keep others apart. We actually ignore most of the things before us. Let me briefly show how this goes on.
To begin at the bottom what are our very senses themselves, as we saw on pp.10-12 [of James' Psychology], but organs of selection? Out of the infinite chaos of movements, of which physics teaches us that the outer world consists, each sense-organ picks out those which fall within certain limits of velocity. To these it responds, but ignores the rest as completely as if they did not exist. Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable [sic], swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and shade.

If the sensations we receive from a given organ have their causes thus picked out for us by the conformation of the organ's termination, Attention, on the other hand, out of all the sensations yielded, picks out certain ones as worthy of notice and suppresses all the rest. We notice only those sensations which are signs to us of things which happen practically or aesthetically to interest us, to which we therefore give substantive names, and which we exalt to this exclusive status of independence and dignity. But in itself, apart from my interest, a particular dust-wreath on a windy day is just as much of an individual thing, and just as much or as little deserves an individual name, as my own body does.

And then, among the sensations we get from each separate thing, what happens? The mind selects again. It chooses certain of the sensations to represent the thing mosttruly, and considers the rest as its appearances, modified by the conditions of the moment. Thus my table-top is named square, after but one of an infinite number of retinal sensations which it yields, the rest of them being sensations of two acute and two obtuse angles; but I call the latter perspective views, and the four right angles the true form of the table, and erect the attribute squareness into the table's essence, for æsthetic reasons of my own. In like manner the real form of the circle is deemed to be the sensation it gives when the line of vision is perpendicular to its centre -- all its other sensations are signs of this sensation. The real sound of the cannon is the sensation it makes when the ear is close by. The real color of the brick is the sensation it gives when the eye looks squarely at it from a near point, out of the sunshine and yet not in the gloom; under other circumstances it gives us other color-sensations which are but signs of this -- we then see it looks pinker or bluer than it really is. The reader knows no object which he does not represent to himself by preference as in some typical attitude, of some normal size, at some characteristic distance, of some standard tint, etc., etc. But all these essential characteristics, which together form for us the genuine objectivity of the thing and are contrasted with what we call the subjective sensations it may yield us at a given moment, are mere sensations like the latter. The mind chooses to suit itself, and decides what particular sensation shall be held more real and valid than all the rest.

Next, in a world of objects thus individualized by our mind's selective industry, what is called our 'experience' is almost entirely determined by our habits of attention. A thing may be present to a man a hundred times, but if he persistently fails to notice it, it cannot be said to enter into his experience. We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything distinct? On the other hand, a thing met only once in a lifetime may leave an indelible experience in the memory. Let four men make a tour in Europe. One will bring home only picturesque impressions -- costumes and colors, parks and views and works of architecture, pictures and statues. To another all this will be non-existent; and distances and prices, populations and drainage-arrangements, door- and window-fastenings, and other useful statistics will take their place. A third will give a rich account of the theatres, restaurants, and public halls, and naught besides; whilst the fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in his own subjective broodings as to be able to tell little more than a few names of places through which he passed. Each has selected, out of the same mass of presented objects, those which suited his private interest and has made his experience thereby.

If now, leaving the empirical combination of objects, we ask how the mind proceeds rationally to connect them, we find selection again to be omnipotent. In a future chapter [22] we shall see that all Reasoning depends on the ability of the mind to break up the totality of the phenomenon reasoned about, into parts, and to pick out from among these the particular one which, in the given emergency, may lead to the proper conclusion. The man of genius is he who will always stick in his bill at the right point, and bring it out with the right element -- 'reason' if the emergency be theoretical, 'means' if it be practical -- transfixed upon it.

If now we pass to the æsthetic department, our law is still more obvious. The artist notoriously selects his items, rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonize with each other and with the main purpose of his work. That unity, harmony, 'convergence of characters,' as M. Taine calls it, which gives to works of art their superiority over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination. Any natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one feature of it as characteristic, and suppress all merely accidental items which do not harmonize with this.

Ascending still higher, we reach the plane of Ethics, where choice reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible. To sustain the arguments for the good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle our longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinchingly on the arduous path, these are characteristic ethical energies. But more than these; for these but deal with the means of compassing interests already felt by the man to be supreme. The ethical energy par excellence has to go farther and choose which interest out of several, equally coercive, shall become supreme. The issue here is of the utmost pregnancy, for it decides a man's entire career. When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? choose that profession? accept that office, or marry this fortune? -- his choice really lies between one of several equally possible future Characters. What he shall become is fixed by the conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what consciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the character itself. The problem with the man is less what act he shall now resolve to do than what being he shall now choose to become.

Taking human experience in a general way, the choosings of different men are to a great extent the same. The race as a whole largely agrees as to what it shall notice and name; and among the noticed parts we select in much the same way for accentuation and preference, or subordination and dislike. There is, however, one entirely extraordinary case in which no two men ever are known to choose alike. One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us; and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names are 'me' and 'not-me' respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. No mind can take the same interest in his neighbor's me as in his own. The neighbor's me falls together with all the rest of things in one foreign mass against which his own me stands cut in startling relief. Even the trodden worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suffering self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear conception either of himself or of what the universe may be. He is for me a mere part of the world; for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place.

Descending now to finer work than this first general sketch, let us in the next chapter try to trace the psychology of this fact of self-consciousness to which we have thus once more been led.

What is Consciousness?

2015-06-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

from hillcountrynews.com

Posted: Monday, June 15, 2015 1:15 pm

Chuck Robison is the former Adjunct Protestant Chaplain at The Church Center of the United Nations in New York. His weekly program can be found atwhatifitreallyworks.com. | 0 comments

For the past 20 years I have asked people to define “New Age.” No one seems to agree on what that term means… some say it is about crystals, and drugs and woo woo stuff considered pure foolishness. Increasingly people also mention ‘Consciousness.’

Physicist Dr. Claude Swanson wrote in 2010: “A century ago Neils Bohr proposed that, in Quantum Physics, human consciousness has the power to disturb experiments. Just a peek causes something called “quantum wave function collapse,” which means you just destroyed those nice wave patterns your particles were in. So consciousness is really powerful. Once you have looked, the particle behaves differently. Despite this enormously important role consciousness plays, physicists have avoided studying it ever since.”

Well, that was the last century. Now all of that is changing. In the 1950’s, the renowned theologian, Paul Tillich described God as “The Ground of All Being.” That brings God up close and personal. God no longer lives in the sky somewhere. He is the basis, the essence of everything. God is our ultimate concern.

In 2011, while on our 40 Days and 40 Nights video trip, we stopped to interview Debra Roberts, an organic beekeeper in North Carolina. She told us briefly about the current plight of bees and the mysterious and massive colony collapse. (40 percent of America’s bees have died off over the past twelve months.) Next, she led us to the seven beehives she was nourishing and I volunteered to sit right next to one of the hives. She let me borrow her wide brim hat to prevent the bees from getting into my hair, where they would have panicked and hurt me, and themselves, as well.

