Telesterion - Self-Knowledge, Self-Development, Self-Observation, Enlightenment, Brain, Mind, and Consciousness. » Science

Out-Of-Body Experience Research Center study suggest alien abduction stories may be vivid dream experiences

Bill — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:55:21 +0000

Having many times had the experience of ‘contacting alien intelligences’ thru the curious methodology of astral projection training, I can certainly confirm that this kind of experience – the vivid sense of communication with “aliens” – does happen during astral projection training and so-called ‘astral travel’. I’m not claiming the experiences are true. Any close examination of teh inconsistencies of those experiences, their essential ‘oddness’, suggests that they are clearly not true in the sense that the word true is usually used. But they are vivid, stiking, strangely compelling and persistent, and seem to be something that occurs naturally and often within these types of meditative or mental training methods.

My theory? That these experiences are, like so much else, a special category of ‘simulation’ – a type of metaphor or interface.

Anyway – here’s an article about the study.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45051979/ns/technology_and_science-science/

According to lead researcher Michael Raduga, more than half the volunteers experienced at least one full or partial out-of-body experience, and seven of them were able to make contact with UFOs or extraterrestrials during these dream-like experiences.

Raduga designed the experiment to test his theory that many reports of alien encounters are actually instances of people experiencing a vibrant, lifelike state of dreaming. If he could coach people to dream a realistic alien encounter, he said, that could prove that reports of such encounters are really just a product of our imaginations.

“When people experience alien abductions in the night, they usually don’t know they are actually in REM sleep and having an out-of-body experience,” Raduga told Life’s Little Mysteries, adding than an estimated 1 million Americans have such experiences each year.

“It’s very realistic and people cannot understand how it happens. [Our study] shows that it’s not about aliens, it’s about human abilities, and it can happen to almost anyone.” [ 7 Things that Create Convincing UFO Sightings ]

Study participants were told to try to “separate from their bodies” every time they became half-awake or lucid during the night. If they were able to dream that they had separated from their sleeping bodies, they were then supposed to look for aliens in their homes. If they were unable to have an out-of-body dream experience, they were told to go back to sleep and try again later in the night.

The brain’s ability to speed up and the crisis “Slow Motion” effect as a memory phenomenon

Bill — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 01:55:59 +0000

Anyone studying brain and mind is likely to have noticed that certain things can change the speed and intensity of perception, and change the way memories of events are created and stored.

Here’s an article about this phenomenon, suggesting the the brain speeds up in times of crisis – presumably triggered by some combination of neurochemicals – to produce the “my life flashed before my eyes” and other slow motion effects of perception. The one experiment performed suggests it’s primarily a memory effect, that it is subjective not objective (primarily? or completely? further experiments needed).

Why A Brush With Death Triggers The Slow-Mo Effect

But, after a little searching, David discovered something called SCAD diving. (SCAD stands for Suspended Catch Air Device.) It’s like bungee jumping without the bungee. Imagine being dangled by a cable about 150 feet off the ground, facing up to the sky. Then, with a little metallic click, the cable is released and you plummet backward through the air, landing in a net (hopefully) about 3 seconds later.

SCAD diving was just what David needed — it was definitely terrifying. But he also needed a way to judge whether his subjects’ brains really did go into turbo mode. So, he outfitted everybody with a small electronic device, called a perceptual chronometer, which is basically a clunky wristwatch. It flashes numbers just a little too fast to see. Under normal conditions — standing around on the ground, say — the numbers are just a blur. But David figured, if his subjects’ brains were in turbo mode, they would be able to read the numbers.

The Time Blur

The falling experience was, just as David had hoped, enough to freak out all of his subjects. “We asked everyone how scary it was, on a scale from 1 to 10,” he reports, “and everyone said 10.” And all of the subjects reported a slow-motion effect while falling: they consistently over-estimated the time it took to fall. The numbers on the perceptual chronometer? They remained an unreadable blur.

“Turns out, when you’re falling you don’t actually see in slow motion. It’s not equivalent to the way a slow-motion camera would work,” David says. “It’s something more interesting than that.”

