Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 27

48 hrs after death, DNA is still alive and firing

The hour of our death, is not the hour of our death for the whole of our physical body. According to new research, hundreds of our genes live on, or even come to life for the first time, for as long as 48 hours after the declaration of clinical death.

Peter Noble and Alex Pozhitkov at the University of Washington, Seattle, led a research team investigated gene activity in mice and zebrafish immediately after death. An increase in this messenger RNA (the meta system that directs the tasks of cells) gives an indication of when genes are more active.

The possibility that genes remain active for some days after death has implications in the field of organ transplants as well as in the establishment of the precise time of death. It also affirms the religious practice in come cultures of leaving the dead unmoved for three dats after the heart has stopped beating.

“We can probably get a lot of information about life by studying death.”

Prof. Peter Nobel

Messenger RNA

The preprint of the paper that appeared in June 2016 states:  “A continuing enigma in the study of biological systems is what happens to highly ordered structures, far from equilibrium, when their regulatory systems suddenly become disabled. In life, genetic and epigenetic networks precisely coordinate the expression of genes — but in death, it is not known if gene expression diminishes gradually or abruptly stops or if specific genes are involved. We investigated the unwinding of the clock by identifying upregulated genes, assessing their functions, and comparing their transcriptional profiles through postmortem time in two species, mouse and zebrafish.”

Noble’s team measured mRNA levels in zebrafish, and in brain and liver samples from mice at regular intervals for up to four days after death, with peak activity at 24 hours after the last breath. They then compared these with mRNA levels measured at the time of death. “Hundreds of genes with different functions woke up after death, including fetal development genes,” they reported. This meant there was sufficient energy and cellular function for some genes to be switched on and stay active long after the animal died. These genes cycled through peaks and dips in activity in a “non-winding down” manner, unlike the chaotic behaviour of the rest of the decaying DNA, said Noble.

Hundreds of genes with different functions “woke up” immediately after death. These included fetal development genes that usually turn off after birth, as well as genes that have previously been associated with cancer. Their activity peaked about 24 hours after death.

“The fact that new molecules were synthesized at 48 to 96 h postmortem suggests sufficient energy and resources to maintain self-organizing processes. A step-wise shutdown occurs in organismal death that is manifested by the apparent upregulation of genes with various abundance maxima and durations. The results are of significance to transplantology and molecular biology.”

Source

Your Brain on Hypnosis

A new study from Stanford University Medical School affirms the enormous potential of hypnosis and conditions of ‘trance’ in relieving pain and treating conditions of anxiety and depression.

Hypnosis – the bypassing of the control centers of the conscious mind in order to elicit a deeper level of communication with the unconscious mind is gaining scientific kudos – as an effective treatment for anxiety, depression and pain relief. The surrender into the so-called ‘trance’ state has, it seems, tremendous benefits for the well-being of  the organism as a whole – unlocking subliminal stress-inducing beliefs about suffering and the sense of a separate self that must stay in control and is liable to be punished.

In addition, hypnosis actually opens up the connectivity between brain and body. If body and mind are functioning as a duality – then the boundless state of mind some call ‘trance’ would seem to offer the nondual perspective of inclusion in order to return to harmony.

[source of below text: Stanford University Press release 28/07/16]

By scanning the brains of subjects while they were hypnotized, researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine were able to see the neural changes associated with hypnosis.

Your eyelids are getting heavy, your arms are going limp and you feel like you’re floating through space. The power of hypnosis to alter your mind and body like this is all thanks to changes in a few specific areas of the brain, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered.

The scientists scanned the brains of 57 people during guided hypnosis sessions similar to those that might be used clinically to treat anxiety, pain or trauma. Distinct sections of the brain have altered activity and connectivity while someone is hypnotized, they report in a study published online July 28 in Cerebral Cortex.

“Now that we know which brain regions are involved, we may be able to use this knowledge to alter someone’s capacity to be hypnotized or the effectiveness of hypnosis for problems like pain control,” said the study’s senior author, David Spiegel, MD, professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

A serious science

For some people, hypnosis is associated with loss of control or stage tricks. But doctors like Spiegel know it to be a serious science, revealing the brain’s ability to heal medical and psychiatric conditions.

