Merkabah

[Skarekrow]

Here is the kind of shit the pharmaceutical companies are pulling recently….
This is the standard treatment for toxoplasmosis that AIDS patients, cancer patients, or immune suppressed patients are susceptible to catching. People WILL DIE as a direct result of this company’s greed.
There is no other description but pure greed…they cannot make the R&D claims the other guys make when this drug has been around for 62 years already!
The Karma is gonna hurt.


A Huge Overnight Increase in a Drug’s Price Raises Protests

By: Andrew Pollack
The New York Times
Sunday, September 20, 2015

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.

The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager.
Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?” said Dr. Judith Aberg, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

She said the price increase could force hospitals to use “alternative therapies that may not have the same efficacy.”
Turing’s price increase is not an isolated example.

While most of the attention on pharmaceutical prices has been on new drugs for diseases like cancer, hepatitis C and high cholesterol, there is also growing concern about huge price increases on older drugs, some of them generic, that have long been mainstays of treatment.

 

[Kgal]

Here is the kind of shit the pharmaceutical companies are pulling recently….
This is the standard treatment for toxoplasmosis that AIDS patients, cancer patients, or immune suppressed patients are susceptible to catching. People WILL DIE as a direct result of this company’s greed.
There is no other description but pure greed…they cannot make the R&D claims the other guys make when this drug has been around for 62 years already!
The Karma is gonna hurt.


A Huge Overnight Increase in a Drug’s Price Raises Protests

By: Andrew Pollack
The New York Times
Sunday, September 20, 2015

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.

The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager.
Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?” said Dr. Judith Aberg, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

She said the price increase could force hospitals to use “alternative therapies that may not have the same efficacy.”
Turing’s price increase is not an isolated example.

While most of the attention on pharmaceutical prices has been on new drugs for diseases like cancer, hepatitis C and high cholesterol, there is also growing concern about huge price increases on older drugs, some of them generic, that have long been mainstays of treatment.

This made me wonder about motives for taking this extreme move...and I'm totally discounting making more money as one of them. Such drastic increases would make less money rather than more....so...it makes me wonder.

Let's see... I found the drug is commonly associated with malaria and toxoplasmosis.

"Up to half of the world's population is infected with toxoplasmosis.[SUP][8][/SUP] In the United States about 23% are affected[SUP][9][/SUP] and in some areas of the world this is up to 95%.[SUP][1][/SUP] About 200,000 cases of congenital toxoplasmosis occur a year.[SUP][10][/SUP] Charles Nicolle and Louis Manceaux first described the organism in 1908. In 1941 transmission during pregnancy from a mother to a child was confirmed.[SUP][11]"


If you wanted to kill off a population by denying or limiting them health care - how would you do it? This is one way of obtaining the same result while doing it legally.
I wonder which areas of the world have up to 95% infection rate....
Also - I let my intuition take a look at the picture of the owner...and he looks like someone who can be bought.

Then I saw this later on in the article:

[/SUP]"Doxycycline, an antibiotic, went from $20 a bottle in October 2013 to $1,849 by April 2014, according to the two lawmakers."

2 separate drugs known for a long time to be effective at curing infections - suddenly made completely unavailable from a financial perspective to the majority of the people on this planet.
So you gotta ask your self... what do they think they know....that the rest of the world does not?

 

[Skarekrow]

This made me wonder about motives for taking this extreme move...and I'm totally discounting making more money as one of them. Such drastic increases would make less money rather than more....so...it makes me wonder.

Let's see... I found the drug is commonly associated with malaria and toxoplasmosis.

"Up to half of the world's population is infected with toxoplasmosis.[SUP][8][/SUP] In the United States about 23% are affected[SUP][9][/SUP] and in some areas of the world this is up to 95%.[SUP][1][/SUP] About 200,000 cases of congenital toxoplasmosis occur a year.[SUP][10][/SUP] Charles Nicolle and Louis Manceaux first described the organism in 1908. In 1941 transmission during pregnancy from a mother to a child was confirmed.[SUP][11]"


If you wanted to kill off a population by denying or limiting them health care - how would you do it? This is one way of obtaining the same result while doing it legally.
I wonder which areas of the world have up to 95% infection rate....
Also - I let my intuition take a look at the picture of the owner...and he looks like someone who can be bought.

Then I saw this later on in the article:

[/SUP]"Doxycycline, an antibiotic, went from $20 a bottle in October 2013 to $1,849 by April 2014, according to the two lawmakers."

2 separate drugs known for a long time to be effective at curing infections - suddenly made completely unavailable from a financial perspective to the majority of the people on this planet.
So you gotta ask your self... what do they think they know....that the rest of the world does not?

It’s a scary path to speculate down…I don’t like doing it because I don’t see anything good until it gets worse in my deepest core.
I almost think this story justifies it’s own thread?
There certainly is something fishy about the whole story isn’t there?
This may very well be the beginning…along with that Hep C drug costing $150,000 to be treated…of a well-orchestrated line being drawn in the sand.
I can’t believe that no one beside Bernie Sanders has even mentioned this…including the President, because I think it is important enough that he should address this.
But that would force them come to terms with our Capitalist system run amok…unregulated, eating it’s own tail voraciously.
I hope there is some kind of legal action that someone brings against them…there has got to be something that can be done other than calling and writing our representatives (which I have already done…come on Patty Murray).
This is some seriously sick and frightening shit.
Ha! Remember the Obama death panels?…they are giving people access to care that would otherwise be dead (perhaps myself included)…it’s the insurance companies, the hospitals, and the pharmaceutical giants who have been the death dealers all along.

 

[Kgal]

It’s a scary path to speculate down…I don’t like doing it because I don’t see anything good until it gets worse in my deepest core.
I almost think this story justifies it’s own thread?
There certainly is something fishy about the whole story isn’t there?
This may very well be the beginning…along with that Hep C drug costing $150,000 to be treated…of a well-orchestrated line being drawn in the sand.
I can’t believe that no one beside Bernie Sanders has even mentioned this…including the President, because I think it is important enough that he should address this.
But that would force them come to terms with our Capitalist system run amok…unregulated, eating it’s own tail voraciously.
I hope there is some kind of legal action that someone brings against them…there has got to be something that can be done other than calling and writing our representatives (which I have already done…come on Patty Murray).
This is some seriously sick and frightening shit.
Ha! Remember the Obama death panels?…they are giving people access to care that would otherwise be dead (perhaps myself included)…it’s the insurance companies, the hospitals, and the pharmaceutical giants who have been the death dealers all along.

The reason why no one is talking about this is because the media is still owned and directed by those who have an agenda that serves themselves...and not the general public.

If it's scaring you then that's an excellent opportunity for you to explore it and come to peace about your fears. I am seeking all sorts of information these days to test myself and get prepared for what may be coming. Right now I'm listening to an interview with the whistle blower from the secret space program. There have been some eyebrow raising moments for me while listening to him describe the processes of mind control out there. This gives me a chance to look at those fears triggered by his information and integrate the knowledge while releasing the trauma and fear.