According to David, it’s all about memory, not turbo perception. “Normally, our memories are like sieves,” he says. “We’re not writing down most of what’s passing through our system.” Think about walking down a crowded street: You see a lot of faces, street signs, all kinds of stimuli. Most of this, though, never becomes a part of your memory. But if a car suddenly swerves and heads straight for you, your memory shifts gears. Now it’s writing down everything — every cloud, every piece of dirt, every little fleeting thought, anything that might be useful.

Because of this, David believes, you accumulate a tremendous amount of memory in an unusually short amount of time. The slow-motion effect may be your brain’s way of making sense of all this extra information. “When you read that back out,” David says, “the experience feels like it must have taken a very long time.” But really, in a crisis situation, you’re getting a peek into all the pictures and smells and thoughts that usually just pass through your brain and float away, forgotten forever.

CO2 (carbon dioxide) in bloodstream possible cause of Near Death Experience vision content

Bill — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:34:04 +0000

Death, the contemplation and confrontation of death, the implications of death, and coping with the experience of death of loved ones and the shock of possible death for oneself, is the major impetus for esoteric and spiritual thinking and philosophy building.

That is, death is the origin of religions, and death is the origin of esoteric systems.

Death is the great question, and the great puzzle.

And the near death experience is arguably the origin of much of the content and world models of religion and esotericism.

So, it’s relevant to we explorers to consider how the near death experience works.

National geographic recently posted an article that basically restates and provides a bit of popular literature supporting an old theory, which is that the characteristic content of the NDE, visions of light, the sense of meetings with beings, tunnels, and the like may be caused or supported by a higher concentration of CO2 in the bloodstream, and presumably by a change in the oxygen/CO2 balance.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100408-near-death-experiences-blood-carbon-dioxide/

James Owen

for National Geographic News

Published April 8, 2010

Near-death experiences are tricks of the mind triggered by an overload of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream, a new study suggests.

Many people who have recovered from life-threatening injuries have said they experienced their lives flashing before their eyes, saw bright lights, left their bodies, or encountered angels or dead loved ones.

In the new study, researchers investigated whether different levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide—the main blood gases—play a role in the mysterious phenomenon.

The team studied 52 heart attack patients who had been admitted to three major hospitals and were eventually resuscitated. Eleven of the patients reported near-death experiences.

During cardiac arrest and resuscitation, blood gases such as CO2 rise or fall because of the lack of circulation and breathing.

“We found that in those patients who experienced the phenomenon, blood carbon-dioxide levels were significantly higher than in those who did not,” said team member Zalika Klemenc-Ketis, of the University of Maribor in Slovenia.

CO2 Only Common Factor in Near-Death Experiences

Other factors, such a patient’s sex, age, or religious beliefs—or the time it took to revive them—had no bearing on whether the patients reported near-death experiences.

The drugs used during initial treatment—a suggested explanation for near-death experiences after heart attacks—also didn’t seem to correlate with the sensations, according to the study authors.

How carbon dioxide might actually interact with the brain to produce near-death sensations was beyond the scope of the study, so for now “the exact pathophysiological mechanism for this is not known,” Klemenc-Ketis said.

However, people who have inhaled excess carbon dioxide or have been at high altitudes, which can raise the blood’s CO2 concentrations, have been known to have sensations similar to near-death experiences, she said. (Related: “High-Altitude Suits Keep Pressure on Pilots.”)

A Glimpse of the Afterlife?

The study is among the first to find a direct link between carbon dioxide in the blood and near-death experiences, or NDEs, said Christopher French, a psychologist at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit of the University of London, who was not involved in the new research.

The hospital study bolsters previous lab work done in the 1950s that found “the effects of hypercarbia [abnormally high levels of CO2 in the blood] were very similar to what we would now recognise as NDEs,” French said in an email.

The research also supports the argument that anything that disinhibits the brain—damages the brain’s ability to manage impulses—can produce near-death sensations, he said. Physical brain injury, drugs, and delirium have all been associated with a disinhibited state, and CO2 overload is another potential trigger.

Still, not all scientists are convinced: “The one difficulty in arguing that CO2 is the cause is that in cardiac arrests, everybody has high CO2 but only 10 percent have NDEs,” said neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick of the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London.

What’s more, in heart attack patients, Fenwick said, “there is no coherent cerebral activity which could support consciousness, let alone an experience with the clarity of an NDE.”

A model like this, incidentally, may OR may not invalidate the content.