“Hypnosis is the oldest Western form of psychotherapy, but it’s been tarred with the brush of dangling watches and purple capes,” said Spiegel, who holds the Jack, Samuel and Lulu Willson Professorship in Medicine. “In fact, it’s a very powerful means of changing the way we use our minds to control perception and our bodies.”

Despite a growing appreciation of the clinical potential of hypnosis, little is known about how it works at a physiological level. While researchers have previously scanned the brains of people undergoing hypnosis, those studies have been designed to pinpoint the effects of hypnosis on pain, vision and other forms of perception, and not the state of hypnosis itself.

“There had not been any studies in which the goal was to simply ask what’s going on in the brain when you’re hypnotized,” said Spiegel.

Finding the most susceptible

To study hypnosis itself, researchers first had to find people who could or couldn’t be hypnotized. Only about 10 percent of the population is generally categorized as “highly hypnotizable,” while others are less able to enter the trancelike state of hypnosis. Spiegel and his colleagues screened 545 healthy participants and found 36 people who consistently scored high on tests of hypnotizability, as well as 21 control subjects who scored on the extreme low end of the scales.

Then, they observed the brains of those 57 participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Each person was scanned under four different conditions — while resting, while recalling a memory and during two different hypnosis sessions.

“It was important to have the people who aren’t able to be hypnotized as controls,” said Spiegel. “Otherwise, you might see things happening in the brains of those being hypnotized but you wouldn’t be sure whether it was associated with hypnosis or not.”

“It’s a very powerful means of changing the way we use our minds to control perception and our bodies.”

Brain activity and connectivity

Spiegel and his colleagues discovered three hallmarks of the brain under hypnosis. Each change was seen only in the highly hypnotizable group and only while they were undergoing hypnosis.

First, they saw a decrease in activity in an area called the dorsal anterior cingulate, part of the brain’s salience network. “In hypnosis, you’re so absorbed that you’re not worrying about anything else,” Spiegel explained.

Secondly, they saw an increase in connections between two other areas of the brain — the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insula. He described this as a brain-body connection that helps the brain process and control what’s going on in the body.

Finally, Spiegel’s team also observed reduced connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the default mode network, which includes the medial prefrontal and the posterior cingulate cortex. This decrease in functional connectivity likely represents a disconnect between someone’s actions and their awareness of their actions, Spiegel said. “When you’re really engaged in something, you don’t really think about doing it — you just do it,” he said. During hypnosis, this kind of disassociation between action and reflection allows the person to engage in activities either suggested by a clinician or self-suggested without devoting mental resources to being self-conscious about the activity.

Treating pain and anxiety without pills

In patients who can be easily hypnotized, hypnosis sessions have been shown to be effective in lessening chronic pain, the pain of childbirth and other medical procedures; treating smoking addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder; and easing anxiety or phobias. The new findings about how hypnosis affects the brain might pave the way toward developing treatments for the rest of the population — those who aren’t naturally as susceptible to hypnosis.

“We’re certainly interested in the idea that you can change people’s ability to be hypnotized by stimulating specific areas of the brain,” said Spiegel.

A treatment that combines brain stimulation with hypnosis could improve the known analgesic effects of hypnosis and potentially replace addictive and side-effect-laden painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs, he said. More research, however, is needed before such a therapy could be implemented.

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The Journey – When Getting Somewhere Keeps Us Trapped

“Breathing in, we make three steps, and we may tell ourselves with each step, “I have arrived. I have arrived. I have arrived.” And breathing out, we make another three steps, always mindful of the contact between our feet and the ground, and we say, “I’m home. I’m home. I’m home.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

The art of living can be profoundly simple, and yet it’s not easy. Even before our waking consciousness emerges here as young children, we are energetically programmed by the stress signals of our environment. Deep within the formless awareness of our mother’s womb, stress chemicals in response to stimuli were already forming our experience of physical life. In the background to these sentient events, was an undertone of dis-ease within the whole: a resistance to being here, human; a repression of life-force; a constant sense of expectation towards the fulfillment that will come in the future; a nasal resonance of fear around the worst that could happen. It’s all in the experiential atmosphere, at the experiential core, to the baby in formation.