Keep in mind the single biggest action we can take is to remain as calm as we can whenever things escalate so we can provide rational logical solutions to the coming problems. If you are wishing to be part of a solution to the issues with the pharmaceuticals....then you can't come up with an effective plan if it's based upon fear thinking. Right?
So whenever fear comes up for you....don't try to assuage it by thinking. Instead go ahead and feel it and acknowledge it's within you. Then decided if you should keep that particular fear. If not...then tell it goodbye and ask the universe to take it from you. That fear energy just goes back into the Torus and is transmuted to neutral energy ready for the next idea of manifestation.

As for the death panels... that is indeed what is happening....but it didn't start with the ACA. And yes... the real owners behind the medical industry including insurance have been acting as the gods they think they are....and determining who lives and who dies.

 

[Skarekrow]

Happy Autumn Everyone!!

“For these beings, fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond.

Where do they come from?

The dust.

Where do they go?

The grave.

Does blood stir their veins?

No: the night wind.

What ticks in their head?

The worm.

What speaks from their mouth?

The toad.

What sees from their eye?

The snake.

What hears with their ear?

The abyss between the stars.

They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners.

They frenzy forth....Such are the autumn people.”

― Ray Bradbury​

 

[Skarekrow]

Hello? We're probably not here

By Billy Cox, Herald-Tribune
/ Tuesday, September 22, 2015​

“To Whom It May Concern:”

This is how I would begin my “Breakthrough Message” to those extraterrestrials who are just like us and are currently scanning infinite space for intelligent radio or laser signals generated by societies that happen to be just like them.

I’ve decided to enter the contest because I know how aliens just like us think, and if my letter gets chosen to represent all of humanity, I can win a million bucks.

We're building a $100 mil terminal, we've laid the tracks and hyped the demand.
Now if only we could find a train ...​

“When you get this message, I will be dead. My children, my grandchildren, their children, and their children’s children will be dead, too.
When and if you choose to reply, I can’t vouch for the character of who’ll be reading your response.
But I can assure you that, posthumously, as far as I’m concerned, this was the happiest day of my life.”

Oh wait — did you miss it?
Over the summer, with the support of celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking, Russian jillionaire Yuri Milner decided to rejuvenate the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence with a $100,000,000 gift.

A fraction of the greenery goes to whoever produces the best “Breakthrough Message.”
The UK SETI Research Network decided to enter the sweepstakes a few weeks ago, so game on, I’m in.

“This dispatch emanates from a world called Earth [see attachment for coordinates].
Point the best telescopes you’ve got in the direction of our G2V yellow dwarf star and we're the third rock out.

We're the planet with the junkyard haze of satellite debris in permanent orbit, our own little welcome-mat of hurtling shrapnel.
Since you’ve acquired and deciphered this signal, that means by inference you’re using the kind of technology that likely went obsolete here several hundred years ago, or however long it took you to confirm our presence.

I say ‘likely’ because there may not be much left of us now.
“We’ve been randomly ejaculating a mishmash of our own unique noise into the universe for nearly a century, but the decision to send an intentional focused message is probably as much a eulogy as it is an act of faith.

We are, from all appearances, genetically predisposed toward migration and colonization on Earth, but when we sent explorers to our moon — you should have a moon, since you're just like us — we couldn’t find anything to easily exploit so we decided it wasn’t worth the effort to send Earthlings back there.

And that was nearly half a century ago.
Our decision to hang back and stick with the known world defied some of the most fundamental impulses of our species.

But the truth is, when it comes to making collective sustained commitments to much of anything anymore, we’re about as reliable as hogs on ice [photo of hogs included in attachment].

We did manage, however, to dispatch robotic probes on photo-recon missions of our solar system.
We even peered deep into impossibly distant galaxies, but all that did was make us feel irrelevant.

So mostly we just decided to stay put and fall back on our insecurities and our languages and our gods and our tribes and our nations and our legends and our history, which has a perversely reassuring way of repeating itself.

“Are you noticing unidentified flying objects coursing randomly through your atmosphere, without authorization?
So are we.

But if you’re like us, you're ignoring them because life is complicated enough already.
However, considering how Earth is probably at least a few hundred years ahead of your technology, here’s a remote but possible explanation for what's going on upstairs: They could be ours.

Really.
Because at the time we sent this message, our planet was on the front end of a calamitous environmental transition that none of us had much enthusiasm for confronting.

Our sea levels are on the rise due to global warming trends created by our proliferation and negligence.
The high ground is reserved for only the most privileged members of our civilization.

What you may be seeing in your air space could be their escape modules, dispatched without fanfare before the flood.
There shouldn’t be many of them -- it takes a lot of money to break the laws of physics -- but their values could present a danger to critical thinking, so just ignore them and they’ll probably go away.

As for the unorthodox things flying around in our own skies, we not only haven't figured that out, we couldn’t care less because we know for a fact they can’t possibly be you.

“So this is the historic crossroads we've all been waiting for.
If they're still alive, our distant progeny, to whom you will hopefully respond hundreds of years from now, are dying to hear back.

Chooseyour words carefully.
Be gentle, be smarter, and -- once again -- greetings from Earth.”

 

[Skarekrow]

Near-death experiences more than dreams, study says.
But neuroscience’s denial of NDEs undaunted.

Recent study of near-death experience survivors flies in the face of neuroscience’s assertion about NDEs.


​

According to science’s current model, your minute-by-minute experience – all your thoughts, feelings, and emotions – are a product of your brain.
Neuroscientists are especially fond of this worldview and as a result have been extremely resistant to near-death experience research suggesting cardiac arrest patients experience hyper-lucid, conscious experiences during a time when their brain is severely compromised.

One often repeated speculation among neuroscientists has been that NDEs are a dream-like, after-the-fact recreations.
But a recently published study from the University of Liège in Belgium compared the memories of NDEs with memories of others who were in coma without an NDE.

They found that memories of NDEs are significantly different from coma patients without an NDE.
In particular they have significantly more characteristics, like visual details, memory clarity, self-referential information (being involved in the event) and emotional content.

The researchers propose that NDEs can’t be considered as imagined events, which have significantly fewer characteristics.
NDE events are really perceived but since the events did not occur in reality and likely result from physiological conditions (e.g., neurological dysfunction), the events are actually hallucinatory (see also ULg video).

This conclusion is based on assumptions that are inconsistent with other evidence from NDEs.
Other interpretations are possible.

Seven researchers from the University of Liège, led by Dr. Steven Laureys, published a report in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLoS ONE on the characteristics of memories from near-death experiences compared with the memories from others who were in coma but did not report an NDE.

The study also compared NDE memories with memories of real events and imagined events (e.g., past dreams or fantasies).
This finding is a direct challenge to neuroscientists, and other NDE-non-believers who proposed that NDEs are dream-like memories of events that never happened, or are altered memories of real events which are partly or fully imagined.

