I certainly appreciate and support Ronit's vision. Yet I believe humans can change and transform even without the help of iphone applications. It is easy to find the reasons for human conditioned behavior in neuroscience and perhaps even some solutions. But this is not the descriptive level which is most appropriate in describing the complexity and the ultimate potential of humanity. The human mind is more than its underlying neural platform (and in 'more' I do not mean here any spooky mystical substance just more layers of complexity that are not fully accounted by neural structure and dynamics)
The minds of children and their developing worldviews is resonating with the worldview and conceptual systems of the adults around them and the cultural patterns they are exposed to. Moving to a higher level is first and foremost a conceptual revolutionary step that can and should be promoted by education for open mindedness, observation and contemplation.
Let me give one example: people understand themselves and their world in terms of the concept 'truth' which is already a few millenia old. Truths are primarily rigid constructs that promote polar absolutist views and justify negative emotions. Moreover, truth is exclusive and not inclusive; it is the root of most biases and prejudice and always selects simplistic explanations upon the complexity of real life situations. Truths promotes oneness upon pluralism and variety. Truth is worshiped and is deeply rooted in the human moral system to which it is almost sole basis. It is a trivial truism that one's truth limits one's ability to see any other truth. The damaging influence that such a concept has on our evolving worldviews cannot be overstated. Yet addressing truth or refining its understanding by addressing neural correlates is ridiculous.
This is why it is my firm belief that moving humanity to the next level is primarily a conceptual revolutionary move that might be facilitated by our growing knowledge of the human brain but not led by it. Why does so much of our political and social discourse devolve into extreme positions with little or no ability for each side to hear the other? Why are we continually reacting to conflict in the same unproductive or destructive ways? Given the multitude of challenges facing us and our planet, it's time to break this reactive and futile cycle. As Albert Einstein so eloquently observed, "A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels." The urgency of finding that "new type of thinking" cannot be overstated. |
As a psychotherapist and a human rights activist working for over twenty-five years with thousands of people on four continents, I witness these patterns of reactive behavior everywhere; and I have become intimately aware of their underlying causes. Gratefully, I have also seen our great capacity to break through these destructive patterns when provided with the necessary knowledge and tools. We can move past divisive obstructions when we become mindful of what is blocking us, and step up to the next level of our evolution -- awareness. |
Recently, neuroscientists have shed more light on our physiological mechanisms and have helped to explain why our conflicts can become so intractable. Advancements in brain scanning technology have revealed that many of our adult emotions, thoughts and actions arise from neural pathways that were created and deeply ingrained in us when we were young children. |
Ninety percent of human-brain growth occurs in the first five years of life. During this critical developmental period, life experiences determine how the millions of neurons in the human brain connect. These connections form the structure of our brains, which in turn create our minds. Hence, our early life experiences shape our minds and define our individual beliefs and values -- who we are. While genetics plays a significant role, our experiences are responsible for how the genes are expressed, because our experiences actually shape our brain structure. |
As we continue to grow, our tendency is to filter new information and experiences through our initial sets of beliefs and values. We develop patterns in our brains that determine how we perceive and respond to our world. These patterns are relatively fixed and will tend to stay that way unless and until repeated new experiences restructure the brain, and thereby change the mind. For example, if a child is raised by racist parents, his brain structure becomes wired to think and feel racism. The child's view can change, however, if he is actively exposed to tolerance. |
So how do we move forward? |
The answer lies in the brain's ability to restructure itself when consistently stimulated by new experiences. This relatively new finding has revitalized neuroscience medicine. Through implementing certain rigorous and intense physical rehabilitation practices, for example, stroke victims and those with traumatic brain injuries have been able to successfully repattern the neurons in their brains. Many patients return to optimum physical health. On the mental health side, studies on long-term meditation practices have shown that mindfulness also changes the brain's structure, shifting people to become more clear, peaceful and compassionate. |
These new findings can now be useful for all of us. By becoming more mindful, we are able to intercept our habitual thought patterns, disconnect from our emotional attachments to our points of view, objectively examine and test our views' validities in larger contexts, and override these patterns with other perspectives if necessary. The more aware we become in our daily lives, the better able we are to catch our early preprogrammed patterns and replace them with more constructive approaches to our conflicts. |
In my practice, I have experienced great success with these awareness techniques, particularly when working with warring couples. I help them to become aware, and to rewire their early childhood patterns. Breakthroughs in neuroscience have given me a deeper understanding of why my practices work, and have inspired me to create a tool that can affect these changes and reach many more people.
This tool is an iPhone application called AWARENESS, which randomly intercepts users several times a day and asks them what they are feeling in the moment; and then follows up by also asking them to document what they are doing while they are present to their emotions. Based on their answers, the app treats users to a brief video meditation exercise. This momentary interruption, repeated over time, begins to recondition the users' minds to become more aware of their emotional states and helps them release those emotions more constructively. Over time and with dedicated use, this tool can free us from our reactive patterns and helps us become more objective so that we are better able to generate new creative responses. |
Read my new post at Spacecollective Does consciousness have a shape?