As I sat next to the hive and the bees began climbing all over me, I had a true spiritual experience. Instantly, I realized that I shared my existence with the bees… they, too, were living as and in the Ground of All Being… Consciousness. That realization brought the lesson: In Consciousness we are ONE with everything. I was ecstatic as I realized the truth of Jesus admonition, that whatever we do to anyone, we do also to ourselves.

Those bees recognized me as Consciousness and they knew that I would not attack myself, disguised as them or any other part of the Consciousness that is our universal experience. Here we have the scientific and spiritual basis for real peace.

At the end of this Old Age we begin to see the truth behind Jesus’ words. Many of Jesus teachings have waited for this moment in history.

Until 1500 the Catholic Church brought us the Dark Ages and treated Science as an evil element which they tried to control. Between 1500 and today, the increasing power of Science allowed it to treat the world of Spirit and God just like the Church had treated Science up until then.

But now, exactly 498 years after Luther nailed the 99 Theses to the Church door, Science is beginning to let go of its attempt to control our growing spirituality and is about to join our emerging global spiritual expression as we, together, create this New Age for which we have so long yearned.

Science has now begun to understand that the world works very much like the mystics of all ages have told us. Science is beginning to write profound theology as a result.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is not just a wise teaching, it is the law. Whatever we do to anyone or anything is also how we treat ourselves, as we are all one in consciousness.

When we spew our trash and waste all over the world, as we have been doing for 100 years, we are destroying not just our world, but everything in it. When we spend our national treasure building 20-megaton nuclear and now neutron bombs, we will literally see our attempts to destroy our enemies’ children blow right back in our faces.

The next time you are about to take an action that will negatively affect anyone or our world, ask yourself this simple question: Would I do this if I was sure that I was doing this to myself?

I found, after my experience with the bees, that understanding our oneness with all of creation simply rules out all the clever ways I unknowingly found to hurt other people and the Earth.

Perhaps you will see this too.

You can see a video of my bee experience at http://www.whatifitreallyworks.com/?s=bee+keeper

See an MDMA-Assisted Therapy Session

2015-06-15T16:01:00.003-07:00

from youtube

The Doctors

The Bright Side

2015-06-09T11:38:00.001-07:00

from youtube

When Does Consciousness Begin and End?

2015-06-06T11:49:00.002-07:00

from pbs.org

By Mo Costandi on Wed, 27 May 2015

In March of this year, the beloved singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell was rushed to the hospital after being found unconscious on the floor in her Bel Air home. Subsequently, long-time friend Leslie Morris filed a petition to become Mitchell’s legal guardian, stating that the singer “remains unconscious and unable to make any responses, and is therefore unable to provide for any of her personal needs.”

Statements issued on Mitchell’s official website deny that Mitchell is in a coma, claiming instead that “she comprehends, she’s alert, and she has her full senses. A full recovery is expected.” But Mitchell’s doctor, the neurosurgeon Paul Vestra, has confirmed that her mental faculties are severely impaired and that she will unlikely be unable to attend the court hearing over guardianship, which is scheduled in July.

The conflicting information about Mitchell’s health status reveals the stigma attached to coma and other conditions in which consciousness is impaired. In such situations, complex ethical questions regarding end-of-life decisions inevitably arise, ones that most societies are still struggling to answer.

“Clinically, consciousness refers to two quite distinct things—wakefulness and awareness,” explains neuroscientist Adrian Owen of the University of Western Ontario in a recent public lecture. “But the problem for people working on consciousness is that none of us can agree on what it actually means.”

Owen is less interested in defining consciousness than he is in measuring it. He’s also keen on finding ways to detect hidden signs of consciousness and determining if patients have conscious awareness, exactly what they are aware of, and how much of their mental faculties they retain. Owen’s is one of several research groups that are pioneering new ways of doing this, and although the work is still in its infancy, it is already helping clinicians to diagnose consciousness disorders more accurately.

Awake, Asleep, or Neither?

Our understanding of consciousness has been hampered by our historically rudimentary ways of understanding its absence. We can easily determine if someone is awake, because their eyes will probably be open. Wakefulness can also be detected if one’s eyes are closed, because the awake and sleeping brain are each characterised by distinct patterns of brainwaves, which can be recorded with electroencephalography (EEG), using electrodes placed onto the scalp.

Electroencephalography is commonly used in studies to determine sleep vs. wakefulness.

Awareness is much harder to detect, because the only way we have of knowing whether or not someone is aware is by asking them. Comatose patients, for example, have their eyes closed at all times, and are neither awake nor aware. Patients in the vegetative state, however, often show signs of wakefulness. “They often open their eyes and look around the room and they have intact sleep-wake cycles,” Owen says, “but they won’t fixate on anything in particular and, importantly, never respond to a command, so they’re often referred to as awake but not aware.”

This poses a major problem for clinicians working with patients who have consciousness disorders because, while minimally conscious patients are more likely to recover, they do not show outward signs of awareness. The problems with diagnosis thus make it extremely difficult to identify those whose conditions might improve.

Owen and his colleagues pioneered the use of functional neuroimaging to detect signs of consciousness in patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, and to communicate with them. The method was first described in a landmark 2006 paper, and involves scanning patients’ brains while asking them a series of questions that require a “yes or no” answer. Upon entering the scanner, the patients are instructed to imagine playing a game of tennis if they want to answer “yes” or to imagine walking around their apartment if their answer is “no.”

Each task produces different brain activation patterns that be detected by the scanner—one activates the supplementary motor cortex, which is involved in planning movements, and the other activates the hippocampus and surrounding areas, which play critical roles in spatial navigation.

Remarkably, Owen and his colleagues found that a significant proportion of apparently vegetative patients can actually follow these commands and respond to the questions by imagining one scenario or the other. The ability to do so indicates that certain of their mental abilities—especially attention, memory, and language comprehension—are intact, and that they are, in fact, aware of what is going on around them.

“All of these things are part and parcel of what we call conscious awareness, things that we all use day every day just to get through our activities,” Owen says. “We’ve seen a lot of patients, all of them diagnosed as being in the vegetative state, and about one in five of them are entirely unresponsive at the bedside but will reliably produce these activity patterns in the scanner.”

On the basis of these results, Owen and his colleagues conclude that around 20% of patients with these disorders are misdiagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state when they are actually minimally conscious. For many, this is a matter of life or death: Court cases that decide whether hydration and nutrition should be withdrawn from apparently vegetative patients are becoming increasingly common around the world, and such decisions often hinge on the question of whether or not the patient is conscious.