Neuroscience Quick to Explain Away NDE Memories

​

“…not of supernatural origin.” – Dr. Oliver Sacks

“…hallucinations people… don’t know are not real.” – Dr. Steven Novella

“…wishful thinking.” – Dr. Sam Harris
​

​

The study’s researchers included 21 patients who suffered from an acute brain insult and coma.
The patients were divided into three groups: those reporting an NDE (≥ 7 on the Greyson scale, N=8), those reporting memories during coma but without an NDE (< 7 on the Greyson scale, N=6) and those reporting no memories of their coma (N=7).

These three groups were all similar in etiology of the brain insult (traumatic, anoxic, hemorrhagic, metabolic and encephalopathic etiologies), as well as age and time since insult.
The 21 coma patients were also compared with 18 healthy control subjects.

The researchers measured the memory characteristics of patients using the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ), comparing the target memories (NDE or coma memories) versus memories of real events and imagined events (e.g., past dreams or fantasies).

The memory characteristics included sensory details (visual, auditory, etc.), memory clarity (e.g., mentally reliving the events when remembering), self-referential information (memories of being involved in the event) andemotionality (e.g., feeling the emotions of the event when remembering).

The researchers found that memories of NDEs have significantly more characteristics than both memories of real events and imagined events (p<0.02), that is, in general the NDE memories had extremely high emotional content and were more vivid and “real” to the NDEr, even compared with memories of recent real events.

Thus, “NDEs can’t be considered as typical imagined event memories”.
The NDE memories “seem to be unique, unrivaled memories”.

The memories of NDEs also have significantly more self-referential, emotional and memory clarity characteristics than memories from coma without an NDE (all p<0.02), that is, in general the NDEr remembered being more involved in the event than the non-NDE coma patient.

The researchers suggest that “what makes the NDEs ‘unique’ is not being ‘near-death’ but rather the perception of the experience itself”.
Furthermore, since it is possible that the core components of an NDE are neurophysiologically determined(e.g., temporo-parietal junction dysfunction or deficit), then “the subject really perceived these phenomena”.

However, since the perceived events did not occur in reality, the perceptions are hallucinatory.
Indeed, memories of NDEs are likely ‘flashbulb memories’ of hallucinations.

CNN also published an in-depth news article on this study.

Commentary

The researchers’ conclusions are based on two assumptions that are inconsistent with other evidence from NDEs:
(1) that the perceived events do not occur in reality and
(2) that NDE phenomena are determined neurophysiologically.

Therefore, other interpretations are possible.
The first assumption, that perceived events in an NDE do not occur in reality, is not consistent with the veridical perceptions that are reported by NDErs.

In fact, nearly all “apparently nonphysical veridical perceptions” (AVPs) are verified when checked.
Janice Holden (2009) reported that of 93 veridical perception cases in the NDE literature, 92% were completely accurate, 6% were accurate with some errors and only one case was completely erroneous.

The AVPs are frequently of objects or events outside the NDEr’s physical line of sight or at a distant location from the NDEr’s physical body.
Furthermore, previously unknown veridical information received during the “transcendent” part of the NDE(e.g. meeting deceased relatives) is frequently later verified.

For example, a man saw and interacted with an apparently deceased person and later found out the man was his biological father who had died in the holocaust (van Lommel, 2010, pp. 32-33).

Since the perceived events in fact occurred or accurately conveyed previously unknown information, one cannot conclude that NDE perceptions are hallucinations.
If some parts of the NDE events were perceived accurately, where do the NDE perceptions become unreal?

If a patient accurately describes the details of operating room events while he had no heart beat or blood pressure, at what point did the other parts of his experience (the tunnel and light) become an hallucination?

Eben Alexander’s experience included both veridical perceptions and an episode of “ICU psychosis”.
During his recovery, he experienced intense delusions and very vivid dreams but both were completely different from the “astonishing clarity and vibrant richness–the ultra-reality” of his NDE (Alexander, 2012, pp. 117-118).

His NDE memories are consonant with the results of this study but point out the stark difference between true hallucinations and NDE memories.
The finding that NDE memories contain both more emotional and self-referential information than other target memories is more likely due to the hyperreal and veridical qualities of the experience than vice versa.

The second assumption, that NDE phenomena are neurophysiologically determined, is not consistent with the full spectrum of NDE cases.
A number of physiological factors are generally cited in explanations of NDEs (Greyson et al., 2009).

None of these factors is adequate to explain NDE phenomena, because
(1) the reported physiologically-caused experiences bear only a slight resemblance to NDEs,
(2) many NDEs occur under conditions without the suggested physiological factor, and/or
(3) in cases where the physiological factor is present, NDEs are not reported in even a large percent of cases.

Furthermore, many NDEs occur during cardiac arrest which results in complete cessation of blood flow to the brain.
In these cases, heightened, lucid awareness and thought processes are reported, the same kind of experiences as are remembered by patients in this study (van Lommel, 2010, pp. 159—176).

In these NDEs, neurophysiological causes of the core components of the NDE could not have occurred because the brain was not functioning.
Veridical perceptions of the onset of resuscitation efforts also establish the time of the experience to be when the brain had no electrical activity.

References

• Alexander, Eben (2012). Proof of Heaven: A neurosurgeon’s journey into the afterlife. New York: Simon & Schuster.

• Greyson, B., Kelly, E. W., & Kelly, E. F. (2009). Explanatory models for near-death experiences. In J. M. Holden, B. Greyson, & D. James (Eds.), The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty years of investigation (pp. 213—234). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishers.

• Holden, Janice M. (2009). Veridical perception in near-death experiences. In J. M. Holden, B. Greyson & D. James (Eds.), The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty years of investigation (pp. 185—211). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishers.

• Thonnard M, Charland-Verville V, Brédart S, Dehon H, Ledoux D, et al. (2013) Characteristics of Near-Death Experiences Memories as Compared to Real and Imagined Events Memories. PLoS ONE 8(3): e57620.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0057620.

• van Lommel, P. (2010). Consciousness beyond life: The science of the near-death experience. New York: HarperCollins.

 

[Skarekrow]

Neuroscience explanation of near-death experiences defies neuroscience

As a philosopher, Dr. Evan Thompson thinks neuroscience model of near-death experience is fine, but what do NDE researchers say?

​

Debate over the science of NDEs.

Interview with Evan Thompson, author of Waking, Dreaming, Being on whether near-death experience evidence falsifies the neuroscience model of consciousness.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Ken Jordan about the consciousness revolution and the shifting paradigm in science and our culture:

Listen Now:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Click here for Evan’s website
Click here for YouTube version

Excerpts From The Interview:

Alex: Now one thing you do seem to be moving past in the book, and in your other writings is this neuro-reductionist materialism.
Often times, associated with the Daniel Dennett, “consciousness is an illusion” stuff. Now, I take it that’s out for you?

Evan: Yes.
Stated that way, I wouldn’t subscribe to it.

I know Dennett quite well.
I actually did a post doc with Dennett, and I have great admiration for his work.