It might sound a strange question at first since what immediately come to mind are the various figures of experience, of imagination, of memory and the abstract shapes of thought. All these seem to have a shape but they all appear in consciousness; none of them is consciousness itself. Paradoxically consciousness is never given, but it is always that by which anything given is given; always hidden and covered by that which it brings forth.
Read more at spacecollective.org |
Highly important approach. The key to scientific breakthroughs lays in understanding its limitations. Also, these are the limits of the human mind which are reflected. Question is whether we would be smart enough just to become progressively smarter. This, without taking into account deeper limits of any knowledge system. During the recent protest march against the Pope in London, I noticed one sign which read "I believe in science". This made no sense. The point about science is you don't have to believe in it. Perhaps the bearer of the sign meant he believed in the power of science to make him happy or fulfilled. Or perhaps he just meant he didn't believe in God. |
Nonsensical posturing about science has become commonplace. This is caused, I think, by the triumphalist tone of the wave, now abating, of popular science books started by Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Physicists used to crow they were on the verge of a "Theory of Everything", biologists said they had cracked the code of life and neuroscientists, accompanied by certain philosophers, claimed the mystery of consciousness would soon yield. |
None of these things was, or is, true. They are not true because all these problems have proved far more complex than anybody expected. But are they also not true for a more profound reason? Are they not true because they are insoluble, because the human mind is incapable of understanding the world fully? |
The physicist Russell Stannard thinks this may be the case. He believes that science will eventually come to an end, and that we are living in a "transient age of human development" in which scientific discoveries can be made. But science won't end because we know everything; it will end because we know everything we can know. |
Science, he says, may well not crack, among other things, the problems of consciousness and free will, the ultimate divisibility of space and time, and the true status of mathematics. It may not even be able to establish the existence of the world. An extreme interpretation of quantum theory says that because all we know of the world is obtained by our acts of observation, and because these determine the world we see, we cannot be sure of the existence of anything between those observations. In fact, strictly speaking, the world ceases to exist in this gap. |
This, therefore, is an anti-triumphalist book. The more of it you read, the less you discover we know. Stannard argues that there are certain to be limits to science. This raises the further question: are these ultimate limits, or just the limits of the human mind? In other words, could a superior intelligence solve the problems? That is doubly unknowable. |
Stannard makes the idea of a limited science more accessible simply by pointing out its actual rather than its conceptual limitations. He pinpoints, for example, the critical difficulty of contemporary neuroscience - that researchers must still rely on the subjective reports of its subjects to match the pictures of the brain seen with fMRI machines with mental events. "There is nothing about these physical patterns of behaviour that in [itself informs] us that they are accompanied by someone having a mental experience." Read more at www.newstatesman.com |
The subject of this year’s top microscope photo in the 36th annual Nikon Small World competition looks more like neon suspension bridges or sailboats than what it really is: mosquito heart muscle magnified 100 times.
The image, which used flourescence technology to highlight different parts of the specimen, stood out as one of the most beautiful of the entries. And it also had scientific merit as part of the photographer’s research on how mosquitoes carry and spread disease.
Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/top-20-microscope-photos-2010/?pid=402&viewall=true#ixzz12HAYRy23
2nd Place
5-day old zebrafish head (20X), Confocal
Dr. Hideo Otsuna, University of Utah Medical Center, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
Salt Lake City, Utah
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3rd Place
Zebrafish olfactory bulbs (250X), Confocal
Oliver Braubach, Department of Physiology & Biophysics, Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
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4th Place
Wasp nest (10X), Extended Depth of Field Stereomicroscopy
Riccardo Taiariol
La Spezia, SP, Italy
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5th Place
Strelitzia reginae (bird of paradise) seed (10X)
Darkfield
Viktor Sykora, Institute of Pathophysiology, First Medical Faculty, Charles University
Prague, Czech Republic
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9th Place
Ctenocephalides canis (flea) (20X)
Fluorescence
Duane Harland, AgResearch Ltd.