And one thing is certain – the NDE has a huge impact on those that experience it.

But, we explorers have to be open to new information and new models, so it’s important to keep in mind that the content of the NDE could easily have a physiological and chemical origin.

Consciousness is chemical, or at the very least, has a very large and significant chemical component – this is the great unacknowledged lesson of the human onsession with the large array of psychoactive drugs, including those produced by the huge anti-depression and anti-anxiety pharmaceutical industry, those produced by the legal inebriant industries (alcohol, tobacco, and other legal inebriants around the planet), the pleasure drugs of the illegal inebriant industry, and especially of the psychedelics.

Mineral of the Day – natural structures of crystals

Bill — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 06:20:23 +0000

The Mineral of the Day

Because I think these have a real beauty to them.

Much of human history, and the power of himans, comes from our relationship to minerals. Using stones as colors, hammers, grinders, scrapers, and eventually sophisticated flint blade technology, the paleo and neolithic cultures. Clay and ceramcs, the chalcolithic cultures. Then metals, gold, silver, copper, bronze, iron, and steel. Then the fossil carbon cultures, coal, and now oil – our root culture. And now the new silicon and rare elements technology of the digital culture.

Humans are what we are, because we have mined the earth and transformed minerals into new forms and into energy.

And, they’re beautiful, too

“If you name your emotions, you can tame them”

Bill — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 02:29:08 +0000

I thought this was an interesting little article. I have a great deal of hope and anticipation about what this kind of brain imaging can tell us about brain and mind.

Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works

“If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.

Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain’s emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”

Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don’t know why it works.

UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, which scan the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given moment.

They asked the subjects to look at pictures of male or female faces making emotional expressions….”.

…

“In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires to determine how “mindful” they are.

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions. ”

Nice 3D chart of 2000 nearby stars

Bill — Mon, 07 May 2007 07:59:27 +0000

A flash tool to look up some information about nearby stars.

ExtraSolar – chart of nearby stars, including most of the discovered extrasolar planets.

Is The Universe Made Of Exotic Matter?

Bill — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 23:12:22 +0000

Recent experiments seem to prove a radical new theory of what matter and particles are, a new model hinted at by an experiment performed twenty years ago – and as it turns out, not only may this new “exotic matter” be what the universe is really made of, we may have found it naturally occuring here on the Earth.

And it may be the solution for practical quantum computing and memory – wow…

Why do I mention this in a blog devoted to self-development, consciousness, and the “spiritual” quest? Because this is an example of model change, paradigm shift, in action, in the hardest of sciences (physics).

Self-development and the exploration of consciousness is also undergoing a model change – but it’s happening much more slowly, and is fraught with a lot of emotional distress and mis-steps.

So, I mention this New Scientist article because (1) exotic matter is just cool, and (2) explorers of consciousness need to be aware of, and to study, model changes and paradigm shifts.

New Scientist article – “The universe is a string-net liquid”

“From this, the researchers made another leap. Could the entire universe be modelled in a similar way? “Suddenly we realised, maybe the vacuum of our whole universe is a string-net liquid,” says Wen. “It would provide a unified explanation of how both light and matter arise.” So in their theory elementary particles are not the fundamental building blocks of matter. Instead, they emerge from the deeper structure of the non-empty vacuum of space-time.

“Wen and Levin’s theory is really beautiful stuff,” says Michael Freedman, 1986 winner of the Fields medal, the highest prize in mathematics, and a quantum computing specialist at Microsoft Station Q at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “I admire their approach, which is to be suspicious of anything – electrons, photons, Maxwell’s equations – that everyone else accepts as fundamental.”

Other theories that try to explain the same phenomena abound, of course; Wen and Levin realise that the burden of proof is on them. It may not be far off. Their model predicts specific arrangements of atoms in the new state of matter, which they dub the “string-net liquid”, and Joel Helton’s group at MIT might have found it.

Helton was aware of Wen’s work and decided to look for such materials. Trawling through geology journals, his team spotted a candidate – a dark green crystal that geologists stumbled across in the mountains of Chile in 1972. “The geologists named it after a mineralogist they really admired, Herbert Smith, labelled it and put it to one side,” says team member Young Lee. “They didn’t realise the potential herbertsmithite would have for physicists years later.”