Later, this is affirmed. The emphasis on the future disaster pitted against the future fulfillment is programmed into thought forms of crime-punishment,  good behavior-reward, in a manner that it appears inseparable from ‘reality’.

Born into the living environment, the message comes from our parents, it’s given through our teachers, it’s sanctified by the promise or condemnation of religion, and it’s embodied through the raw threat of financial survival. It impregnates our most intimate relationships, our freedom to manifest and even our self-honesty in being able to connect to our own inner source. It numbs the senses, disconnects us from life and propagates illusion.

Like donkeys bashed with a stick from behind and following a carrot that never gets closer, we move forward with increasing despair. Between the “It might never happen” of the collapse of dreams and the reassuring “It might never happen” collapse of nightmares, we falter, experiencing the present moment as senseless. Yet, more than most humans, the donkey was always free.

Maybe I’ll never make it to the moon.

Yes, 47 years after someone first stepped on the moon, we all seem to be waiting for our personal Apollo Moment. We’re waiting for the present moment – the only window through which life could ever fulfill us. We’re waiting for it to be “Now”. We’re denying the life rushing through our veins, to the dazzling light of our minds, the unconfined miracle of the foot on the ground, for the Now that will come ‘later’: the moment in which it all suddenly makes sense. We deny our physical senses – our incredible potential in sensitivity – for the sake of a “sense” that can only emerge through direct experience in this moment, as there is no “other” moment.

And so we continue on this imagined journey, laden with goods and imagined responsibilities, fearful we’ll take a wrong turn and fall into a ditch, yet knowing that anyway, sooner or later, we’ll take our last step and the ditch will be here. Senseless indeed.

We look back fearfully towards where we have been, clutching at the highlights of the way – even trying to repeat them – and denying the parts that seem to threaten the way ahead. We look fearfully ahead and agonize about choices of turning left or right. On the left is the pot of gold, to the right could be Satan himself. We don’t know, and always, whether we turn left or right, the sun beats down on our back, as if it really doesn’t matter. Senseless indeed.

The very concept of beginnings endings, initiations and arrivals is built on time – past, present and future. The very sense of destination is built on physical space – the nowhere, everywhere and somewhere.

The actor in these parameters of time and space is you: but who are you? Are you the one that is moving? Or are you always still, whether the feet move quickly or slowly? Are you everything you see emerging in your consciousness, or are you none of that, not even conscious at all?

As the donkey moves forward, anyway tempted and punished by the master of karma and previous generations, there is another map, and a deeper destiny. The two great arches of the ‘here’ and the ‘now’, boundless space and timelessness, stand deep within the living body as gateways to freedom.

Each step arriving. Each step kissing the earth. Each step ultimately fulfilled.

 

 

Multifractal Cascades of Consciousness in Literature

Regardless of the language they were working in, some of the world’s greatest writers appear to be constructing fractals. Statistical analysis carried out at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, however, revealed something even more intriguing. The composition of works from within a particular genre was characterized by the exceptional dynamics of a cascading (avalanche) narrative structure. This type of narrative turns out to be multifractal. That is, fractals of fractals are created.

For book lovers, advanced equations and graphs are the last things which would hold their interest, but there’s no escape from the math. Physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, Poland, performed a detailed statistical analysis of more than one hundred famous works of world literature, written in several languages and representing various literary genres. The books, tested for revealing correlations in variations of sentence length, proved to be governed by the dynamics of a cascade. This means that the construction of these books is in fact a fractal. In the case of several works their mathematical complexity proved to be exceptional, comparable to the structure of complex mathematical objects considered to be multifractal. Interestingly, in the analyzed pool of all the works, one genre turned out to be exceptionally multifractal in nature.

Sequences of sentence lengths (as measured by number of words) in four literary works representative of various degree of cascading character.

Fractals are self-similar mathematical objects: when we begin to expand one fragment or another, what eventually emerges is a structure that resembles the original object. Typical fractals, especially those widely known as the Sierpinski triangle and the Mandelbrot set, are monofractals, meaning that the pace of enlargement in any place of a fractal is the same, linear: if they at some point were rescaled x number of times to reveal a structure similar to the original, the same increase in another place would also reveal a similar structure.