Brain scanning is expensive, and moving patients to have these tests can be hugely problematic, so Owen and his colleagues have developed a cheaper, portable EEG-based version of the test. They want to test as many patients as they can, and to that end have built what they call the EEJeep, which they use to visit patients in their homes. And they believe that some patients may be unable to follow commands despite retaining some awareness, so have developed a “passive” test based on the shared experience and brain activity people have when watching the same movie together.

Defining Consciousness

Despite these important advances, this research tells us very little about what consciousness actually is, or about how the brain generates it. Consciousness is at once familiar to us all, and deeply mysterious. We are all familiar with the content of our consciousness, and how those contents change as time passes, and we all lose consciousness every night when we go to sleep, only to regain it in the morning. Yet, neuroscientists and philosophers alike are still struggling to find an adequate definition of consciousness.

When brain scanning technologies first emerged in the 1990s, some researchers began using them to identify the neural correlates of consciousness—activity patterns in specific parts of the brain that are associated with certain aspects of awareness—but this did not explain the relationship between brain activity and experience or why we only become aware of some aspects of the brain’s workings but not others.

Neuroscientists are increasingly viewing the brain as a complex network of inter-connected modules, and so there is growing interest in mapping the long-range neural pathways linking them. They have also come to believe that the synchronized activity of large groups of brain cells—which produces brain waves—is important for information processing and that the synchronization or de-coupling of brain wave frequencies between inter-connected brain regions is likely important for the flow of information between them.

But many say that we still have no real understanding of consciousness. “I often hear that we haven’t made much progress and still don’t know what we’re talking about,” says Anil Seth, director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Studies at the University of Sussex, “but I think that’s simply wrong, because we’ve seen huge developments in understanding.”

One such development is integrated information theory (IIT), developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which explains consciousness in terms of the amount of information that is shared amongst brain regions. IIT states that consciousness is graded, and equates the amount of information being integrated with the level of conscious experience, such that conscious awareness increases with the amount of integration taking place. It predicts that any sufficiently complex system that integrates information could have “bits of consciousness.”

Thus, most animals are conscious to a greater or lesser extent, and the internet, with its billions of interconnected computers worldwide, could conceivably be conscious in some sense. Yet a supercomputer simulation of the human brain, which is only partly integrated, could not.

“This is an interesting theory that allows us to make all sorts predictions,” Seth says. For example, it predicts that general anesthetics make us lose consciousness by reducing information integration in the brain to below a certain critical level and that integration is reduced or otherwise disrupted in consciousness disorders. Both of these predictions turn out to be accurate.

Marcello Massimini of the University of Milan and his colleagues developed a test based on Tononi’s theory. It involves using transcranial magnetic stimulation to interfere with the brain’s electrical activity and then measuring the complexity of the brain’s response. Massimini and his colleagues have performed the test on healthy participants while they are awake, asleep, and at different levels of sedation by anesthetic, as well as in comatose, vegetative, and minimally conscious patients. They’ve shown that it can reliably determine the level of consciousness in each of these states.

Similarly, researchers in France have devised a way to measure how much information is being shared between pairs of scalp electrodes during EEG sessions. Using it to record brainwaves both in patients with consciousness disorders and in healthy controls, they found that unconscious patients’ brains do indeed exhibit lower levels of what they called “global information sharing” than those of the others.

These methods could potentially be developed into cheap bedside tests that allow for more accurate diagnosis of consciousness disorders. Broader access to portable EEG tests promises to revolutionize how these patients are diagnosed and cared for.

“We’ve made a great deal of progress and discovered a lot, but it’s a very hard problem, and it’s not going to just go away so easily,” Seth says. As new ways of measuring consciousness are developed further, we will become better equipped to deal with its disorders. And although we may still be a long way from understanding consciousness, by studying its various forms, we now seem to have a loose grasp of it.

The saddest story I have ever heard !

2015-05-16T20:58:00.001-07:00

from youtube

Consciousness Does Not Compute (and Never Will), Says Korean Scientist

2015-05-12T21:10:00.002-07:00

from prnewswire.com

Daegene Song's research into strong AI could be key to answering fundamental brain science questions

May 05, 2015, 08:45 ET from Daegene Song

CHUNGCHEONGBUK-DO, South Korea, May 5, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Within some circles in the scientific community, debate rages about whether computers will achieve technological singularity (TS) or strong artificial intelligence (AI)--in other words, self-recognition or human consciousness within a computer--within the next few decades. Now, however, a Korean quantum physicist has shown that computers will never be able to duplicate human consciousness or be programmed to do so, because they lack the fundamental . . . well, humanity. And his research may finally answer questions that have long stymied brain science researchers.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150504/213552

In his paper, "Non-computability of Consciousness," Daegene Song proves human consciousness cannot be computed. Song arrived at his conclusion through quantum computer research in which he showed there is a unique mechanism in human consciousness that no computing device can simulate.

"Among conscious activities, the unique characteristic of self-observation cannot exist in any type of machine," Song explained. "Human thought has a mechanism that computers cannot compute or be programmed to do."

And therein lies the kernel of truth that could resolve two problems researchers have until now been unable to resolve: First, that no approach to brain research had ever been able to precisely represent consciousness; and second, that no one actually understood how a network of neurons, also known as the human brain, could somehow give rise to consciousness.

"Non-computability of Consciousness" documents Song's quantum computer research into TS. Song was able to show that in certain situations, a conscious state can be precisely and fully represented in mathematical terms, in much the same manner as an atom or electron can be fully described mathematically. That's important, because the neurobiological and computational approaches to brain research have only ever been able to provide approximations at best. In representing consciousness mathematically, Song shows that consciousness is not compatible with a machine.

Song's work also shows consciousness is not like other physical systems like neurons, atoms or galaxies. "If consciousness cannot be represented in the same way all other physical systems are represented, it may not be something that arises out of a physical system like the brain," said Song. "The brain and consciousness are linked together, but the brain does not produce consciousness. Consciousness is something altogether different and separate. The math doesn't lie."

About Daegene Song

Daegene Song obtained his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oxford and now works at ChungbukNational University in Korea as an assistant professor. To learn more about Song's research, see his published work: D. Song, Non-computability of Consciousness, NeuroQuantology, Volume 5, pages 382~391 (2007). http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.1617

Contact:
Daegene Song
+82(10)6309-3267
Email

SOURCE Daegene Song

OpEd: The Burden of Triple Consciousness

2015-05-10T18:21:00.005-07:00

from nbcnews

BY DANIELLE MOODIE-MILLS

In the Souls of Black Folk W.E.B DuBois coined the term: Double consciousness.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

DuBois put into prose the internal melee that has black folks at once loving America, and its appearance of opportunity and justice, whilst at the same time despising it for that very fallacy.

The appearance of opportunity and equality, are not the same thing as actually being equal and having opportunity.

