Tag Archives: brain

Evolution of the Brain

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The Evolution of the Brain and the Mind

neurons.jpg 

The following is excerpted from Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment, by David Perlmutter, FACN, and Alberto Villoldo, PhD,  published by Hay House.

Thousands of years ago, our ancestors faced a neurological opportunity similar to the one we face today, an opportunity that facilitated an evolutionary leap forward. With the awakening of the neocortex, our forebears acquired a new brain structure that nature had wired for joy, creativity, and innovation.

To access that potential, our ancestors required specific nutrients to provide fuel to run their neurocomputer. Once they added brain-enriching foods to their diet, the faculties of certain individuals, the visionaries of their day, came online and began to create great works of art, devise written language, establish civilizations, and lay the foundations for our modern human experience.

During this time, ancestral shamans described Creation as a web of life in which we are all interconnected. This was a kind of Indra’s Net, which the mythology of ancient India describes as a web with an infinite number of intersecting strands and a precious jewel at the intersection of every strand. Each of the infinite number of jewels reflects every other jewel perfectly. Within this mythical net, all beings are interrelated, and all of our actions, no matter how slight, affect everyone else. Within this net, prophets converse with God and interpret His will, while mystics search for the elixir of immortality and alchemists attempt to transform lead into gold. These sages, mystics, and alchemists shared the same preoccupations as seers of today. They asked, as we do now: How can we live long and healthy lives, unaffected by debilitating illness and degenerative brain disease? How can we turn the dense lead of human suffering into the gold of enlightened consciousness?

to read more, go to:    http://www.realitysandwich.com/evolution_brain_mind

Internet Searches Affect Memory Patterns

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Is Google Messing with Your Mind? Search Alters Memory Patterns

Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 14 July 2011 Time: 02:00 PM ET
computer, internet, google, yahoo, search engine
Search engines are making people more likely to rely on computers to “remember” things for them, computers and online search engines have become a kind of external memory system that can be accessed at will — and that human memory is adapting to it.
CREDIT: Simon Cataudo

Whether the Internet is making us smarter or stupider may be up for debate, but new research shows that search engines are changing the way we learn and remember things.

People are using the Internet as an external “expert” to be accessed at will. This phenomenon, called transactive memory, isn’t new; it’s been around as long as humans have communicated. We’ve always relied on experts within our group (which used to be other humans) and, with the invention of the printing press, stored information in books. In those cases, we had to remember only who or what held the information.

to read more, go to:    http://www.livescience.com/15044-internet-google-influence-learning-memory.html

Shakespeare-A Pot Head???

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Could Shakespeare’s Bones Tell Us if He Smoked Pot?

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 27 June 2011 Time: 04:36 PM ET
Shakespeare Tomb
Shakespeare’s final resting place in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.
CREDIT: David Jones, Flickr

A South African anthropologist has asked permission to open the graves of William Shakespeare and his family to determine, among other things, what killed the Bard and whether his poems and plays may have been composed under the influence of marijuana.

But while Shakespeare’s skeleton could reveal clues about his health and death, the question of the man’s drug use depends on the presence of hair, fingernails or toenails in the grave, said Francis Thackeray, the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, who floated the proposal to the Church of England.

Thackeray conducted a study in 2001, which found evidence of marijuana residueon pipe fragments found in Shakespeare’s garden.

to read more, go to:   http://www.livescience.com/14797-shakespeare-bones-smoked-pot.html

Can your Physics Teacher Do This?

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Video Lectures

Photo of Prof. Lewin swinging on a pendulum.

Professor Walter Lewin demonstrates that the period of a pendulum is independent of the mass hanging from the pendulum. This demonstration can be viewed on the video of Lecture 10. (Image courtesy of Markos Hankin, Physics Department Lecture Demonstration Group).

to see the lecture, etc. go to:    http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-classical-mechanics-fall-1999/video-lectures/

 

Take A Breather

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Things are hectic and crazy these days.  There seems little prospect of this changing.  Our job is to deal, to cope, perhaps even to overcome.  In order to do this, we need to be in contact with WHO we are as much as possible.

The good thing about being in contact with our WHO is that we have a sense of our own worth and our own power. What we choose to so with that is our own stuff.

Under any circumstances, there is no judgement here. Rather, I am offering a suggestion for a way to make through the day with a little less stress.  It is an easy method, but as we learn from reading Taoism, the small stuff is generally the hardest.  We are conditioned to complicate.  To find reasons, to find motives to make observations.  What if you just needed one.  Hmm, not very… democratic?