Multifractals are more highly advanced mathematical structures: fractals of fractals. They arise from fractals ‘interwoven’ with each other in an appropriate manner and in appropriate proportions. Multifractals are not simply the sum of fractals and cannot be divided to return back to their original components, because the way they weave is fractal in nature. The result is that in order to see a structure similar to the original, different portions of a multifractal need to expand at different rates. A multifractal is therefore non-linear in nature.

“Analyses on multiple scales, carried out using fractals, allow us to neatly grasp information on correlations among data at various levels of complexity of tested systems. As a result, they point to the hierarchical organization of phenomena and structures found in nature. So we can expect natural language, which represents a major evolutionary leap of the natural world, to show such correlations as well. Their existence in literary works, however, had not yet been convincingly documented. Meanwhile, it turned out that when you look at these works from the proper perspective, these correlations appear to be not only common, but in some works they take on a particularly sophisticated mathematical complexity,” says Prof. Stanislaw Drozdz (IFJ PAN, Cracow University of Technology).

The study involved 113 literary works written in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish by such famous figures as Honore de Balzac, Arthur Conan Doyle, Julio Cortazar, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexandre Dumas, Umberto Eco, George Elliot, Victor Hugo, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Wladyslaw Reymont, William Shakespeare, Henryk Sienkiewicz, JRR Tolkien, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, among others. The selected works were no less than 5,000 sentences long, in order to ensure statistical reliability.

To convert the texts to numerical sequences, sentence length was measured by the number of words (an alternative method of counting characters in the sentence turned out to have no major impact on the conclusions). The dependences were then searched for in the data – beginning with the simplest, i.e. linear. This is the posited question: if a sentence of a given length is x times longer than the sentences of different lengths, is the same aspect ratio preserved when looking at sentences respectively longer or shorter?

“All of the examined works showed self-similarity in terms of organization of the lengths of sentences. Some were more expressive – here The Ambassadors by Henry James stood out – while others to far less of an extreme, as in the case of the French seventeenth-century romance Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus. However, correlations were evident, and therefore these texts were the construction of a fractal,” comments Dr. Pawel Oswiecimka (IFJ PAN), who also noted that fractality of a literary text will in practice never be as perfect as in the world of mathematics. It is possible to magnify mathematical fractals up to infinity, while the number of sentences in each book is finite, and at a certain stage of scaling there will always be a cut-off in the form of the end of the dataset.

Things took a particularly interesting turn when physicists from the IFJ PAN began tracking non-linear dependence, which in most of the studied works was present to a slight or moderate degree. However, more than a dozen works revealed a very clear multifractal structure, and almost all of these proved to be representative of one genre, that of stream of consciousness. The only exception was the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, which has so far never been associated with this literary genre.

“The absolute record in terms of multifractality turned out to be Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce. The results of our analysis of this text are virtually indistinguishable from ideal, purely mathematical multifractals,” says Prof. Drozdz.

The most multifractal works also included A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, Rayuela by Julio Cortazar, The US Trilogy by John Dos Passos, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, 2666 by Roberto Bolano, and Joyce’s Ulysses. At the same time a lot of works usually regarded as stream of consciousness turned out to show little correlation to multifractality, as it was hardly noticeable in books such as Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.

“It is not entirely clear whether stream of consciousness writing actually reveals the deeper qualities of our consciousness, or rather the imagination of the writers. It is hardly surprising that ascribing a work to a particular genre is, for whatever reason, sometimes subjective. We see, moreover, the possibility of an interesting application of our methodology: it may someday help in a more objective assignment of books to one genre or another,” notes Prof. Drozdz.

Multifractal analyses of literary texts carried out by the IFJ PAN have been published inInformation Sciences, the prestigious journal of computer science. The publication has undergone rigorous verification: given the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, editors immediately appointed up to six reviewers.

Source

Music, Meditation & the Brain

Meditation and prayer have been likened to a form of listening. Since there is no real silence, when quietly listening we hear the sounds of the environment, and the internal sounds of the breath, heart beat and electrical sounds.