Over the past few years we've borne witness to the deaths of too many young black men, women and children. We've watched as they went from fathers, mothers, sisters, friends, sons, daughters, husbands, wives and lovers… to hashtags.

#TrayvonMartin, #JordanDunn, #JohnCrawford, #RekiaBoyd, #RenishaMcBride, #TamirRice, #MichaelBrown, #EricGarner, #WalterScott… and now, #FreddieGray. These are the names that occupy the growing cohort of black lives that mattered, but that were nonetheless violently taken from their communities and loved ones through state sanctioned violence.

If you are white and are feeling the slightest bit oppressed than you can bear the name revolutionary. When you decide to buck the system—if you are black, brown, LGBT or any other form of perceived "other" you're a troublemaker, a degenerate, or a thug.

With each life taken there have been calls to peacefully protest. With each body that lay in the street, on the grass, in the playground, along the sidewalk, on the front porch and in a store—black people, have been told to "stay calm" and not "lose their heads". They've been lectured about the legal process and told that nothing good comes from friction. I vehemently disagree.

Friction is where change happens.

Revolutionaries versus rioters—is just a matter of perspective and privilege.

From the Tea Party to the Race "Riots" of the 60s to the Stonewall "Riots" and beyond, change always follows great upheaval, and as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "riots are the language of the unheard."

So, how many not guilty verdicts did we think the black community was going to quietly absorb as their pain goes unnoticed? How many unnecessary funerals were we going to watch on cable news with black families grieving before a breaking point was reached?

The historical lesson being learned is that if you are white and are feeling the slightest bit oppressed than you can bear the name revolutionary. When you decide to buck the system—if you are black, brown, LGBT or any other form of perceived "other" you're a troublemaker, a degenerate, or a thug.

As a black lesbian who occupies one body with three souls—black, lesbian and American—each with varied understanding on where America is on it's journey to respecting the fullness of my body politic—a body comprised of three identities that have been politicized and vandalized over the course of my lifetime.

Friction is where change happens. Revolutionaries versus rioters—is just a matter of perspective and privilege.

As a black woman, I have gone to bed this week with the weight of the city of Baltimore resting heavily on my heart. Like a scene torn from the pages of our not to distant history that has me fearing for the life of my unborn children—whose skin color will make them targets upon entering this world.

As a black woman married to another black woman I awoke this week at the possibility that my marriage may soon be recognizedin all 50 states of this country and the likelihood that the patchwork of protections that makeup our marriage could actually become equal to our neighbors.

Yet also painfully clear, is that as two black women living together who each make 64 cents to a white man's $1—statistically speaking, are more likely to fall into poverty.

As a black American I woke up this week with a new Attorney General, another first for "The American Project" that would make a black woman it's lead attorney. Understanding that her first was made possible by a lot of other black people's last. The last breath they exerted fighting for their humanity—the right to live to learn to love to just be—in the face of unrelenting bigotry and terrorism.

This week, I woke up with the painful reality those decades after W.E.B. DuBois penned Souls of Black Folks and articulated the contortionist feat black people have to navigate just to survive, that we are still breaking our bodies still trying desperately to be seen and heard.

I wake up with identities that our country places at war with one another—each fighting for the sweet victorious air of equality.

Each identity being a card that loses or gains value depending on the decade or political whim of the moment. Except being American should be my ultimate trump.

First published April 29th 2015, 2:47 pm

It’s Not a ‘Stream’ of Consciousness

2015-05-08T21:26:00.002-07:00

from nytimes

MAY 8, 2015

IN 1890, the American psychologist William James famously likened our conscious experience to the flow of a stream. “A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described,” he wrote. “In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.”

While there is no disputing the aptness of this metaphor in capturing our subjective experience of the world, recent research has shown that the “stream” of consciousness is, in fact, an illusion. We actually perceive the world in rhythmic pulses rather than as a continuous flow.

Some of the first hints of this new understanding came as early as the 1920s, when physiologists discovered brain waves: rhythmic electrical currents measurable on the surface of the scalp by means of electroencephalography. Subsequent research cataloged a spectrum of such rhythms (alpha waves, delta waves and so on) that correlated with various mental states, such as calm alertness and deep sleep.

Researchers also found that the properties of these rhythms varied with perceptual or cognitive events. The phase and amplitude of your brain waves, for example, might change if you saw or heard something, or if you increased your concentration on something, or if you shifted your attention.

But those early discoveries themselves did not change scientific thinking about the stream-like nature of conscious perception. Instead, brain waves were largely viewed as a tool for indexing mental experience, much like the waves that a ship generates in the water can be used to index the ship’s size and motion (e.g., the bigger the waves, the bigger the ship).

Recently, however, scientists have flipped this thinking on its head. We are exploring the possibility that brain rhythms are not merely a reflection of mental activity but a cause of it, helping shape perception, movement, memory and even consciousness itself.

What this means is that the brain samples the world in rhythmic pulses, perhaps even discrete time chunks, much like the individual frames of a movie. From the brain’s perspective, experience is not continuous but quantized.

Another clue that led to this discovery was the so-called wagon-wheel illusion, in which the spokes on a wheel are sometimes perceived to reverse the direction of their rotation. This illusion is easy to induce with a strobe light if the rotation of the wheel is such that each strobe flash captures the spoke location slightly behind the location captured on the previous flash, leading to the perception of reverse motion. The illusion results from “sampling” the scene in discrete frames or time chunks.

The telling fact, for perceptual scientists, is that this illusion can also occur during normal observation of a rotating wheel, in full daylight. This suggests that the brain itself, even in the absence of a strobe light, is sampling the world in discrete chunks.

Scientists have uncovered still more clues. It turns out, for example, that our ability to detect a subtle event, like a slight change in a visual scene, oscillates over time, cycling between better and worse perceptual sensitivity several times a second. Research shows that these rhythms correlate with electrical rhythms of the brain.

If that’s hard to picture, here’s an analogy: Imagine trying to see an animal through a thick, swirling fog that varies in density as it drifts. The distinctness of the animal’s form will oscillate with the density of the fog, alternating between periods of relative clarity and opaqueness. According to recent experiments, this is how our perceptual systems sample the world — but rather than fog, it’s brain waves that drive the oscillations.

This is not to say that the brain dances to its own beat, dragging perception along for the ride. In fact, it seems to work the other way around: Rhythms in the environment, such as those in music or speech, can draw neural oscillations into their tempo, effectively synchronizing the brain’s rhythms with those of the world around us.

Consider a study that I conducted with my colleagues, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science. We presented listeners with a three-beat-per-second rhythm (a pulsing “whoosh” sound) for only a few seconds and then asked the listeners to try to detect a faint tone immediately afterward. The tone was presented at a range of delays between zero and 1.4 seconds after the rhythm ended. Not only did we find that the ability to detect the tone varied over time by up to 25 percent — that’s a lot — but it did so precisely in sync with the previously heard three-beat-per-second rhythm.