He was very generous with me.
However, the view that consciousness is an illusion and that basically what neural science tells us about how the brain works today that that’s enough to understand consciousness, I think it’s fair to say that that’s Dennett’s view.

That’s not my view.
I think there is really a fundamental gap in our understanding.

We have an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the brain, but we really don’t understand how the brain could be the basis where the source or the kind of contingent platform, however you want to put it, for consciousness.

So there’s a big question for us there.
I think that the materialist solution is just much too quick with that question.

So I don’t find it satisfying.
I think the idea of saying that consciousness is an illusion doesn’t really work because the very notion of an illusion presupposes consciousness.

There are no illusions unless there is a conscious experience or for whom there is an illusion.
So that doesn’t really work for me either.

At the same time however, I wouldn’t want to go to the other extreme and say, “Well, consciousness is intrinsically mysterious. We’ll never be able to understand it.”
So that’s a position of say someone like Collin McGinn, or maybe Thomas Nagel.

So that’s doesn’t seem to me to follow necessarily either, and then I don’t want to go to let’s say a different kind of extreme, which would be a traditional Indo-Tibetan Buddhist view, which says that consciousness is non-physical that it’s immaterial and that it’s nature is radically different from the brain or let’s say from living biology, more generally.

So I try to thread my way through those difficult places to remain true to what I think is really a touchstone in the end, which is the phenomenology of consciousness.
That is in some sense whatever we’re going to say about consciousness is in at the end of the day going to come back to our understanding of it through our own lived experience.

That’s very much a principle of phenomenal logical philosophy in the sense coming from say Husserl in western thought.
This idea that phenomenology, the logic of consciousness of our experience as we live it in the first person perspective that that’s really in a way a source.

Indeed, it’s a source for all of science because science depends on observation, and observation depends on consciousness.

Alex: Okay, but as you’re threading your way through here, I wonder where you’re really landing.
Are you talking about consciousness as an emergent property [of the brain]?

We have some sense in biology of this idea of emergence, and a lot of people have likened consciousness to being an emergent property of the brain without really ever identifying what the constituent elements of that emergence would be.

I your book you likened it to dancing, but we can model dancing.
I can tell you what makes up a dance.

I can even predict how a dance will turn out.
I can’t do that with consciousness.

Does this emergent property thing really fit here?

Evan: Yes.
So there’s two things there.

One, I used the dancing metaphor really when I’m talking about the self.
So they’re the ideas that the self isn’t an entity or a thing.

It’s a process in the way that we’re now obviously to the way that dance isn’t a thing or an entity.
It’s a process.

So a dance is the dancing, and the self is something that’s enacted in the process of awareness.
There are different ways of experiencing this self depending on whether we’re awake, or asleep, or dreaming, or lucid dreaming, and so on.

So the dance metaphor is really meant to capture that, not so much mean to capture consciousness.
Now with regard to emergence, there’s a sense in which my view is an emergentist view, and a sense in which maybe it’s not.

So the sense in which it isn’t an emergentist view is that I think we have very good reason to believe that the cognitive complexity of consciousness, by which I mean the differentiation of different modes of consciousness in terms of different sensory systems or the ability to think consciously and grasp something in thought, that the complexity of that increases as a function, you could say, of biological complexity.

So that the repertoire of possible conscious states for a human being is much, much greater in terms of its cognitive abilities than say the consciousness of a rat or an insect.
So in that sense, I’m an emergentist.

I think consciousness is contingent on our biological make up.
The cognitive complexity of it is contingent on the cognitive complexity of our biological structure.

That emerges over the course of evolution and development.
Now, the sense in which I’m not an emergentist is exactly the sense in which I was talking about before that there is a kind of gap in our knowledge of how it is possible that there is consciousness in the natural world at all.

It’s one thing to say, “Look. We can see that it increases in its complexity according to evolution and development.”
It’s another thing when we step back and say, “Yes, but why is if the case that there is consciousness at all.”

That’s the so-called hard problem.
That’s the so-called explanatory gap.

My view about that is that we’re not really able to deal with that problem adequately, given our present conceptual framework.
So what I mean by that is our present conceptual framework is one in which we think that what it is for something to be physical, fundamentally, at the end of the day is not mind involving in any way.

That we can say what it is for something to be inherently physical without mentioning anything about consciousness or the mind.
Then, when we talk about consciousness, we can do the same thing.

We can talk about the intrinsic qualitative feel of something.
When we’re talking that way, it doesn’t seem we’re talking about anything physical.

I think that’s just a conceptual structure that we happen to have inherited from the way that science and philosophy have evolved over the past five, 600 years, even older maybe depending on how you want to date it.

So I think in order to really understand consciousness, we would need a kind of revolution in our understanding of nature, so that we wouldn’t set the physical and the mental apart from each other in that oppositional way.

So we would really need a kind of deep revolution in our understanding of what it is for something to be physical or what it is for something to be natural in a way that didn’t take those concepts as just from the start inherently opposed to mind and consciousness.

It’s one thing to say what I just said.
It’s another thing actually to work that out in the context of say, Science.

I don’t think we’re near to doing that.
Though, we might be able to do that in a hundred years, 200 years.

I don’t know.
Certainly, some scientists and philosophers have tried to do that with varying degrees of success.

So that’s my view at the end of the day about emergence is that, well, it definitely is an important notion in the context of biology and cognitive science.
But if we step back and ask this much bigger question about how is it possible for there to be consciousness in a biological one and a physical world, then we are going to need some deep transformation of our thinking and our concepts.

At least, that’s what I believe.

Later Dr. Thompson discusses near-death experience science and why he remains unconvinced that they falsify neuroscience’s model of consciousness:

Alex: … So to recap, [noted NDE research Dr. Pim] Van Lommel sends you this letter, and he [explians his NDE research and why he believes it defies our understanding of consciousness].

He’s a cardiologist.
He’s studied these things for 20 years.

He’s worked on thousands of patients, hundreds of them with these NDEs.
He tells you that during the time his patients are reporting these NDES that their brain is so severely compromised that it’s impossible to generate these near-death experiences.

Maybe I should mention, one of the things about near-death experiences is that there are hyper-lucid experiences that many people report as being the most significant experience of their life.

It’s very vivid.
Often people remember this more than anything else in their life.

They often report like it happened yesterday.

So, back to Van Lommel correspondence with you, he’s saying, “Hey, this is happening at a time when the brain is severely compromised. It can’t possibly any kind of neuroscience model.”

And you say, “Not so fast. I looked at the research, and we don’t know when those NDE’s are occurring. Maybe, they’re occurring at a time when the brain isn’t compromised.”
As you said, “When it’s going into the shutting down process, or when it’s coming out, or much later in their recalling of it.”

So, since this is a question, I’ve spent at least 50 shows addressing, with some of the leading researchers and scholars.
I wanted to bounce some things off you, and see where we wind up, because I’ve come to a completely different conclusion [than you have].