Well, enough of that.  I have a small exercise (no huffing and puffing required) that, if used on a daily basis, can bring a bit of peace into the day.

Take a minute out of every hour of the day to center.  (If you are awake fourteen hours, that is fourteen minutes.  Not bad.) Just put everything down.  Close your eyes or perhaps focus your eyes on a peaceful picture.  Take two deep breaths.  See all the stuff just rolling off of you.  It can puddle at your feet.  You can send down into whatever is below you.  Feel how great it is to let things go for a bit. Watch it as it goes.  Then see a great white, shining light come down and flow through your body.  Renewing your energy.  Re-establishing WHO you are in your core self.  When it has fully engulfed you, go to your heart center, take two deep breaths. Add a bit of gratitude, a Namaste, whatever, and come back to where you were.

The end.  A one minute vacation to the center of it all.

Ayahuascan Experience

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Peru: Hell and Back—Video Exclusive
Deep in the Amazon jungle, writer Kira Salak tests ayahuasca, a shamanistic medicinal ritual, and finds a terrifying—but enlightening—world within.
Photo: An ayahuasca ceremony in Peru
INTO THE LIGHT: Shamans (from left) Hamilton Souther, Julio Gerena Pinedo, and Alberto Torres Davila preside over an ayahuasca ceremony in the Peruvian Amazon. Drawn by the prospect of life-changing visions, visitors come from around the world to take part.
For centuries, Amazonian shamans have used ayahuasca as a window into the soul. The sacrament, they claim, can cure any illness. The author joins in this ancient ritual and finds the worlds within more terrifying—and enlightening—than ever imagined.

I will never forget what it was like. The overwhelming misery. The certainty of never-ending suffering. No one to help you, no way to escape. Everywhere I looked: darkness so thick that the idea of light seemed inconceivable.

to read more and see the video, go to:    http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0603/features/peru.html

Creation and Thinking

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Can Thoughts Make Things Happen?

Posted: 06/10/11 09:01 AM ET
by Peter Baksa, Author – The Point of Power

As a pragmatic truth-seeking philosopher, I was very skeptical when I first encountered the Law of Attraction (LOA). Many things I’ve seen really stretch my credulity. But the more I think about it, the more I see nuggets underneath the hype that make sense to me, if reformulated a bit. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Buddha was a Law of Attraction proponent, I do think there is some common ground to be found between the two.

We create our world through our thoughts. Max Plank, Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking all seem to agree that the universe/god is actually a set of laws and principles that we can count on to create our world. Steven Hawking and Richard Feynman both speak in terms of M Theory and String Theory to further postulate how thoughts become matter. Our minds are essentially idea machines that refine our thoughts into electrical impulses which communicate with the same source energy that creates everything from nothing.

To read more, check out:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-baksa/law-of-attraction_b_873666.html

 

Consciousness & The Brain

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Does Our Brain Really Create Consciousness?

by Peter Russell, Physicist & Author

Western science has had remarkable success in explaining the functioning of the material world, but when it comes to the inner world of the mind, it has very little to say. And when it comes to consciousness itself, science falls curiously silent. There is nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that can account for our having an interior world. In a strange way, scientists would be much happier if minds did not exist. Yet without minds there would be no science.
This ever-present paradox may be pushing Western science into what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift–a fundamental change in worldview.

This process begins when the prevalent paradigm encounters an anomaly — an observation that the current worldview can’t explain. As far as the today’s scientific paradigm is concerned, consciousness is certainly one big anomaly. It is the most obvious fact of life: the fact that we are aware and experience an internal world of images, sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Yet there is nothing more difficult to explain. It is easier to explain how the universe evolved from the Big Bang to human beings than it is to explain why any of us should ever have a single inner experience. How does all that electro-chemical activity in the physical matter of the brain ever give rise to conscious experience? Why doesn’t it all just go on in the dark?

to read more go to:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-russell/brain-consciousness_b_873595.html

 

Mirror Neurons

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Curious Phenomena:

frhttp://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/m/mirror_neuron.htm

A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal.

Thus the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself performing the action.

These neurons have been observed in primates, including humans, and in some birds.

In humans, they have been found in Broca’s area and the inferior parietal cortex of the brain.

Some scientists consider mirror neurons one of the most important findings of neuroscience in the last decade.