Herbertsmithite (pictured) is unusual because its electrons are arranged in a triangular lattice. Normally, electrons prefer to line up so that their spins are in the opposite direction to that of their immediate neighbours, but in a triangle this is impossible – there will always be neighbouring electrons spinning in the same direction. Wen and Levin’s model shows that such a system would be a string-net liquid.

Although herbertsmithite exists in nature, the mineral contains impurities that disrupt any string-net signatures, says Lee. So Helton’s team made a pure sample in the lab. “It was painstaking,” says Lee. “It took us a full year to prepare it and another year to analyse it.”"

Biocentrism as a New Model and Possible Unified Theory

Bill — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 22:16:42 +0000

Why do we live in a universe that seems so perfectly constructed to allow us, that is, conscious lifeforms, we humans, to exist?

(I’m sure my readers are familiar with the idea, popular in modern cosmology, that we exist in such a universe because such a universe is required for us to exist. That is, that there may have existed or exist now [possibly] countless numbers of universes that don’t/didn’t have the required “laws of nature” [laws of physics] that allow us to be alive and conscious, but since we can only exist in a universe which allows us to exist, inevitably we find ourselves in a universe that seems miraculously constructed to allow our existence.)

A new article recently written by an odd source, Robert Lanza, a businessman in cell research, is bringing this question into the public debate. (And it’s got some ideas that seem to me to be important for consciousness research and self-development as well…)

Robert Lanza suggests a new model of physics, one that recognizes that our physics is “our physics”, that we have to recognize that our biology shapes our understanding of the physics of this universe.

I love this sentence from Lanza – “Space and time are not objects or things — they are forms of animal sense perception.”.

American Scholar article by Robert Lanza – “A New Theory of the Universe – Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation”

“…life has taught us that time and space are external and eternal realities. They bound all experiences and are more fundamental than life itself. They are above and beyond human experience.

As animals, we are organized, wired, to think this way. We use dates and places to define our experiences to ourselves and to others. History describes the past by placing people and events in time and space. Scientific theories of the big bang, geology, and evolution are steeped in the logic of time and space. They are essential to our every movement and moment. To place ourselves as the creators of time and space, not as the subjects of it, goes against our common sense, life experience, and education. It takes a radical shift of perspective for any of us to entertain the idea that space and time are animal sense perceptions, because the implications are so startling.

Yet we all know that space and time are not things—objects that you can see, feel, taste, touch, or smell. They are intangible, like gravity. In fact they are modes of interpretation and understanding, part of the animal logic that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.

We live on the edge of time, where tomorrow hasn’t happened yet. Everything before this moment is part of the history of the universe, gone forever. Or so we believe.

Think for a minute about time flowing forward into the future and how extraordinary it is that we are here, alive on the edge of all time. Imagine all the days and hours that have passed since the beginning of time. Now stack them like chairs on top of each other, and seat yourself on the very top. Science has no real explanation for why we’re here, for why we exist now. According to the current physiocentric worldview, it’s just an accident, a one-in-a-gazillion chance that I am here and that you are there. The statistical probability of being on top of time or infinity is so small as to be meaningless. Yet this is generally how the human mind conceives time.”

Wired’s Interview with Robert Lanza

“Lanza: Of course they should be funded. I don’t think that everything should be changed. What I am saying is that there is a missing piece to the puzzle of how the universe works. The answer is biology. It is as simple as that. The biological picture of space and time must be integrated into our understanding of physics.

WN: Why do you think that there is such a deep misunderstanding of what time and space really are?

Lanza: Our minds are structured to think that way. Even Einstein avoided the question of what space and time are. He simply defined them as what we measure with clocks and measuring-rods. However, the emphasis should be on the “we,” not the measuring.

WN: Do you expect that some people will read your article and think you mean that they can sit on a mountaintop and meditate to change the world around them with mind powers?

Lanza: We can’t decide that we want to jump off the roof and not get hurt. However much we want, we can’t violate the rules of spatiotemporal logic.

WN: In your article, you make the assertion that time and space do not exist. What do you mean by that?

Lanza: There is something very unusual about them. We can’t put them in a marmalade jar and take them back to the lab for analysis. Space and time are forms of animal sense perception. Space and time are not objects or things — they are forms of animal sense perception.”