And I have to tell you, a lot of the points you’re making seem to me like things that have been handled over and over again by near-death experience researchers over the years.
I mean first, let’s start with regard to the flat-lining of the EEG and whether we have any measurement of that with people who have undergone a near-death experience.

So again, this is something that skeptics have floated out there for years.
They’ve said, “Oh, sure, the person had cardiac arrest, and they were out for two minutes, and then they were resuscitated, but we don’t know whether they really had a flat EEG during that time.

What I did is ask an EEG expert [about this].
I found one at the University of Toledo, Dr. John Greenfield because he’s written one of most often quoted books on understanding EEG’s.

I asked him directly, “What’s going on before, during, and after the flat lining of an EEG?”
I’ll tell you what he told me.

That through years and years of study, because the EEG has been around for such a long time as a tool… it’s just a tool for measuring brain activity, right?
There’s nothing magic about EEG.

It’s just a tool, and now we have some better tools… but, we’ve studied it extensively on both humans and animals.
We know that right before, certainly during, and right after the heart stops, there is very little going on in the brain that we would associate with a conscious experience.

When you ask these folks directly, not the kind of debunking question like “Is it possible that there’s something here, or there, or deep down that we haven’t discovered?”
But you just ask them that based on the decades of work we have compiled with EEG’s, is there any chance that these hyper-lucid, vivid experiences could be happening at this time when this brain is so severely compromised like after cardiac arrest?

They just tell you there’s no way.
So really, what gets me about it, the skeptical position, is that the notion that Pim Van Lommel, again is this cardiologist.

I mean works with these people all the time.
He understands what it’s like for people to have cardiac arrest, what it’s like for people after they’re resuscitated, how they don’t recall anything, how they’re extremely amnesiac usually for weeks.

To think that this guy has just kind of fumbled through and made this huge glaring mistake in terms of evaluating the medical condition of these patients, I just can’t buy that for a second.

Evan: Yes.
Well, I certainly wouldn’t say that.

I wouldn’t say that people are bumbling, or making huge medical mistakes.
I would say rather that there are cardiologists whose knowledge is specialized for a certain kind of domain – namely heart function and the treatment of that.

They’re dealing with patients in life-threatening situations.
These are not neuroscientists or cognitive neuroscientists who are familiar with the complexities of investigating reports of experience and brain activity in a relationship to those reports.

It’s not to say that there’s any bumbling; it’s just that this is not an area where it’s been investigated.
Now with regard to the point you made about EEG, there are two things: one, is that it takes time for the EEG to go to flat line, and that’s variable – depending on the person, and depending on the conditions.

When it goes flat line, it’s a recording made at the surface of the scalp.
We have very few recordings of what actually is the course of the EEG during these traumatic events for obvious reasons.

That’s not the prime concern, but it takes some time.
It’s variable, and then just because you have inactivity of the brain recorded at the surface of the scalp, that does not tell you about much, much deeper brain structure.

Some of which we know are crucial to memory and the ability to form mental images.
It doesn’t tell you about what is going on at that level.

Biologically, when an organism dies, things decay at very, very different rates depending on what they are, the kinds of cells they are, the kind of connections they have, all sorts of metabolic factors.

So we can’t just infer from a flat line EEG that the brain is somehow turned off.
The brain is …

Alex: But that’s exactly what the EEG experts tell you.
They say — we have decades of work with EEG and consciousness and the correlation between the two.

We have no evidence that any one ever has a conscious experience, let alone this kind of hyper-lucid, super-duper conscious experience, when the EEG is flat.
As to your other point, we understand pretty darn well, just like Van Lommel told John the stage there when the two were presenting together that medical science, we understand pretty darn well what happens to your EEG during cardiac arrest.

Just because we don’t have every person who suffers cardiac arrest hooked up to an EEG doesn’t mean that we can’t infer based on that huge body of knowledge what is probably going on with their EEG.

I think the only question is — is the near-death experience happening during this period of like for example, when they’re being resuscitated?

Evan: Well, my point about the EEG is that there’s a variable window for the EEG going flat, and so the person is descending into the crisis as it were.
That window of time leaves plenty of time for all sorts of subjective experiential things to happen.

Then, there’s the time in which the person is reemerging into consciousness.
Of course, that’s a time in which all sorts of subjective experiential things can happen.

Then, there’s the zone that we don’t really know much about in terms of deep brain function, which is again that just because the EEG is flat, you can have a flat EEG, and it’s still maybe possible.

This is something we don’t know.
Any scientist who says that we do know, I would take issue with.

We don’t know in terms of much deeper structures exactly what their time course have shut down is in relationship to the moment at which an EEG goes flat.
Now there was just a study, for example, albeit in rats that was published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science just a couple of years ago where … and this is not a very nice experiment.

They basically induced cardiac arrest in rats, and they see a huge surge of brain activity – very complex pattern involving multiple frequencies and shifting patterns of coherence that happens in the 30 to 40 seconds after the cardiac arrest.

Then, you see prolonged activity in the brain for up to 30 minutes after the cardiac arrest.
Now, that’s a startling finding in relationship to the classical medical view that just basically says you have a heart attack and your brain shuts down.

No.
The brain is an extremely complicated system made up of many different kinds of cells with incredible connectivity.

It doesn’t just turn off when blood flow and oxygen are no longer being delivered.
It goes into a kind of huge phase change of activity that can actually be kind of protracted.

The bottom of the line here is that we don’t actually know the answer to these questions.

Alex: Well, we can always say that.
Let’s talk about the Borjigin and the University of Michigan study in a minute because I want to go back and touch on the other question, you raised, which I think is a legitimate question.

But to a certain extent, it’s been answered.
That is “Are these near-death experiences happening during the time when this brain is really severely compromised or are they semi-conscious and just kind of going in and out of consciousness, and is that one that is being formed?”

I do have to just kind of jump in there and take exception.
We don’t know the brain is so complex thing.

I mean sure we can advance that, but then you’re just overthrowing like 50 years of neural science that says, “We understand the correlates between, for example, EEG or FMRI in consciousness.”

We’re just going to throw that out in the wind and say, “Well, it’s all just a mystery, folks. All that stuff we thought we knew, we now don’t know.”
This is a way of stepping over this in the e-Data, but I digress because here is the research.

We have some good empirical data that suggests that these people really are out when they’re having a near-death experience.
I’ve talked to Dr. Penny Sartori, also Dr. Jan Holden at the University of North Texas who you reference in your book, and is one of the editors along with Dr. Bruce Greyson of the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences.

What they did, which was and ingeniously experiment, they went on the Cardiac Arrest Board and they had two groups of people.
One was the control group – people who had a cardiac arrest and were resuscitated and didn’t have a near-death experience, didn’t report that.

The other group had a cardiac arrest and had a near-death experience, and were resuscitated and obviously came back alive.
They just went, and they asked them in a very systematic scientific way to recall their resuscitation experience.

