brain training perks with neuroscience & neurolingistics cutting-edge knowledge, experience and trends will improve and boost your brain health and all your learning | education | lingüistics | english as a second language | ESL | ELT | second language acquisition | learning & teaching | neuroscience | neurology | holistic methodologies | management | effective communication | liaising with clients | travelling & tourism | general news | animal protectionism | youtube curator
I prepared a summary to introduce you to this topic:
Models of consciousness aim to inspire new experimental protocols and aid interpretation of empirical evidence to reveal the structure of conscious experience. Nevertheless, no current model is univocally accepted on either theoretical or empirical grounds.
The four current and major neuroscientific theories of conscious experience are: global neuronal workspace (GNW) theory, re-entrant processing theory, predictive coding, and integrated information theory (IIT).
A fantasy is an idea with no basis in reality and is basically your imagination unrestricted by reality. Reality is the state of things as they exist. It’s what you see, hear, and experience.
Imagery and perception are the same? A large body of evidence has shown that imagery and perception can behave in strikingly similar ways. For most of us, both can produce the subjective feeling (or qualia) of ‘seeing’; however, imagery is often a weaker and fuzzier version of visual perception.
The Perky Effect describes the relationship between real visual information (perception) and mental imagery. Discovered by C. W. Perky in 1910, her experiments were able to show that visualization of images can depress the sensitivity of perception of real visual targets.
What did Perky find about projecting a faint image of a banana while participants created a mental image of a banana? Their descriptions of the mental image matched the real image.
Quanta Magazine’s coverage of biology in 2023, including important research progress into the nature of consciousness, the origins of our microbiomes and the timekeeping mechanisms that govern our lives and development. Read about more breakthroughs from 2023 at Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-bi…
00:05 The Research of Consciousness: Our minds are constantly taking in new external information while also creating their own internal imagery and narratives. How do we distinguish reality from fantasy? This year, researchers discovered that the brain has a “reality threshold” against which it constantly evaluates processed signals. – Original story with links to research papers can be found here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-it-…
04:30 Microbiomes Evolve With Us: This year, scientists provided clear evidence that the organisms in our microbiome —the collection of bacteria and other cells that live in our guts and elsewhere on our body — spread between people, especially those with whom we spend the most time. This raises the intriguing possibility that some illnesses that aren’t usually considered communicable might be. — Original story with links to research papers can be found here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/global…
08:43 How Life Keeps Time: The rate at which an embryo develops and the timing of when its tissues mature vary dramatically between species. What controls the ticking of this developmental clock that determines an animal’s final form? This year, a series of careful experiments suggest that mitochondria may very well serve dual roles as both the timekeeper and power source for complex cells. – Original story with links to research papers can be found here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-m…
Presentation by W. Kirk MacNulty, PM Reproduced here with the kind permission of Albert McClelland of WEOFM
Jul 27, 2021
Freemasonry isn’t one thing, but many, and it has always been this way. Much of this vagueness and variety stems from the fact that Freemasonry’s origins are lost in time. As ever, people see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe. Therefore, unsurprisingly, Freemasonry grew into a worldwide presence, and in this video we see how it inspired and influenced society as we know it today.
This video is episode 13 from the series The Real History of Secret Societies, presented by Richard B. Spence.
00:00 The Secret Ritual to Enter the Blue Lodge Masonry 03:24 How Do You Define a Secret Society? 05:08 The Importance of Freemason Symbolism and Terms 08:48 Similarities between Freemasonry and Illuminati 10:11 Freemasonry Link to Kabbalah 11:31 Masonic Higher Degrees and Rites 14:03 Origins of Modern Freemasonry 17:57 One of the Earliest Known Masonic Documents 18:31 Exploring the Freemason/Templar Connection 21:26 British Freemasonry Grows among Establishment 24:07 Aleister Crowley’s Masonic Roots 25:41 Annie Besant Brings Politics to Masonry 28:18 Papacy Condemns Masonry 30:35 Freemasonry Isn’t One Thing, but Manys as relaxed as possible. It’s time to cover yourself with a blanket and go to sleep.
Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience Anil Seth looks at the neuroscience of consciousness and how our biology gives rise to the unique experience of being you.
Anil provides an insight into the state-of-the-art research in the new science of consciousness. Distinguishing between conscious level, conscious content and conscious self, he describes how new experiments are shedding light on the underlying neural mechanisms in normal life as well as in neurological and psychiatric conditions.
Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He is Editor-in-Chief of Neuroscience of Consciousness and is on the steering group and advisory board of the Human Mind Project.
He has written popular science books, including 30 Second Brain, and contributes to a variety of media including the New Scientist, The Guardian, and the BBC.
Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience — and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we’re all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it “reality.” Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.
The amygdala is a collection of cells near the base of the brain. There are two, one in each hemisphere or side of the brain. This is where emotions are given meaning, remembered, and attached to associations and responses to them (emotional memories). The amygdala is considered to be part of the brain’s limbic system.
The amygdala may be best known as the part of the brain that drives the so-called “fight or flight” response. While it is often associated with the body’s fear and stress responses, it also plays a pivotal role in memory.
ego/ˈiːɡəʊ,ˈɛːɡəʊ/ noun
a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance.
for PSYCHOANALYSIS it is the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity.
for PHILOSOPHY (in metaphysics) a conscious thinking subject.
Sam Harris describes the properties of consciousness and how mindfulness practices of all stripes can be used to transcend one’s ego.
Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Mr. Harris’ writing has been published in over ten languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and holds a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, where he studied the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason.
Complete this transcript | Sam Harris:
What one of the problems we have in discussing consciousness scientifically is that consciousness is irreducibly _________. This is a point that many philosophers have made – Thomas Nagel, John Searle, David Chalmers. While I don’t agree with everything they’ve said about consciousness I agree with them on this point that consciousness is what it’s like to be you. If there’s an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system then that is ___________. And we can’t reduce the experiential side to talk of information processing and neurotransmitters and states of the ______________________in our case because – and people want to do this.
Someone like Francis Crick said famously you’re nothing but a pack of _____________. And that misses the fact that half of the reality we’re talking about is the qualitative experiential side. So when you’re trying to study human consciousness, for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become that never gives you license to throw out the first person experiential side. That would be analogous to saying that if you just flipped a coin long enough you would realize it had only one side. And now it’s true you can be committed to talking about just one side. You can say that heads being up is just a case of tails being _____________. But that doesn’t actually reduce one side of reality to the other. And to give you a more precise example, we have very strong third person “objective measures” of things like _________________and ___________________________at this moment. You bring someone into the lab, they say they’re feeling fear.
You can scan their brains with FMRI and see that their _______________response is heightened. You can measure the sweat on their palms and see that there’s an increased galvanic skin response. You can check their ____________________cortisol and see that its spiking. So these now are considered objective third person measures of fear. But if half the people came into the lab tomorrow and said they were feeling fear and showed none of these signs and they said they were completely calm when their cortisol spiked and when their palms started to sweat, these objective measures would no longer be reliable measures of fear. So the cash value of a change in physiology is still a change in the _____________person conscious side of things. And we’re inevitably going to rely on people’s ___________reports to understand whether our correlations are accurate. So the hope that we are going to talk about __________________shorn of any kind of qualitative internal experiential ________________, I think, is a false one.
So we have to understand both sides of it subjective – classically subjective and objective. I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or ________________the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its _____________________. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an _______________, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the ______________________. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re ____________the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their _____________. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an _________________.
The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a ___________________in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads. Now that sense of being a ____________, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense. There’s no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. We know that everything you _______________– your conscious emotions and thoughts and _________________and the impulses that initiate behaviour – all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain that are spread out over the whole of the brain. They can be independently erupted. We have a changing system. We are a process and there’s not one unitary self that’s carried through from one moment to the next unchanging.