By Dr. Jon Lieff

Meditation traditions describe a hierarchy of internal sounds. In these systems, different sounds are correlated with different regions of the brain and spinal cord plexus. Meditation on these neural centers at least increases bodily relaxation in these regions. The meditation traditions state that specific types of meditation experiences are increased using these sounds as techniques which focus on specific nervous system plexus. Unfortunately, there have been no brain studies of this type of activity. But, hopefully there will be soon.

In all types of meditation, sounds are used – sometimes in the form of  syllables, words, phrases and prayers usually in a repeated rhythm. If the purpose of meditation is to absorb the active mind so that an experience beyond thoughts can be obtained, then often sounds and a mental image are often both used at the same time.

The power of visualization in learning was described in the previous post related to the multisensory brain. There it was noted that combining visualization with a second concentration such as a physical movement makes the learning much more powerful. In the same way, visualization tied to rhythmic mantra is considered powerful in evoking deeper meditation states. Unfortunately, scientific studies have not reached this far.

Art suggests form with line and color. Poetry suggests form. Music does not have this form. Lines and colors can inspire, fragrance can go even further. But music produces dramatic inspiration, ecstasy, and exultation without form.

Multi Modal Musical Spirituality

Music is able to stimulate ecstasy in a group of people. As with other effects of music noted in the post on neuroplasticity, combining several sensory and motor modalities makes the effects more powerful.

Several different forms of spiritual practice link movements to prayerful singing and mantra. These multi modal practices are noted to have powerful effects. Some traditions use group singing of specific spiritual phrases and mantras as a major form of practice for the community.

In gospel singing clapping, dancing and other body movements are tied to spiritual singing with dramatic effects.

The Sufi tradition of spiritual dance, with specific repetitive movements linked to mantras and rhythms, has been noted to stimulate ecstatic experiences. These repetitive rhythmic movements occur in a group dance at the same time as melodic singing and, at times, a gradually increasing tempo. Another practice involves a spinning form of dance with rhythm and mantra and also evokes very strong reactions. All of these utilize very strong multi modal neuroplasticity.

A different form of sound and movement involves physical hatha yoga combined with spiritual music, repetitive mantra or prayer. The combination of music, mantra and the yogic postures can also stimulate spiritual experiences.

Music Improvisation and Spirituality

When our ordinary day-to-day experience of “who we are” is altered through a variety of means, we are able to have extraordinary experiences (see posts on extraordinary experiences –  super talents, out of body experience, psychedelics, spiritual). This same type of experience certainly occurs listening to very expert musical improvisation, where the performer and listener lose themselves in the rapture of the music and are transported to great emotional heights.

As has been stated before in several posts, our actions that produce neuroplasticity can be used for good or for evil. History has shown many examples of people brain washed by despots’ repetitive chanting and saluting while marching into a bad war.

On the flip side, prayerful mantra expressing spiritual meaning, with the power of melody, rhythm, and movement has been used to stimulate spiritual experience promoting increased compassion and love.

Read more on the author’s website.

Can We See Magnetic Fields?

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

Meister Eckhart

From Aristotle on, we have been conditioned to believe we have only five senses, even after science has established that we could have thousands. People who “see” energy are often deemed as crazy, or at least fantasaic, a condemnation that contracts belief systems and closes the brain to sensory input. Now, such psychics can rest easy, as a paper published in Nature Communications officially establishes that magnetoception as a sense is not only restricted to birds. We have it too, we just need to believe it, and train those neural networks.

New research shows that a human retina protein can function as a light-sensitive magnetic sensor.

In atomic physics, the Bohr magneton (symbol μB) is a physical constant and the natural unit for expressing the magnetic moment of an electron caused by either its orbital or spin angular momentum.

For migratory birds and sea turtles, the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field is crucial to navigating the long-distance voyages these animals undertake during migration. Humans, however, are widely assumed not to have an innate magnetic sense. Research published in Nature Communications this week by faculty at UMass Medical School shows that a protein expressed in the human retina can sense magnetic fields when implanted into Drosophila, reopening an area of sensory biology in humans for further exploration.

In many migratory animals, the light-sensitive chemical reactions involving the flavoprotein cryptochrome (CRY) are thought to play an important role in the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. In the case of Drosophila, previous studies from the laboratory of Steven Reppert, MD, the Higgins Family Professor of Neuroscience and chair and professor of neurobiology, (http://reppertlab.org/) have shown that the cryptochrome protein found in these flies can function as a light-dependent magnetic sensor.