Then, they evaluated whether or not they were as they claimed above their body, outside of their body recalling the resuscitation.
So they kind of scored it and saw who was more accurate – the control group that didn’t have a near-death experience, or the group that did have a near-death experience.

In both these independent studies, they find a highly significant evidence in favor of the idea that these people really did see the resuscitation, and that they reported that in a way that it was totally different from the control group.

The control group that people that didn’t have an NDE, when you ask them, they were like, “I don’t know. I was dead. I was out. I was unconscious.”
They just kind of give a Hollywood version of it.

The other version from the near-death experiencers is really precise.
Now, if you go and talk to cardiologists, when you talk to people who are in this emergency medical condition, they’ll tell you a couple of things that I’ve learned.

One, they’ll tell you that this resuscitation process, despite what you see on TV, doesn’t begin instantly.
When a person has a cardiac arrest, the doctors I’ve talked to told me that it’s very unusual in a large hospital for that person to be resuscitated within a minute.

It’s usually after a minute or even two minutes after they are gone before they are able to resuscitate them.
So when we talk about people recalling their resuscitation, we can be pretty darn confident that their brain state was in this or very, very close to this flat line state.

What I just say, it’s just severely compromised to the extent that we have no neurological model for how that kind of brain could generate a consciousness experience.
It totally blows that away, and then I want you to go ahead and respond to that, and let’s talk about the University of Michigan rat study.

Evan: Well, so I mean there’s a sense in which I agree with where you ended your point, which is that we have no neurological model for this.
I think that that’s right in the following sense.

That is these experiences that people report have distinctive phenomenological features that make them let’s say belong to a different phenomenological class than dream experiences or waking hallucinatory experiences.

So there’s no question that they are unique as a class of reported experiences – reported now on the basis of memory, and that we don’t really have a good neurological model for those kinds of experiences.

I agree with that.
However, it doesn’t follow from that that we know definitively or even in a sort of … leaving out definitively that we have good reason to think that these experiences transcend what’s going on in the brain for reasons that we’ve just been reviewing.

Namely, that all of the inferences along the way from this cardiac arrest shutdown, the EEG flat line, the subjective sense of when the experience occurs in relation to the objective timing of what’s going on in the brain, our knowledge of what’s going on in the brain based on an inference of a flat line EEG that all of that is so fragile that we can’t say, “Well, these experiences transcend the brain.”

If you look at reports about verifiable out-of-body perception, for example, in the near-death experience handbook, there’s a chapter by the researchers you just mentioned on verifiable out of body perception.

If you actually look at that chapter carefully, there is extremely little, if any evidence at all, of verifiable out-of-body perception.
There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence of people reporting out-of-body experiences.

Those can be subjectively very compelling.
I mean in my own book, I describe some of my own out-of-body experiences.

They weren’t near-death experiences.
You know I was perfectly fine and healthy, but they were experiences I had of being out of body.

They are very, very vivid and compelling.
However, in terms of evidence of verifiable perception, that’s a whole other situation in which we just don’t have that evidence.

Alex: It depends on how you slice and dice the data.
I mean I just gave you verifiable empirical data because what they did was very smart.

They didn’t try and go line by line and say, “Okay. You said that you saw the sneaker on the ledge. Let’s go see it.”
They did it in a well-understood scientific way of saying, “Okay. Let’s go over your evaluation of your resuscitation process, and compare it to a control group.”

That’s the kind of work that I find compelling because it’s outlet science.
The other point that I made, which I think is the main point in this that we started with.

I think we have to get away from this idea of proof and convincing and this and that, and talk about these two competing theories we have and which one provides us parsimony – which one fits the data and whether the neural science model of brain-based consciousness really holds up and whether it’s been falsified.

So I feel like we’re kind of keep propping it up here and there to try and make it fit when we say like I think I’m taking what you’re just saying, and I take that as a total movement away from the existing neural science model.

I mean if we’re gong to throw that out and say, “We no longer have this understood correlation between EEG and FMRI and consciousness, then I think we have to say kind of all bets are off for the neural science model.”

That’s where I’m at.

Evan: I don’t think that’s our situation where we’re throwing out the EEG and the FMRI.
In point of fact, what the EEG and the FMRI in the context of neural science of consciousness indicates that it’s a way more complicated story than just consciousness present or absent with regard to awaking EEG versus a flat line EEG with one electrode or two or three on the scalp, and that’s not the state of the neural science.

So the kind of neural science evidence that we have, for example, about what happens when you dream where we have very sophisticated high-denser EEG, where we have FMRI, where we have PET, where we have very careful and precise ways of collecting dream reports and scoring them.

So this is fantastic science that has evolved over the past 50, 60 years.
Well, we don’t have that kind of comparable, cognitive neural science for near-death experiences.

Now, for obvious reasons because people in many of these experiences are in situations that are life-threatening, I think it would be much, much better if we did have that kind of scientific evidence through a kind of sustained investigation to the extent that we can do it in these cases.

So I think we just need to be clear about the state of investigation here, and the state of the science.
We’re not talking about throwing out anything.

We’re actually talking about taking a very well-established and progressive research program for investigating the brain in relationship to consciousness, and noting that it’s actually more or less absent in the case of investigating near-death experience that most of what’s said is said by people who are cardiologists who are very familiar with the patient situation, the crises, and who are doing important work, but who aren’t trained psychologists and cognitive scientists in dealing with consciousness with some exceptions.

But in general, that’s the situation.
I think we need that kind of investigation.

It’s got to obviously be collaborative between the clinicians who really know what they’re dealing with as a lived reality, and then the neuroscientists and psychologists who have some built up experience in the complexities of investigating consciousness, especially with regard to retrospective reports about experiences that are some time later in relationship to when the experience seems a memory to have happened.

Alex: We’ll touch on that in a minute, but I want circle back and talk about the University of Michigan study because I think it hits on a point that you just made, which is that you’re saying, “Hey, let’s not be so sure about what these cardiologists are saying in their experience with their patients.”

I’m much more skeptical of the neuroscientist that dabble into this.
You have the University of Michigan study that you described with the brain surge in dying rats.

They got a lot of play in the mainstream science media, especially among in the skeptics.
I looked into this as well.

I did do it a few years ago actually with George Washington University Medical Center professor, Dr. Lakhmir Chawla, who found a similar result in humans.
It’s the same kind of thing brain surge.

I also looked at the University of Michigan thing.
You know, a few things to say about it.

First, it’s not an NDE study.
Neither one of them are, right?

They didn’t study NDEs.
They didn’t study NDE experiencers.

They didn’t even review the NDE literature as part of their published work.
Both of them just made this little kind of comment at the end like, “Hey, man. Maybe this has something to do with NDEs.”

So there when you talk about clinicians, cardiologists like Van Lommel, really coordinating with neural science.
I think it’s much, much worse on the other way around, but here is the real problem with all that research.

It’s just so obviously flawed.
I have to tell you.

Before I talked to Chawla about the brain surge thing, I talked to a couple of near-death experience researchers.
Privately, they said, “Alex, this is the dumbest explanation yet from the NDE skeptics.”