And yet we feel that we have this self that’s just this centre of experience. Now it’s possible I claim and people have claimed for thousands of years to lose this feeling, to actually have the centre drop out of the experience so that you just rather than feeling like you’re on this side of things looking in as though you’re almost looking over your own _________________appropriating experience in each moment, you can just be identical to this sphere of experience that is all of the colour and light and feeling and energy of consciousness. But there’s no sense of centre there. So this is classically described as self- transcendence or ego ______________in spiritual, mystical, new age ___________________literature. It is in large measure the baby in the bathwater that religious people are afraid to throw out. It’s – if you want to take seriously the project of being like Jesus or __________________or some, you know, whatever your favourite contemplative is, self-transcendence really is at the core of the phenomenology that is described there. And what I’m saying is that it’s a real experience.
It’s clearly an experience that people can have. And while it tells you nothing about the __________________, it tells you nothing about what happened before the Big _______________. It tells you nothing about the divine origin of certain books. It doesn’t make religious dogmas any more plausible. It ____________ tell you something about the nature of human consciousness. It tells you something about the possibilities of experience but then again any experience does. You can – there’s just – people have __________________experiences. And the problem with religion is that they extrapolate – people ______________________from those experiences and make grandiose claims about the nature of the universe. But these experiences do entitle you to talk about the nature of human consciousness and it just so happens that this experience of self-transcendence ___________________link up with what we know about the mind through ____________________to form a plausible connection between science and classic mysticism, classic __________________________. Because if you lose your sense of a unitary self – if you lose your sense that there’s a permanent unchanging centre to consciousness, your experience of the world actually becomes more ________________________to the facts. It’s not a distortion of the way we think things are at the level of the brain. It’s actually – it brings your experience into closer register with how we think things are.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Dillon Fitton
Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnett syndrome — when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heart-warming detail and walks us through the biology of this under-reported phenomenon.
Francis Crick, the man who discovered DNA: Scientific Search for the Soul (excerpt) – Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove
A noted scientist discusses free will, consciousness, attention and memory and their relationship to the human nervous system. In a wide ranging discussion, Crick points out that the hypothesis that the brain is the seat of consciousness has not yet been proven.
Francis Crick, Ph.D., received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the discovery of DNA’s central role in the process of genetic reproduction. He is author of Life Itself, What Mad Pursuit and The Astonishing Hypothesis.
The Secret of Life — Discovery of DNA Structure
Fifty years ago, James Watson and Francis Crick announced to patrons in a Cambridge pub that they had just discovered the secret of life. Their discovery was that the DNA double helix explained how cells divide and develop. Yet it was not enlightened genius alone that propelled Watson and Crick toward this fundamental revelation. In addition they were building on the work of other scientists and a fortuitous (and un-acknowledged at the time) collaboration with Rosalind Franklin, a British X-Ray crystallographer, was of crucial help in this great achievement.
How we discovered DNA, by James Watson.
Nobel laureate James Watson opens TED2005 with the frank and funny story of how he and his research partner, Francis Crick, discovered the structure of DNA.
La conciencia es una estructura geométrica desde el punto de vista dinámico. El tálamo decide si la cognición existe o no, si el tálamo está activado estamos despiertos, si el tálamo está oscilando a baja frecuencia desaparecen los estados funcionales de la percepción (estamos dormidos).
Conferencia del 30 de agosto del 2007. Todos los derechos intelectuales al Doctor Rodolfo Llínas y su equipo de neurocientíficos. Derechos de producción reservados a la Universidad EAFIT de Colombia:http://envivo.eafit.edu.co/catedra/in…
En esta conferencia el doctor Llinás, Colombiano, junto con su equipo de lujo mundial, expone entre otras cosas cuáles son las bases físicas de la consciencia: os canales de calcio son la caleve; además la cura para la esquizofrenia. ¡Sí, como lo escuchan!
Importante saber que el vídeo fue tomado de la página web de ésta universidad el cual es publicó a la que yo asistí por eso desesperado quise tener el vídeo y casi no lo consigo, además, su calidad es muy mala…se ha hecho un esfuerzo enorme para tratar de que la menos pueda verse y escucharse pero la calidad no es buena…(igual que la fuente original) El contenido es tan increíble que vale la pena para los neurocientíficos, y psicólogos clínicos conocer tales descubrimientos…los invito a seguir el trabajo del doctor Llinás muy de cerca y descubrir como va esto y que nuevos avances han surgido desde este día.
brain-perks 