New sarticles about developments in neuroscience (and “neuroculture”) from Slate magazine –

“How Smart Is Grandpa?: How much can you expect from a septuagenarian brain?” by Michelle Tsai. Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007.

“Cells That Read Minds?: What the myth of mirror neurons gets wrong about the human brain,” by Alison Gopnik. Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007.

“God Is in the Dendrites: Can ‘neurotheology’ bridge the gap between religion and science?” By George Johnson. Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007.

“Spirit Tech: How to wire your brain for religious ecstasy,” by John Horgan. Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007.

“Train Your Brain: The new mania for neuroplasticity,” by Meghan O’Rourke. Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007.

“Ginkgo Biloba? Forget About It.: A history of the top-selling brain enhancer,” by Brendan I. Koerner. Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007.

“Brain Lessons: Steven Pinker, Oliver Sacks, and others on how learning about their brains changed the way they live.” Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007.

“Best of the Brain: The five biggest neuroscience developments of the year,” by William Saletan. Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007.

“Brain-Gym Showdown: Can a Slate reporter hold his own at the local neurobics club?” by Max Linsky. Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007.

brains!: A special issue on neuroscience and neuroculture.

BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work.

If you have ever written about using psychedelics, you may be denied entry (or rentry?) into the United States

“Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to the Blaine border crossing last summer as he had hundreds of times in his career. At 66, his gray hair, neat beard, and rimless glasses give him the look of a seasoned intellectual. He handed his passport to the U.S. border guard and relaxed, thinking he would soon be with an old friend in Seattle. The border guard turned to his computer and googled “Andrew Feldmar.”

The psychotherapist’s world was about to turn upside down.

The Blaine border guard explained that Feldmar had been pulled out of the line as part of a random search. He seemed friendly, even as he took away Feldmar’s passport and car keys. While the contents of his car were being searched, Feldmar and the officer talked. He asked Feldmar what profession he was in.

When Feldmar said he was psychologist, the official typed his name into his Internet search engine. Before long the customs guard was engrossed in an article Feldmar had published in the spring 2001 issue of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used hallucinogenics as a “path” to understanding self and that in certain cases, he reflected, it could “be preferable to psychiatry.” Everything seemed to collapse around him, as a quiet day crossing the border began to turn into a nightmare.”

Visit bibliodyssey to see larger versions of this image and others… Bibliodyssey page on the Kalighat Pictures of Indian Gods

This is what the Voynich Manuscript is – a mysterious book, now believed to be a forgery created by John Dee to swindle a king out of $50,000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

An older scientific american article By Gordon Rugg showing a method by which the VM might have been created by Edward Kelly (made famous by John Dee) using a fairly simple coding technique that creates gibberish that looks like language.
Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

“The Cardan grille method therefore appears to be a mechanism by which the Voynich manuscript could have been created. My reconstructions suggest that one person could have produced the manuscript, including the illustrations, in just three or four months. But a crucial question remains: Does the manuscript contain only meaningless gibberish or a coded message? ”

Here’s a report about a recent statistical analysis that seems to comfirm that the book is gibberish intended to look like a language:
Another chapter in the story of the world’s most mysterious book.

“A breakthrough comes with the publication in Cryptologia this April of an article by Austrian researcher Dr Andreas Schinner (who) analysed the text of the manuscript using specialist statistics capable of handling quasi-stochastic distributions, and found that the manuscript’s statistical properties were consistent with a hoax consisting of meaningless gibberish produced using Rugg’s method or a similar quasi-random method.

This does not prove that the manuscript is a hoax, but it strongly suggests that the hoax theory is correct. If there is meaningful coded material in the manuscript, then either:

1 there is only a small amount, surrounded by large amounts of meaningless padding – otherwise the statistics would have come out differently, or

2 if there is a large amount of meaningful coded material, then it must have been encoded using a method which just happens to produce the same statistical properties as a quasi-random gibberish generator. ”

Why is this worthy of note? It’s worth being reminded that fascinating (and the Voynich has been consdiered fascinating for many years) does not mean true, and may often mean one is dealing with mistakes, misunderstandings, or deliberate deception.

—

MORE: Here’s a Flickr of the complete Voynich Manuscript.

Remembering U.G. Krishnamurti

“In 1939, when UG was 21 years of age, he went and met Sri Ramana Maharshi and asked him, ‘This thing called moksha, can you give it to me?’ Ramana reply, ‘I can give it, but can you take it?’ struck him like a ‘thunderbolt’ and set him up on a relentless search for truth that ended at the age of 49 with a totally unforeseen result.”

A totally unforseen result. That’s useful to remember.

More discussion of good old UG here. UG Krishnamurti, one of my favorite “enlightened dudes”, has died. “Thinker and philosopher U.G. Krishnamurti, 89, died at Vallecrosia, Italy, on Thursday” (March 28, 2007)

With thanks to http://guruphiliac.blogspot.com/

An interesting mp3, if you have the time, can be downloaded at RU Sirius’s website. There’s a few minutes of extraneous stuff at the beginning. It does kind of give you a sense of Jody’s take on this whole business. Some interesting descriptions of several gurus, mostly concentrating on their obvious flaws.

Nothing revolutionary, but I ended up enjoying it. If you occasionally find guruphiliac valuable, you’ll probably like this podcast.