They said so because of a couple of reasons.
One is this whole idea of this surge in the electrical activity is part of this last gasp of the dying brain theory that you described quite nicely in your dying book that folks can get on Amazon.

It’s this idea that the brain goes through these kind of unique physical changes right before it dies, and then the speculation is that kind of physical shutdown is somehow related to the NDE thing.

But, one of the biggest problems with that is that not all NDEs occur during cardiac arrest.
You know this, but obviously the reason that there’s so much work in NDEs with cardiac arrest is because we can know and predict exactly what’s going on in the brain without really looking at the brain.

So these guys said, “Okay. We have all these NDE accounts. We’re not sure what’s going on. Oh, here’s a great idea. Let’s go into cardiac arrest work because now we know after you’ve had a cardiac arrest, the brain is shutdown.”

But if you look beyond that, we have people who have near-death experiences that have no physical trauma.
That should’ve raised a huge red flag for these folks that want to say the brain surge in this dying rat is somehow connected to near-death experience.

It certainly wouldn’t fit any of those cases where someone doesn’t have a dying brain.
But the other way that this fails, this surge in activity of a dying brain, is that there’s a continuity of experience to these near-death experiences.

Not all the time, but a lot of times there are.
I mean you’ll hear folks say, “Okay. I was stabbed, and I was laying there dying on the street. I was barely conscious, and then I went out. Then, I kind of regained consciousness, and they put me in the ambulance. Then, I was floating above my body as the ambulance was driving to the hospital, and I saw all these NDE things. Then, I regained consciousness, and I saw the lights inside the hospital. Then, I lost consciousness.”

So there’s this continuity of experience that they’re reporting.
It isn’t like this what the University of Michigan and Chawla are talking in terms of a dying brain.

It’s not that it can’t be, but it certainly doesn’t fit.
So again, here are some folks that are just not really deeply looking at the near-death experience data.

There’s no other way around it.
They’re taking a debunking position.

It’s apologetics.
It’s working backwards from the answer we want, which is, “Hey, our existing neurological model holds up fine. We just need to shore it up here, and shore it up here, and change this.”

Because then an objective look at the data, I think it just doesn’t fit.

Evan: Yes.
So there are a lot of points there that I think are worth going at maybe one by one.

So with regard to the study on the dying rat brain, I agree that linking that specifically to near-death experience in humans doesn’t work.
All I would want to claim on the basis of that study is that the idea that the brain shuts down when you have a cardiac arrest is just way too simplistic.

That rather, the brain is this complex system with different kinds of rhythms of activity, and that those in the case of cardiac arrest, they have a certain profile.
That profile kind of actually lasts for a certain amount of time.

So the only thing that study tells us is that in animals who are like us in some ways, and not like us in other ways, when cardiac arrest happens, it’s not for the case that the brain just shuts down.

There’s a huge cascade of all sorts of different complicated things going on.
So the only link that that provides to near-death experiences is to just caution us if we were to say, “Well, cardiac arrest, the brain is shutdown.”

We can’t say that.
That study does actually suffice to make that point.

It doesn’t suffice to provide us with a model of near-death experiences.
I agree that the remarks made in that paper linking the study to near-death experiences are let’s say made with some leaps and bounds.

A definitely more cautious link would’ve been better to see, but nonetheless, there is this important point about what happens to the brain when cardiac arrest occurs.
That study is informative with regard to that.

Now, with regard to near-death experiences happening in situations other than cardiac arrest, well, if we’re using the term near-death experience to mean experiences with certain features that are scored in a certain way based on the reports that individuals give after the experience, of course that’s true.

That’s an important fact.
Two things to say there, one way is that …

Alex: Just to be clear.
I mean I’m talking about white lights, seeing God, the whole shebang from jumping off a bridge or from being frightened that my plane is going to crash.

Evan: So hold one.
It’s important for listeners to know that there are different elements that are scored or weighted in order to make out which is something that’s ultimately a construct to make up a near-death experience.

Individuals don’t all have the same things happening when they have an experience that someone scores a near-death experience.
Different things can happen according to what is reported.

Some elements are weighted in certain ways, and the researcher will say, “Okay. That fits what we mean by near-death experience.”
Now, that can happen in different situations.

Most of which involve trauma, not necessarily cardiac arrest.
So the two things to say there are – well, nevertheless, people want to point to the cardiac arrest case as a special case because they think that case provides a basis for saying consciousness transcends the brain.

That’s what I am not convinced by.
Then, we’re generally in the case of trauma.

Well, that tells us something important about what can happen in situations of trauma that there can be these kinds of experiences that have these different dissociative elements like out-of-body experiences.

I mean out-of-body experiences for that matter can happen in sometimes in non-traumatic situations as well, so just that one element alone.
In those cases, no one wants to make any inference about consciousness transcending the brain because the brain is still there and working, and the body is still there and functioning.

It’s only in the case of cardiac arrest that people want to say that.
So it depends …

Alex: I don’t think that’s true, Evan.
I mean I think what people are saying is that we have completely different physiological situations, and that therefore you guys that are peddling this brain shutting down or it’s all about the brain thing, it falls apart.

It doesn’t fit because this person over there had a well-functioning brain.
This person over here had a brain that was severely compromised.

You can’t have it both ways.
You can’t say, “This person experienced a near-death experience because their brain was in the last gasp of the dying brain.

This person over here had a near-death experience that we can score it any way we want, and it’s identical to the other one.
Their brain wasn’t compromised at all.

So I think what people are saying is kind of the opposite of what you’re saying, is that this suggests that we have to look past the current neural science mind-equals-brain model, and look at all the other data that points this way, and look at consciousness as being something more – perhaps consciousness being fundamental, and perhaps being the real construct of reality, and that the brain is interacting with that kind of consciousness.

We don’t have to advance that theory.
Also, we have to do is falsify the existing neural science model that suggest, as you’ve advanced, that the brain is the biological basis for consciousness.

Evan: Well, in the case of the near-death experiences happening in cardiac arrest and non-cardiac arrest situations, the common factor that people point to is trauma.
Then, they try to determine from a neural science perspective, “Okay. What’s the situation with regard to the brain in relation to that kind of trauma?”

Then, people say, “But look in cardiac arrest, the brain is shut down.”
So that’s where the Michigan study is relevant.

It’s to say, “Well, no. You can’t infer that the brain is shut down.”
Now that does not provide us with a neurological model of these experiences.

I agree with you that that’s way too quick, but that’s the logic as I see it.
Now in terms of consciousness being fundamental to the nature of reality … I mean that could very well be the case, but I see that as a huge step – inferential leap that these experiences don’t provide us.

So the models that people, let’s call them the anti-materialist models that people … for example, like Pim Van Lommel, want to provide for these experiences, strike me as extremely unconvincing and weak.

People want to jump from the difficulties we have with explaining these experiences in terms of current neural science to all sorts of alternative models in which quantum mechanics is usually invoked because quantum mechanics is very weird and hard to understand.