Why would the brain do this? One theory is that it’s the brain’s way of focusing attention. Picture a noisy cafe filled with voices, clanging dishes and background music. As you attend to one particular acoustic stream — say, your lunch mate’s voice — your brain synchronizes its rhythm to the rhythm of the voice and enhances the perceptibility of that stream, while suppressing other streams, which have their own, different rhythms. (More broadly, this kind of synchronization has been proposed as a mechanism for communication between neural networks within the brain.)

All of this points to the need for a new metaphor. We should talk of the “rhythm” of thought, of perception, of consciousness. Conceptualizing our mental experience this way is not only more accurate, but it also situates our mind within the broader context of the daily, monthly and yearly rhythms that dominate our lives.

Is cosmic consciousness the next stage of human evolution?

2015-04-27T21:29:00.004-07:00

from inquirer.net

Apr 28, 2015

One suddenly realizes the unity or oneness of the whole universe

BY JAIME T. LICAUCO

Last week I wrote about the possibility of obtaining knowledge not from our normal five physical senses, but from something beyond them. Such knowledge has been called by various names, such as intuition, extrasensory perception, etc.

But there is another type of knowledge higher than this, which is more difficult to describe in words. And much fewer people have experienced it, unlike intuitive knowledge of something mundane or physical.

This type of knowledge or awareness has also been called by various names by different cultures, such as cosmic consciousness in the West, samadhi in Indian yoga philosophy and satori in Japanese Zen Buddhism.

However, there is a fundamental difference among these mystical states. Cosmic consciousness, for example, cannot be obtained deliberately or consciously. It usually comes spontaneously, without deliberate effort nor intention. Samadhi is a state of enlightenment attained through years of mental discipline, meditation and even fasting. Samadhi is the ultimate goal of yoga, satori the ultimate goal of Zen practice.

Samadhi is achieved when the human mind unites with the universal mind. Satori, on the other hand, is achieved when one bypasses the logical mind and achieves oneness with universal truth.

No distinction

In cosmic consciousness, one suddenly realizes the unity or oneness of the whole of the universe, that there is no distinction between object and subject, that everything is really one. One also gets the feeling that all of this knowledge of the world appears useless and of no consequence or value at all. And that there is a higher awareness that is more valuable than anything else.

Such a state of cosmic consciousness may last for only a few seconds or minutes, or for several days. One who experiences it is forever transformed. He or she is no longer the same person. And all knowledge of the world seems to be inconsequential, in comparison with this new and higher level of awareness.

This, I believe, happened to me quite unexpectedly in 1975, when I knew nothing about such things as cosmic consciousness, ESP or mystical phenomena.

I couldn’t remember any more the details, as it happened a long time ago, but I knew I was in a meditative state. And I was alone at home, thinking of nothing in particular.

Then, without warning, my mind was transported to another level of understanding or another universe, like nothing I have ever experienced before. Everything became connected to everything else, that there was no longer any distinction between me and everything else in the universe, that everything had become one or part of that universal one.

It was mind-blowing. Even nonliving things, like stones, minerals, water, were all alive and communicating with one another. Subject and object became indistinguishable.

Mystical experience

I didn't know what hit me that day. I kept such experience from everybody else, reluctant to talk about it because I couldn't explain it.

Then, many years later, I read Dr. William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience,” which explained it as a religious mystical experience.

But my experience was nothing religious at all. It was not connected to any religion. It was beyond all religion.

Again, many years later, I came across the book of Richard Bucke on cosmic consciousness. The many examples of people who have experienced cosmic consciousness somehow resonated with me and I knew then that was what I had, although I could not compare myself with those famous people.

P.D. Ouspensky, a famous Russian mathematician and mystic who was a long-time disciple of Gurdjieff, described his experience with cosmic consciousness in his book, “A New Model of the Universe.”

“I am reading the chapter on levers. And all at once a multitude of simple things, which I knew as independent and having nothing in common became connected and united into a great whole. A stick pushed under a stone, a pen knife, a shovel, a seesaw, and all the things one and the same, they are all ‘levers.’

“In this idea there is something both terrifying and alluring. How is it that I did not know it? Why has nobody spoken about it? Why I am made to learn a thousand useless things and not told about this? All that I am discovering is so wonderful and miraculous that I became more and more enraptured, and I am gripped by a certain presentment of further revelations waiting me. It is as though I already feel the unity of all and am overcome with awe at the sensation.”

Bucke, author of “Cosmic Consciousness,” described his experience with this elusive and fleeting type of knowledge and listed down its characteristics as follows: “Its sudden appearance, a subjective experience of inner light, moral elevation, intellectual illumination, a sense of immortality, loss of fear of death, and loss of a sense of sin.”

In his book, Bucke listed down some 35 individuals who had experienced cosmic consciousness, such as Jesus Christ, Plotinus, Mohammed, Buddha, William Blake, Francis Bacon, Walt Whitman, Socrates, Swedenborg, Ralph Waldo Emerson, etc.

Bucke’s experience of cosmic consciousness seems to have some moral or religious dimensions. I believe, however, that because all becomes one, cosmic consciousness is beyond religion and morality. From my limited experience of it, all of reality appears to be one and the same thing.

He considers cosmic consciousness the next stage of human evolution and development.

Do animals have consciousness?

2015-03-06T09:33:00.002-08:00

from scienceline.org

The way scientists answer this animal consciousness question has a big effect not only on their research, but also your medicine cabinet

Does this little guy have consciousness? Researchers are divided as to whether it’s even a question we should be answering. [Image credit: Flickr user S. J. Pyrotechnic]

By Chelsey B. Coombs | Posted March 6, 2015

There’s a rat in a cage with two sides: one bright and one dark. One of the rat’s survival mechanisms is to favor the dark side and avoid the bright side at all costs. But when the rat goes into the dark side of the cage, it gets shocked. After a few shocks coincide with its favorite habitat situation, it remains on the bright side despite its lifelong instincts. Is the rat now afraid of the dark, or is he simply trained to avoid it?

If the rat were a human, he’d probably tell us he’s afraid of the shocks in the darkness, which shows the ability to feel emotions. We know humans have the capacity for consciousness because we think, make decisions, have feelings and a sense of self. And each of us believes that other humans have the same ability. But we don’t yet have the technology to go into the minds of those around us to see and feel what they do.

This distinction is all the more difficult when it comes to non-human animals. We think that our pets are happy when we come home, or sad when we punish them for ruining the brand new couch. But we can’t go into their minds to really know how they’re feeling, or whether they are actually conscious.

The animal consciousness debate has higher stakes than a simple desire to know whether Fido or Fluffy has feelings. It affects how scientists think about and conduct their research on non-human animals, and whether researchers should or should not make assumptions about their subjects’ consciousness while doing their experiments. One side believes scientists must separate the mechanisms that detect and respond to threats from those that create conscious feelings of fear, while the other believes these mechanisms are one and the same.