I did think his description of enlightenment could have been stronger. One interviewer comments, “I’m a little skeptical about wether there is really anything to teach, but then, you believe in enlightenment…”. Jody says, “But you can’t teach it, tho. (refering to enlightenment) … It is completely outside the realm of intellectual discourse, or emotional experience. It’s not a thought, feeling, or sensation of any kind. But it is a special kind of knowledge, a special kind of understanding, that can exist in the context of a persons life.”.

Which is all true enough, and a good choice of a description for an internet radio show, but it certainly makes one think about how hard it is to try to simply describe and discuss even the idea of enlightenment. Much less the aspects of the enlightenment thing that are outside of the realm of language.

My favorite quote, referring to one of the currently semi-famous gurus that were being discussed: “… (a) factory spewing clouds of occluding nonsense about self realization … because … people come to think “When I get enlightened, I’m going to become this Shakti-spewing God or Goddess able to give people spiritual experiences by hugging them or looking at them or touching their forehead.” … none of that has anything to do with self realization.” (according to vedanta, Jody adds.)

Jody Radzik of Guruphiliac Interviewed by RU Sirius – the mp3 is on this page.

guruphiliac

Doug Hofstadter of “Godel, Escher, Bach” fame has a new book about consciousness. I’ve not read it, I’m just referencing this review of it, which was rather low on actual detail. I found the mention of the death by brain tumor of Hofstadter’s love touching – it’s interesting how grief magnifies and shapes the consideration of the question of consciousness.

Scientific American review of “I AM A STRANGE LOOP”, the new book on consciousness by Douglas R. Hofstadter

“Think of your eyes as that video camera, but with a significant upgrade: a mechanism, the brain, that not only registers images but abstracts them, arranging and constantly rearranging the data into mental structures–symbols, Hofstadter calls them–that stand as proxies for the exterior world. Along with your models of things and places are symbols for each of your friends, family members and colleagues, some so rich that the people almost live in your head.

Among this library of simulations there is naturally one of yourself, and that is where the strangeness begins.
“You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated ‘you’ makes more decisions, and so forth, round and round,” Hofstadter writes. What blossoms from the Gödelian vortex–this symbol system with the power to represent itself–is the “anatomically invisible, terribly murky thing called I.” A self, or, to use the name he favors, a soul.

It need know nothing of neurons. Sealed off from the biological substrate, the actors in the internal drama are not things like “serotonin” or “synapse” or even “cerebrum,” “hippocampus” or “cerebellum” but abstractions with names like “love,” “jealousy,” “hope” and “regret.”

And that is what leads to the grand illusion. “In the soft, ethereal, neurology-free world of these players,” the author writes, “the typical human brain perceives its very own ‘I’ as a pusher and a mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad infinitesimal entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among them.”

From New Scientist – one of the better science email newsletters, incidentally:

Ecstasy really does unleash the love hormone

“Clubbers who take the “love drug” ecstasy really might be “loved up”. Studies in rats suggest the drug causes a brain surge of oxytocin – the hormone that helps bond couples, as well as mothers to their babies.

Earlier research found increased oxytocin in the blood of people who had taken ecstasy. However, many drugs increase blood oxytocin without raising it in the brain – something thought necessary for any “pro-social” effects.

Iain McGregor at the University of Sydney in Australia, and his colleagues studied the effects of ecstasy in rats, which, like people, become more sociable on the drug. “It’s very characteristic behaviour. They lie next to each other and chill out,” McGregor says.

The team gave the rats the equivalent of two to three ecstasy tablets in an adult human and found that the drug activated oxytocin-containing neurons in an area of their brains called the hypothalamus. When they gave the rats a drug that blocked brain receptors for oxytocin, the increased sociability almost disappeared.

Why it didn’t disappear entirely isn’t clear. It could be that the dose of the receptor blocker was too low, or that other brain chemicals, such as dopamine, are also involved in triggering the sociable behaviour, McGregor says.”

This is a fairly shallow article, mostly interesting because it appears on the CNN website.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/04/04/neurotheology/index.html

“”When we think of religious and spiritual beliefs and practices, we see a tremendous similarity across practices and across traditions.”

The frontal lobe, the area right behind our foreheads, helps us focus our attention in prayer and meditation.

The parietal lobe, located near the backs of our skulls, is the seat of our sensory information. Newberg says it’s involved in that feeling of becoming part of something greater than oneself.

The limbic system, nestled deep in the center, regulates our emotions and is responsible for feelings of awe and joy.

Newberg calls religion the great equalizer and points out that similar areas of the brain are affected during prayer and meditation. Newberg suggests that these brain scans may provide proof that our brains are built to believe in God. He says there may be universal features of the human mind that actually make it easier for us to believe in a higher power.

Interestingly enough, devout believers and atheists alike point to the brain scans as proof of their own ideas.”

What’s “memory-prediction framework”? Well, to oversimplify it, it suggests that the brain takes in information from the senses, compares it to memories of past experiences, and then tries to simulate, or imagine, likely future experiences. Sounds pretty obvious I suppose, but like a lot of things about the brain, it’s not well understood.

Jeff Hawkins, the fellow who started the Palm Pilot company (and a few others), thinks it may be the key to developing artificial intellengence. Or at least a better understanding of intelligence.

The language in these articles is pretty dense and jargonized, so be warned.

the wiki on Jeff Hawkins’ book and theories on artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and the brain.

“Hawkins’ basic idea is that the brain is a mechanism to predict the future… Perhaps not always far in the future, but far enough to be of real use to an organism.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory-prediction_framework

an excerpt from the On Intelligence book

and the On Intelligence website