Lincoln, New Zealand
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10th Place
Crystallized soy sauce (16X), Reflected and Transmitted Light
Yanping Wang, Beijing Planetarium
Beijing, China
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12th Place
Juvenile bivalve mollusc, Lima sp. (10X), Darkfield
Gregory Rouse, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
La Jolla, California
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19th Place
Wistar rat retina outlining the retinal vessel network and associated communication channels (100X), Confocal
Cameron Johnson, The University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
Read more at www.wired.com |
A quantum random number generator is a kind of a computer too... but it computes something which according to our current conceptions is incomputable - that which is the result of absolutely no conceivable algorithm! If Lewis Carroll was alive he could write another book... There is a growing sense among physicists that all physical processes can be thought of in terms of the information they store and process; by some accounts information is the basic unit of existence in our cosmos. That kind of thinking has extraordinary implications: it means that reality is a kind of computation in which the basic processes at work simply chomp their way through a vast bedrock of information. |
And yet this is at odds with another of the great challenges facing modern science: understanding the nature of randomness. While information can be defined as an ordered sequence of symbols, randomness is the opposite of order, the absence of pattern. One of the basic features of true randomness is that it cannot be produced by a computer, otherwise it wouldn't be random and that sets up a mouthwatering problem. |
If all physical processes in the universe are ongoing computations, how does randomness arise? What kind of process can be responsible for its creation? Read more at www.technologyreview.com |
Recent interesting research shows that life on earth may have distinct suicidal inclinations. Human destruction of the environment is but the most recent episode. If true it has interesting implication on forming of exobiological theories, and the evolution of civilizations outside our precious planet. | their research arose one of the most influential, ground-breaking scientific ideas of the 20th century - the Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth, a nurturing "mother" of life. But is it correct? New scientific findings suggest that the nature of life on Earth is not at all like Gaia. If we were to choose a mythical mother figure to characterise the biosphere, it would more accurately be Medea, the murderous wife of Jason of the Argonauts. She was a sorceress, a princess - and a killer of her own children. |
<img src="http://content6.clipmarks.com/clog_clip_cache/amplify.com/263C950A-EE6B-46B8-B368-BFA2D5AC9DF4/63CAE951-11F9-488B-AD5D-D01F85F3D27B" alt="Toxic gases and mass extinctions mean Earth isn't always life friendly (Image: Sarah Howell)" width="300" height="225"/> |
| "The Gaia theory says that the temperature, oxidation state, acidity and certain aspects of the rocks and waters are kept constant, and that this homeostasis is maintained by active feedback processes operated automatically and unconsciously by the biota." |
| A number of recent discoveries have cast serious doubt on the Gaia hypotheses. |
This is a really fun application with huge potential | Somewhere between the harshness of reality and the fantasy of virtual reality lies the domain of Augmented Reality (AR). |
| The French company Total Immersion’s AR technology uses camera capture and 3D imaging techniques to blend surrounding and simulated environments in real-time. |
| ou’ve probably seen the videos floating around You Tube — people hold simple pieces of paper up to their web cameras and suddenly cool cars or a baseball player appear on the screen, seemingly right on top of the paper. The mash of real and virtual gives the illusion that both are occurring in the same space.Read more at singularityhub.com |
| AR videos have been making the rounds on the Internet recently in part due to their nearly seamless blending of the captured and constructed images. |
| In the short term, AR will primarily be seen in two venues: interactive marketing and extended-content media. |
Interesting article about architecture, design and the brain.
The neuroscience of design is still in its infancy, but it has its own organization, The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego, and some architecture schools now include some basic neuroscience in their curriculum. Are we on the verge of a new field of emotionally intelligent design? Here are few early findings:
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| A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects--sofas, watches, etc.--subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles. |
| A study published earlier this year in the journal Science found that we remember words and other details better when surrounded by red, and that we're more creative and imaginative in the presence of blue. |
| High-ceilinged rooms encourage you to think more freely and abstractly, she reported, and low-ceilinged rooms leads to more attention to detail. |
| clutter increases the "memorability" of a room and establishes a reassuring sense of place. |
 When it comes to the human brain, even the simplest of acts can be counter-intuitive and deceptively complicated. For example, try stretching your arm.
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| Nerves in the limb send messages back to your brain, but the subjective experience you have of stretching isn't due to these signals. |
| The feeling that you willed your arm into motion, and the realisation that you moved it at all, are both the result of an area at the back of your brain called the posterior parietal cortex. |
Dualist philosophers like Descartes believed that the mind and consciousness exist outside the physical world, producing our actions by interacting with the physical meat of our brains. The idea has become commonplace, but it's challenged by neuroscientific studies like this one, which show that the conscious intention to move emerges from electrical activity in neurons, tangible objects that are all too real.
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(CBS) 60 Minutes wondered what Richard Garwin would think of the Defense Department's appraisal.
"The experiments leave 'no doubt that anomalous, excess heat is produced,'" Pelley told Garwin.
Watch the video !
(CBS)
Twenty years ago it appeared, for a moment, that all our energy problems could be solved. It was the announcement of cold fusion - nuclear energy like that which powers the sun - but at room temperature on a table top. It promised to be cheap, limitless and clean. Cold fusion would end our dependence on the Middle East and stop those greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. It would change everything.
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"We can yield the power of nuclear physics on a tabletop. The potential is unlimited. That is the most powerful energy source known to man," researcher Michael McKubre told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.
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| McKubre is an electro-chemist who imagines, in 20 years, the creation of a clean nuclear battery. |
The same would go for cars. "The potential is for an energy source that would run your car for three, four years, for example. And you'd take it in for service every four years and they'd give you a new power supply," McKubre told Pelley.
Read more at www.cbsnews.com |
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