But this is not a new debate.

“It has been going on forever,” said New York University neuroscientist Joe LeDoux, one of the most vocal of a group of researchers who think non-human animal consciousness isn’t relevant in experiments or even scientifically resolvable. “The basic idea is about how many assumptions scientists are willing to make about consciousness.”

In a 2014 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “Coming to terms with fear,” LeDoux elaborated on his argument, writing, “we can learn quite a bit that is relevant to human feelings from studies of animals without making any assumptions about [their] consciousness.”

But another group of neuroscientists — one of the most vocal being Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University — want to factor consciousness into their experiments. In July 2012, at the conclusion of the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-human Animals, Panksepp, along with a White House advisor and other neuroscientists, published The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. This declaration, whose signing was witnessed by physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, emphasized that scientific evidence showed clearly that non-human animals have “conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.” They argued that all mammals and birds, as well as many other organisms, have the same brain structures and substrates that make consciousness possible in humans, which makes consciousness possible for them as well.

Animal behaviorists have been discussing animal consciousness as long as their field has existed, since Charles Darwin wrote his 1872 book, “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” But the issue has deep philosophical roots. Even French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes got in on the debate, writing in his 1637 treatise “Discourse on Method,” “it is more probable that worms and flies and caterpillars move mechanically than that they all have immortal souls.”

John Watson, the early 20th century psychologist known as the father of behaviorism, which focuses on studying outward behavior rather than inward consciousness, had a very similar view. Watson and other behaviorists thought that the only way to understand animals was to observe the causes and effects of their behaviors, rather than to ruminate on whether the animals made conscious behavioral choices. They insisted, for example, that a chastised dog cowering in a corner isn’t feeling fear: He’s actually exhibiting a reflexive behavior triggered by a stimulus — a position bolstered by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s experiments with salivating dogs.

“The behaviorists took a very strong stance right from the beginning with the ideas that emotions were something you couldn’t measure in a nonhuman animal, so there was no point in going down that route,” said Penn State University biologist Victoria Braithwaite, who studies pain perception, fear and suffering in fish. “It was very clean cut, it was clinical. They thought we shouldn’t be studying things we don’t understand.”

Some researchers, like the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud tried to delve into how human behavior was influenced or driven by inner feelings and desires. But animal behaviorists almost unanimously focused solely on the observable behaviors themselves, rather than trying to experimentally manipulate or even delve into animal consciousness.

The classical behaviorist point of view has reigned since the 1950s, but there was a silent minority toiling away to try to prove that non-human animals have consciousness.

“[Consciousness] is a century old dilemma that the academic behaviorists decided to close the book on many years ago,” Panksepp said in a recent interview. “I turned out to be among the scientists to open the book.”

Panksepp was inspired by the work of American psychologists Peter Milner and James Olds, who in 1954 discovered the brain reward system. By using electrodes to target certain brain regions in rats, Milner and Olds found they could train the creatures to perform behaviors like pressing levers so they could get more of this deeply rewarding brain stimulation. The brain’s reward system is activated to reinforce certain behaviors that cause pleasure and researchers believe this system is responsible for drug addiction.

Panksepp began using similar deep brain stimulation techniques in his own research. But rather than lying back to enjoy this reward system stimulation, the rats would actually change their behaviors.

“Every animal I stimulated in the rewards system explored [its environment],” he said. “I immediately started seeing this as an emotional system as opposed to just a reward system. It was through this emotional system that animals explore the world,” Panksepp added, and can thus better anticipate threats to their survival.

Panksepp called this branch of the reward system the seeking system. Since then, he and other pro-consciousness scientists have concluded that animals have systems not only for seeking, but also rage, lust, maternal care, panic, play and fear. Researchers were able to map the brain’s so-called play system using rat laughter, a sound that’s too high for humans to hear but sounds like bird calls when manipulated into the human hearing range.

“Every animal I tickled was chirping like crazy and they became very fond of my hand like a little puppy chasing you around,” Panksepp said.

One of his doctoral students began to map the brain areas that caused the rats to laugh, and found that this laughter was, according to Panksepp, a “marker for good feelings” or social joy.

But LeDoux argues differently. He thinks that the neural circuitry associated with fear conditioning, which he argues is a response to a threat, is separate entirely from any circuitry that could create conscious fear.

LeDoux says that in a variety of experiments in humans, subliminal threats were able to cause physiological responses, such as increased skin conductance caused by sweat, without subjects being aware of the threat, even when they are asked to describe how they are feeling at that moment.

“We can trigger these kinds of states that if you measured in an animal, you would say the animal is feeling fear,” LeDoux said. “But if we can’t use that information to conclusively demonstrate that a human is feeling fear or experiencing that state, then we certainly can’t use it every time an animal looks like he may be feeling afraid.”

This uncertainty explains why LeDoux and his camp call this reaction a threat response rather than fear.

Like LeDoux, Braithwaite acknowledges we still don’t have all the information on human consciousness, but in the animal consciousness debate she sides with Panksepp.

“It’s the 21st Century. We can put people on the moon but we still don’t understand our own consciousness,” she said. “I think we need to recognize that we’re part of an evolutionary progression and it would be very bizarre for animals to not have forms of consciousness.”

This isn’t simply a war of competing factions who just want to be right. According to both Panksepp and LeDoux, whatever direction the field goes in will affect how scientists look for new human psychiatric medications and how animals in research laboratories are used in experiments.

Panksepp, for instance, developed a new antidepressant that is currently undergoing FDA testing. “It is a molecule that facilitates social joy, mainly rat laughter. Lo and behold, we developed molecules that were safe and non-addictive to modulate this complex neurochemical pathway, and it’s been in human testing now for four years.”

While Panksepp believes researchers should take animal emotions into account when looking for these new medications, LeDoux believes scientists must separate the mechanisms that detect and respond to threats and the mechanisms that create conscious feelings of fear.

LeDoux says behavioral therapy addresses non-conscious brain circuitry more directly, while cognitive, or talk, therapy addresses the conscious circuitry. But many therapists use both methods. He argues that from a neuroscientific standpoint this is not as effective at helping patients, because the different predisposing factors that cause psychiatric problems are susceptible to different treatments.

“If we’re confusing the experience and the automatic detection and response systems, we’re not really doing justice to how we’re curing anxiety disorders,” LeDoux said. “We’re not being clear about what’s controlling different aspects of it and how those different things should be treated in people.”

There’s a lot more at stake for the rat in the dark and light cage than most would expect, and the way researchers handle their thinking of the rat’s conscious and unconscious experiences has great implications for human applications. For now, this shocking controversy continues on.