To test whether the human cryptochrome 2 protein (hCRY2) has a similar magnetic sensory ability, Dr. Reppert, graduate student Lauren Foley, and Robert Gegear, PhD, a former post-doctoral fellow in the Reppert lab and now an assistant professor of biology and biotechnology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, created a transgenic Drosophilamodel lacking its native cryptochrome protein but expressing hCRY2 instead. Using a behavioral system Reppert’s group previously developed, they showed that these transgenic flies were able to sense and respond to an electric-coil-generated magnetic field and do so in a light-dependent manner.

These findings demonstrate that hCRY2 has the molecular capability to function in a magnetic sensing system and may pave the way for further investigation into human magnetoreception. “Additional research on magneto sensitivity in humans at the behavioral level, with particular emphasis on the influence of magnetic field on visual function, rather than non-visual navigation, would be informative,” wrote Reppert and his colleagues in the study.

What other senses do we have?

The sense of gravity, the sense of time, the sense of truth, the sense of home, the sense of wonder? Check here for a listing of human sense perceptions that goes far beyond the classical five of sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing. Sooner or later, the sensory GPS of the human physical organism will be better understood on a biological level. For now, un-focus the eyes from their habitual patterns of selecting and grasping what “ought” to be seen, relax into broad-range visual receptivity, and maybe enjoy the ebb and flow of some electromagnetic fields to color a grey day. Here is the I AM HERE archive of stories on human physical senses.

“I don’t like anything that feels like an established electromagnetic paradigm is pulling you into it’s cliched forebear’s footsteps.”

Russell Brand

OUT OF AN ORANGE SUN

OUT OF AN ORANGE SUN

Sweetheart so plagiarized,

how I watch from here,

as your light networks

matrix of love

from everywhere.

As by degrees, you get clothed

in forsaken threads of Maya’s

forbidden and ongoing strings

of incoming outgoing things

as sandcastles near the sea

beloathed but once beloved

fail to dust, again.

Even the greatest castles of sand


are washed away by watery hands.

Don’t you know, that beneath

those remnants of

second-hand belief,

you stand

so brilliantly still,

naked in rise and fall

a light within ocean and land?

Behind and before,

Will you listen

to the divine whispers

of an angel’s shore?

Georgi

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The Sense of Truth & Trusting the Inner Polygraph

When it comes to the Satsang of detecting lies told by others, the unconscious mind could be more reliable than the conscious one, according to scientific research. The findings indicate the subtle, graduated nature of consciousness, in which a vast amount of information is processed before it reaches the stage of conscious reflection. The research suggests that the sense of truth as a non-verbal intuition or inner compass could far surpass the power of mental inquiry in actually locating authenticity.

Basically, it’s common sense, it seems, to trust our gut feelings.

The Unconscious Mind Can Detect a Liar

When it comes to detecting deceit, your automatic associations may be more accurate than conscious thought in pegging truth-tellers and liars, according to research published in 2014 in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The findings suggest that conscious control may hinder our ability to detect whether someone is lying, perhaps because we tend to seek out behaviors that are supposedly stereotypical of liars, like averted eyes or fidgeting. But those behaviors may not be all that indicative of an untrustworthy person.

“Our research was prompted by the puzzling but consistent finding that humans are very poor lie detectors, performing at only about 54% accuracy in traditional lie detection tasks,” explains psychological scientist and study author Leanne ten Brinke, postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

That’s hardly better than chance, as if participants were simply guessing whether the person was lying. And it’s a finding that seems at odds with the fact that humans are typically sensitive to how others are feeling, what they’re thinking, and what their personalities are like.

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Along with UC Berkeley colleague Dayna Stimson and Berkeley-Haas Asst. Prof. Dana Carney, ten Brinke hypothesized that these seemingly paradoxical findings may be accounted for by “unconscious” processes:

“We set out to test whether the unconscious mind could catch a liar — even when the conscious mind failed,” she says.

The researchers first had 72 participants watch videos of “suspects” in a mock-crime interview. Some of the suspects in the videos had actually stolen a $100 bill from a bookshelf, whereas others had not. However, all of the suspects were instructed to tell the interviewer they had not stolen the money. In doing so, one group of suspects must have been lying, whereas the other group must have been telling the truth.