Scientists playing sleight of hand games

2015-02-14T11:55:00.000-08:00

from leaderpost.com

BY BETHANY LINDSAY, POSTMEDIA NEWS FEBRUARY 12, 2015

Can questions about something as fundamental as the existence of free will be answered with a simple magic trick?

It may sound strange, but a new study from researchers in Vancouver and Montreal uses magicians' mind tricks as a gateway to exploring human consciousness and decision-making. In a street magic experiment, lead author Jay Olson asked 118 strangers to pick a random card as he riffled through the pack, intentionally showing one card for longer than the rest.

The results were remarkable.

Ninety-eight per cent of people picked the target card, and an impressive 91 per cent believed that they had made that choice freely, without any influence from the magician.

"It was pretty cool," said co-author Ronald Rensink, a psychology and computer science professor at the University of British Columbia. "This would seem to be supporting the view that your conscious mind doesn't really decide.

"It's the non-conscious mind that makes the decision-making. ... Your conscious mind, some people would argue, only vetoes the selection."

Magicians have been exploiting the unconscious mind for centuries to create a sense of wonder in their audiences, and that makes magic a perfect vehicle for studying psychology, according to co-author Alym Amlani, a magician and accounting professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

"We're now able to tap into the effects that have been, for lack of a better word, fooling people for years.

"We're in a position now that we can better understand why they work," Amlani said. "For everyday people, it's just incredible that we can actually have our decisions influenced outside of our awareness."

The researchers also attempted to replicate the results from the street magic experiment in the lab using a computer program that showed participants a series of 26 images of cards. The target card was shown for about three times as long as the rest.

Participants in this part of the study chose the target card in 30 per cent of the trials. That result isn't as jaw-dropping as what the researchers saw on the street, but it is still significant, Rensink said.

"I was just happy to get our foot in the door. It could be with better timing parameters we could get a stronger effect," he said.

"Or it could be there's something about the social interaction with the magician."

Recent years have seen an increase in research focused on both "magic" and decision-making, according to Rensink, and the results of studies like this could have wide implications.

"If you're an advertiser, for example, you really want to appeal to the non-conscious mind, that part of the viewer, instead of making a formal argument," he said. "It's both kind of cool and kind of scary."

Human Soul Found? Quantum Theory Of Consciousness ‘Orch OR’ Claims Both Science And Religion Are True

2015-02-08T09:11:00.000-08:00

from inquisitr.com

Has the human soul been found by science? A controversial quantum theory of consciousness called “Orch OR” (which stands for “orchestrated objective reduction”) recently had a review, and the scientists supporting this idea are claiming the recent discovery of quantum vibrations in “microtubules” inside brain neurons corroborates their beliefs.

In a related report by the Inquisitr, Stephen Hawking fears the Terminator movies may actually come true, but to this day, the “lowly” human brain still beats out supercomputerson multiple fronts. Louis Del Monte, the author of The Artificial Intelligence Revolution, also believes an AI singularity event will occur by 2045, but so far, computer AI can’t even pass the Turing test.

In most religions, the totality of being human is divided into three parts; mind, soul, and body. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other religions typically equate the mind to the physical human brain, which works in conjunction with an immaterial human soul. What has had philosophers and scientists arguing for thousands of years is exactly how this process functions from a mechanical viewpoint. When it comes to the philosophy of the mind, dualism and physicalism have competed for the beliefs of scientists, with the latter claiming that all which exists in our world, including consciousness, is physical.

On the side of physicalism, some scientists claim the soul or consciousness can be reduced to mere computations conducted within the neural networks in the human brain, which means all consciousness can be explained by algorithms. Other scientists believe believe that quantum processes attributed to the human soul work in partnership with the observable neurological processes to produce the experience of human consciousness, although one is not completely dependent on the other to function. Essentially, these scientists claim the human brain is a quantum computer, and the informational state of qubits are influenced by the human soul.

One such scientist is Stuart Hameroff, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Anesthesiology and Psychology and the Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. He and Sir Roger Penrose, mathematical physicist at the Mathematical Institute and Wadham College and University of Oxford, believe overall brain function derives from quantum level microtubule vibrations.

“The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review, according to Science Daily. “This opens a potential Pandora’s Box, but our theory accommodates both these views, suggesting consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules, protein polymers inside brain neurons, which both govern neuronal and synaptic function, and connect brain processes to self-organizing processes in the fine scale, ‘proto-conscious’ quantum structure of reality.”

In other words, they believe they’ve found scientific evidence for the human soul. They claim six testable prediction published in 1998 have been fulfilled, and none have been falsified. As an example, they cite the “recent discovery of warm temperature quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons,” which is a big deal since man-made quantum computers typically require icy conditions in order to function at all. In addition, they point to research which “suggests that anesthesia, which selectively erases consciousness while sparing non-conscious brain activities, acts via microtubules in brain neurons.” From a practical medical perspective, they also believe “treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions.”

From a religious perspective, Hameroff believes their Orch OR theory could also account for near death experiences, out of body experiences, and even the afterlife.

“The connection to space–time geometry also raises the intriguing possibility that Orch OR allows consciousness apart from the brain and body, distributed and entangled in space–time geometry,” Hameroff says according to Popular Mechanics. When he spoke to the Huffington Post he also claimed, “It’s possible that the quantum information can can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”

Skeptics have long attributed near death experiences to physical phenomena such as the brain being deprive of oxygen, not the human soul or any interaction with God or the afterlife. To put these claims in perspective, last year, even Skeptic magazine’s Michael Shermer wrote about a possible after-death communication from his grandfather-in-law. Other skeptics also tend to be committed materialists until they have their own experience.

One such skeptic was Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, whose neurons in his cerebral cortex were stunned to complete inactivity for seven days during a near-fatal bout of meningitis.

“I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death,” says Alexander in aNewsweek article. “In the fall of 2008,… I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death…. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.”

Many Christians have come forward in recent years claiming to have experienced heaven and met God. Of course, Hameroff’s personal beliefs are very much different from traditional religions in regards to the nature of the human soul. He believes “consciousness, or its immediate precursor proto-consciousness, has been in the universe all along, perhaps from the Big Bang.”

What do you think about this quantum theory of consciousness? Do you think science will be able to prove the existence of the human soul?

Inflammation

2015-02-07T19:35:00.002-08:00

from huffpost

‘Inconsolable’ Bobby Brown Praying for Daughter to Regain Consciousness

2015-02-02T15:45:00.003-08:00

from time

TIME Staff 1:06 AM ET

Bobbi Kristina Brown has been unconscious since Saturday

Family members of Bobbi Kristina Brown, the 21-year-old daughter of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, are waiting for a “miracle” as she remains on a respirator with scant brain activity. Brown was found unconscious Saturday in her bathtub at her home in Roswell, Ga., reports a PEOPLE exclusive.