When the 72 participants were asked to say which suspects they thought were lying and which were telling the truth, they were pretty inaccurate: They were only able to detect liars 43% of the time, and truth-tellers only 48% of the time.

But the researchers also employed widely-used behavioral reaction time tests (one of which is called the Implicit Association Test or IAT) to probe participants’ more automatic instincts towards the suspects.

Results showed that participants were more likely to unconsciously associate deception-related words (e.g. “untruthful,” dishonest,” and “deceitful”) with the suspects who were actually lying. At the same time, participants were more likely to associate truthful words (e.g. “honest” or “valid”) with the suspects who were actually telling the truth.

A second experiment confirmed these findings, providing evidence that people may have some intuitive sense, outside of conscious awareness, that detects when someone is lying.

“These results provide a new lens through which to examine social perception, and suggest that – at least in terms of detection of lies – unconscious measures may provide additional insight into interpersonal accuracy,” says ten Brinke.

Good Vibe, Bad Vibe: is Inaudible Sound Impacting the Mind?

Do you sometimes detect a bad vibe, or a good one? This intuition could be more than fantasy. Ultrasound is all around us, even if we can’t hear it with our physical ears.

A scientific study from July 2016 shows that these ultrasonic sound waves have a direct impact on neural activity. Could a continuous pulse of undetected, high frequencies be exciting, or suppressing stuff that goes in on in your head, experience or body?

“We can call to the Beloved from our hearts, but we need to be able to listen for the answer.”

Georgi

We can all recognize the sound of the dog whistle – not by its tone, but by the immediate response of our furry friends whose ears have a different range of sound from us. Yet, just because sound is not consciously heard, does that mean that we’re not affected? Could it be that clairaudience and the often decipherable logic of certain thoughts are the mind’s method to give representation to resonance that is within perception, but beneath the threshold of waking consciousness? Imagine the unanchored thought: “I am fearful”, in entering a bank. Is this thought the result of the firing of neurons according to the subtle vibration created through generations of chemical stress release in one location?

Who shall I say is calling?

Ultrasound is acoustic (sound) energy in the form of waves having a frequency above the human hearing range. The highest frequency that the human ear can detect is approximately 20 thousand cycles per second (20,000 Hz). This is where the sonic range ends, and where the ultrasonic range begins. Ultrasound is used in electronic, navigational, industrial, and security applications. It is also used in medicine to view internal organs of the body. Today, it is being pioneered to impact brain function, showing that a little inaudible sound can be a big deal in the nanoscale dimension of our neural networks.

A Technion study from June 2016 reveals a mechanism for accurate and individualized control of brain activity using ultrasonic waves: ultrasound’s waveform pattern dramatically affects interaction with neurons, and consequently, certain ultrasound patterns will have a different effect on different types of neurons.

This approach may complement or even partially replace existing brain treatments, which require surgical insertion of electrodes through the skull and are therefore inherently more risky. The ability to affect nerve cells using ultrasound waves has recently seen dramatic developments, including a demonstration of the ability to create artificial (phantom) sensations in human subjects by direct brain stimulation. However, since these are highly complex systems and phenomena, much is still unknown about them, particularly with regard to the mechanisms impact neural networks.

“A new ability to engineer ultrasound patterns that will specifically activate neuron populations.”

In a study just published in the journal eNeuro, the Technion team puts forward a unifying new theoretical foundation that explains a wide range of experimental findings in the field. Their study surprisingly concludes that the ultrasound’s waveform pattern dramatically affects its interaction with neurons, and consequently certain ultrasound patterns will have a different effect on different types of neurons. The framework they introduce also makes it possible to predict the outcome of complex interactions in realistic brain neural networks which are composed of various types of neurons.

The study is based on NICE – a bio-physical model that the research group developed to explain the effect of ultrasound waves on brain cells. According to NICE, when the ultrasonic waves interact with a cell, the cellular membrane experiences nano-scale vibrations which lead to electrical charge accumulation on the membrane:  the longer the vibrations continue, the more charge builds up in the membrane. Eventually, enough charge builds up so that an action potential is generated. The group now shows that when the ultrasonic wave is activated in short pulses, this will cause selective excitation of inhibitory cells, with the net result of suppression of the neural network activity. This is the first explanation for this suppression phenomenon, which was recently observed experimentally by researchers at Harvard University.