“This is [Bobby’s] worst nightmare,” a family source told PEOPLE. “Losing Whitney [Houston] was hard, but this is a million times worse, and to lose her in the same way would devastate him.”

Read PEOPLE’s coverage here.

In Search Of A Science Of Consciousness

2015-01-04T19:22:00.000-08:00

from npr blog

DECEMBER 30, 2014 8:17 AM ET

Yenpitsu Nemoto/Ikon Images/Corbis

Any color you choose can be matched by a mixture of short, medium and long wavelength light (i.e., blue, green and red light). This perceptual observation led to the formulation, early in the 19th century, of a neurophysiological hypothesis: The eye contains three kinds of distinct color-sensitive receptors (cones); just as colors themselves can be composed of lights of different spectral character, so we can see the vast range of visible color thanks to the joint operation of only three distinct kinds of receptors.

This is a beautiful example of the primacy of experience in the study of the brain-basis of consciousness. Before you can even begin to think about how the brain enables us to see or feel or (more generally) experience what we do, you need to pay careful attention to what our experience is actually like.

And, so, it was further attention to the experience that led scientists to realize the shortcomings of what came to be known as the Trichromatic Theory of Color.

Waking, Dreaming, Being

Self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation, and philosophy

by Evan Thompson and Stephen Batchelor

Hardcover, 453 pagespurchase

Consciousness: Magic or Meh?

2014-12-19T10:07:00.003-08:00

from northcoastjournal.com

BY BARRY EVANS

You're sitting opposite your friend Susan and you see her glance down and notice a stain on her blouse. You immediately know pretty much what's going on in her head from her expression, her attempt to hide the stain, your prior knowledge of her. Somehow, you've attributed awareness of the stain to Susan. According to a new book, your brain uses exactly the same mechanism (located in the temporo-parietal junction) to attribute awareness to itself. In this theory of consciousness, awareness — your inner sense of experiencing something — is your brain's rough-and-ready, good-enough model of attention.

The book is Consciousness and the Social Brain by Michael Graziano, a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. You don't have to read the whole book (although it's very accessible, and in our county library), since the author published a summary of his new — or rather old-but-brilliantly-reformulated — theory in an Oct. 14 New York Times op-ed, "Are We Really Conscious?" Drawing on earlier work by such well-known researchers as Douglas Hofstadter, Michael Gazzaniga, Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, Graziano's "attention schema theory" is an attempt to answer the so-called "Hard Problem" of consciousness.

Ironically, the Hard Problem is really easy to state: Why do we feel anything?When we see a red apple, smell fresh-ground coffee, remember an embarrassing faux pas, touch the bark of a tree, something happens: We experience a feeling, or sensation, or memory. And, if we take a moment to introspect, we're aware of experiencing. Why? Unlike other animals who (presumably) don't introspect nor are aware of themselves —we'd say they're on "automatic" — we have this whole inner world we call consciousness or awareness.

About 20 years ago, Australian psychologist David Chalmers proposed a deceptively simple dichotomy, assigning consciousness questions into either the Easy Problem or the Hard Problem. The Easy Problem (easy only in relation to the hard one!) is figuring out the mechanics of how brains work in ourselves and other animals. The Hard Problem, meanwhile, has produced three dominant responses: (1) Consciousness is not a physical property, that is, our inner world can't be explained by purely physical processes. Chalmers himself had adopted this point of view, claiming that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like time, space and mass. (2) We're not smart enough. An explanation may be out there, but either our present knowledge isn't up to the task, or the human brain (in its current form) is inherently inadequate to figure it out. (3) There is no problem! Consciousness only seems mysterious because our minds fool us, much as a good magician convinces part of our brain that the lady really is being sawn in half, even as we know, intellectually, that it's a magic trick.

Graziano's theory, which comes under (3), is both simple and rational. "Brains are information processing devices," he writes. "When an information processing device introspects ... and on that basis arrives at the conclusion that it has a magical, non-physically-explainable property, the most straightforward scientific question is not: How did it produce magic? but instead: How, and for what use, does it construct that description of itself?" OK, if consciousness isn't magic, what then? As I wrote above, it's the brain's model of what we call attention, its simplified attempt to explain itself to itself. Why do we need a model? So we can make the best use of the brain's limited resources. We can't be attentive to everything that's going on, and consciousness is the mechanism for optimally controlling our attention.

This brief account doesn't do justice to Graziano's theory, of course. If you're a consciousness junkie like myself, his book is required reading, whether you end up convinced or not. And, as a bonus, it's very funny.

Barry Evans (barryevans9@yahoo.com) is okay with his brain telling itself a story about telling itself a story. But not if that's just a story.

Tags: Field Notes

Brain's dementia weak spot identified

2014-11-24T21:40:00.003-08:00

from bbc

The brain has a weak spot for Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia, according to UK scientists who have pinpointed the region using scans.

The brain area involved develops late in adolescence and degenerates early during ageing.

At the moment, it is difficult for doctors to predict which people might develop either condition.

The findings, in the journal PNAS, hint at a potential way to diagnose those at risk earlier, experts say.

Although they caution that "much more research is needed into how to bring these exciting discoveries into the clinic".

“Start Quote

Early doctors called schizophrenia 'premature dementia' but until now we had no clear evidence that the same parts of the brain might be associated with two such different diseases”

Prof Hugh Perry of the MRC

Weak spot

The Medical Research Council team who carried out the study did MRI brain scans on 484 healthy volunteers aged between eight and 85 years.

They looked at how the brain naturally changes as people age.

The images revealed a common pattern - the parts of the brain that were the last to develop were also the first to show signs of age-related decline.

These brain regions - a network of nerve cells or grey matter - co-ordinate "high order" information coming from the different senses, such as sight and sound.

When the researchers looked at scans of patients with Alzheimer's disease and scans of patients with schizophrenia they found the same brain regions were affected.

The findings fit with what other experts have suspected - that although distinct, Alzheimer's and schizophrenia are linked.

Prof Hugh Perry of the MRC said: "Early doctors called schizophrenia 'premature dementia' but until now we had no clear evidence that the same parts of the brain might be associated with two such different diseases. This large-scale and detailed study provides an important, and previously missing, link between development, ageing and disease processes in the brain.

"It raises important issues about possible genetic and environmental factors that may occur in early life and then have lifelong consequences. The more we can find out about these very difficult disorders, the closer we will come to helping sufferers and their families."

Dr Michael Bloomfield of University College London said: "Schizophrenia can be potentially devastating but at the moment it's very difficult to predict with certainty who is going to have a good prognosis and who might have a poor one.

"This study brings us a step closer to being able to make this prediction, so patients could in the future receive better targeted treatments."

Armed with this new knowledge, it may also be possible to understand how to prevent the brain changes before they occur, he said

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“Start Quote

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