“Right now, the brain is still something of a closed box. Ultrasound could help to pry open that box.”

The new study may lead to breakthroughs in the field of non-invasive medical treatment of neurological diseases. “Right now, the brain is still something of a closed box,” says Prof. Shoham. “Ultrasound could help to pry open that box. Now, for example, for the first time at the Technion and in cooperation with InSightec Ltd. and Prof. Itamar Kahn of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, we are using functional MRI technology to examine the effect of ultrasound on brain activity, so that we can both excite and monitor it without recourse to electrodes and other invasive means.”

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Does Consciousness Create the Universe?

“Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.”

– John Archibald Wheeler

The beginning of time, according to quantum physics, could have come not with the big bang, but the first moment where consciousness proclaimed “NOW”. In the now, is born the past, the future, and the whole story line of cause and effect. Is consciousness fundamental to creation, and can the frequency of this “Now” rhythm speed up or slow down? If the rhythm of my “Nows” is creating my universe, then who is creating yours?

 

“Let’s assume the whole universe is a quantum system… when you take out the observer participant, you have a problem of frozen time. The universe does not evolve, it doesn’t change, nothing happens,” said Alan Wallace, expert on Tibetan Buddhism at SAND 2015.

Quantum physics has long been stunned by the measurement problem. The experimental evidence that the intrusion of the observer is actually effecting the outcome of observed phenomena between wave and particle has become as mind-boggling of the Shroedinger cat which is both dead, alive, both or neither.

The participatory universe was proposed scientifically by the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler, colleague to Einstein and Bohr. Wheeler is best known for linking the term “black hole” to objects with gravitational collapse already predicted early in the 20th century, and for coining the terms “quantum foam”, “neutron moderator”, “wormhole” and “it from bit”, and for hypothesizing the “one-electron universe”.

“The universe and the observer exist as a pair. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of the universe that ignores consciousness.”

-Andrei Linde of Stanford University

In the final decades of his life, the question that intrigued Wheeler most was: “Are life and mind irrelevant to the structure of the universe, or are they central to it?” He suggested that the nature of reality was revealed by the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics. According to the quantum theory, before the observation is made, a subatomic particle exists in several states, called a superposition (or, as Wheeler called it, a ‘smoky dragon’). Once the particle is observed, it instantaneously collapses into a single position.

Wheeler suggested that reality is created by observers and that: “no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” He coined the term “Participatory Anthropic Principle” (PAP) from the Greek “anthropos”, or human. He went further to suggest that “we are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here, but the far away and long ago.”

This claim was considered rather outlandish until his “delayed-choice experiment,” which was tested in a laboratory in 1984. This experiment was a variation on the famous “double-slit experiment” in which the dual nature of light was exposed (depending on how the experiment was measured and observed, the light behaved like a particle (a photon) or like a wave).

In Wheeler’s version, the method of detection was changed AFTER a photon had passed the double slit. The experiment showed that the path of the photon was not fixed until the physicists made their measurements. The results of this experiment, as well as another conducted in 2007, proved what Wheeler had always suspected – observers’ consciousness is required to bring the universe into existence. This means that a pre-life Earth would have existed in an undetermined state, and a pre-life universe could only exist retroactively.

“Stronger than the anthropic principle is what I might call the participatory principle,” said Wheeler, “According to it, we could not even imagine a universe that did not somewhere and for some stretch of time contain observers because the very building materials of the universe are these acts of observer-participancy. You wouldn’t have the stuff out of which to build the universe otherwise. This participatory principle takes for its foundation the absolutely central point of the quantum: no elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed (or registered) phenomenon.”

Today, most people still believe there is an external world out there. “Why should a particle out there change its behavior depending on whether you watch it or not?” asks Robert Lanza, whose Biocentric view of the universe has having a significant impact on the fundamental belief systems of 21st century science. “The particles aren’t just “out there”. Space and time are tools of our mind, they’re tools of animal understanding.”

 

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

– Max Planck