So consciousness is weird and hard to understand.
So it seems like there’s a link there.

These are not compelling to me at all.
I think if it turns out that near-death experiences really do definitively falsify a current neural science model of consciousness, if that turns out to the be the case, then what’s likely to be proposed is a new model that’s going to be well-tied to science in some way.

These alternative models that we’re being presented with don’t seem to me to meet that standard at all.
They seem wildly speculative to me.

So I find those very unconvincing.

 

[Skarekrow]

The worst assumption you could ever make about your health.

[video=youtube;_cq38BD9DAA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=_cq38BD9DAA[/video]

Interview with Frank Huguenard about his new Beyond Me film and his exploration of spontaneous healing and science’s failed assumptions.​

 

[Skarekrow]

What Lies Under the Skin?–Psi and the Physics of Indeterminacy

I have suggested in previous posts that psi may operate not directly on actual reality, but on the unactualized quantum potential of superposed states prior to physical observation, or what for convenience I call the “Not Yet.”

I don’t know if this is a widely held interpretation, although quantum mechanics is felt by many theorists to hold the key to understanding psi in one way or another.

It seems eminently reasonable to me that consciousness may have some deep affinity for (or even identity with) the non-actual and could be constantly interacting with it.

Such a notion not only would account for psi but also preserve free will in a non-causally-closed universe, which is crucial given my opposition to the Minkowski glass block universe in which the future somehow already exists.

Even though Slavoj Žižek is a die-hard materialist opposed to all manner of “New Age obscurantism” (which would certainly include the woo I spout on this blog), I agree with his argument in The Parallax View against attempts to neatly sew up philosophical and scientific contradictions via pop-Taoist yin/yang symmetries or Jungian archetypes.

The dualities of life, including the future and past, exist in an anamorphic, irreconcilable, non-sew-up-able state; nothing adds up, and there is an instability and indeterminacy even in what seems most secure and definitive.

This ultimate non-closure and non-self-identity (Buddhist “no self”) is what enables free will to exist; the human subject is an agent participating in making reality through observation–the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics insists on this.

The future thus cannot exist fully formed “out there” in some preexisting Platonic realm.
Where I depart from Žižek is in suggesting that this asymmetry and non-closure even includes the existent past.

The past can really be changed, and not just in its retroactive framing via the ever-shifting Symbolic (which I suggest is just Žižek’s materialistic evasion of paranormal possibilities like precognition).

As Richard Shoup writes (in his contribution to the excellent new collection Extrasensory Perception edited by Edwin May and Sonali Bhatt Marwaha), “in the quantum realm, possibilities are ‘real’ and can interact to have real effects.”

If psi is an interaction with these possibilities prior to their physical observation, it could explain both precognitive phenomena and psychokinetic (PK) effects, and even “retro-PK” effects: Anything that remains unobserved is still indeterminate, and this should render even large portions of the past subject to change.

Behind the surface of what already exists there must be vast reserves of unobserved potentiality.

​

The possibility that focused attention can actually alter the past has been explored experimentally–for instance, Helmut Schmidt’s work with retroactively altering the outcome of random number generators.

In his book First Sight, James Carpenter argues that psi–including both ESP and PK–is an intrinsic (albeit largely unconscious) part of our everyday functioning.

If so, and if psi involves some kind of unconscious tampering with the latent potential of quantum superposed states prior to physical observation, then we may be continually traversing the Forbidden Zone of the Not Yet and thereby creating our own order and moving toward it, hidden even from the eyes of God and Heisenberg.

In other words, we are not only reacting to our probable futures through some unconscious precognitive channel; we may even, without knowing it, be setting up opportunities and obstacles for ourselves that could affect our future outcomes by meddling in the past via our attention or our intention.

The possibilities could go well beyond the implications for our personal fates.
Interacting with the quantum Not Yet may be the ‘secret’ in various ancient alchemical, magical, or shamanic practices.

Such retroactive effects may be exploited for healing, for instance, and may be the mechanism involved in nontraditional or spiritual curing modalities (see below).

Although scandalous to the materialistically minded, it is not really such a far-out idea, if you have any magical inclinations: Such meddling in the unseen/hidden is what the occult means, after all.

”Pulsing slowly with inchoate life”

Folklore, myth, and art have produced many ways of personifying the abhorrent/fascinating notion that the past is not safely buried and that inert matter may hold weird and awesome surprises in its dark heart.

In my last post I mentioned Oedipus as a kind of time traveler, but vampires and other undead creatures are also classic representations of the idea of the fixed (i.e., “dead”) past somehow still subject to change because of a latent unseen potential still lurking under the skin: Despite being inert, cold, and lifeless, a vampire is paradoxically alive, animated by and seeking out a vital energy, symbolized by the blood of the living, especially of youth.

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan made such a hidden, unsymbolized-yet-vital domain central to his theory of the human condition:
The Real is that which is unspeakable, unknowable, not even actually existing, yet uncannily and outrageously still exerting a tangible effect.

It is the very model of the sacred, the impossible acausal cause, and it is the home of jouissance, the excessive painful enjoyment that is “the only substance acknowledged by psychoanalysis.”

Jouissance is that blood of youth that keeps the vampire alive, and, I have argued, it is a better candidate than “trauma” for the carrier of precognitive information about our own future.

Lacan’s understanding of the psychoanalytic cure was having the patient traverse the fantasy keeping them in ignorance of their enjoyment, thus implicitly carrying them closer to the (terrifying) Real.

​

One of Žižek’s favorite illustrations of the Real is a 1942 Robert Heinlein story, “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”:
The title character comes to learn that our universe is only one of a plurality of universes created as works of art by mysterious beings, and that he himself has been assigned by an evil lesser divinity to corrupt our world.

Hoag informs his friends of his mission and lets them know that, later that day, he will be fixing a few minor blemishes in reality that he has discovered; he warns his friends not to open their windows or look outside during the minutes when he will be making these fixes.

When Hoag’s friends of course do roll down the window of the cab they are riding in, despite his warning, they see a “formless gray flux” where their view of the city had been, “pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life.”

This, Žižek says, is the Real–”the pulsing of the pre-symbolic substance in all its abhorrent vitality.”
I don’t know whether Heinlein was knowingly alluding to quantum physics, but his “formless gray flux” seems precisely to represent the “spread-out smear” of non-actualized quantum potentials.

More recently, Žižek has described the inscrutable equations of quantum mechanics as a manifestation of the Real–simply because those equations are intimidating gibberish to most of us–but clearly the “abhorrent” (to a mechanistic materialist) smear of indeterminacy itself is really where the Real is at.

​

Almost as if to illustrate my proposal that this flux may be directly manipulated or reprogrammed, Hoag’s editorial emendations of reality work through this non-public-facing “quantum back end.”

His intervention may look to us today very much like an administrative change to a website, or the Matrix, but the Real does not consist (ultimately) of strings of green numbers tumbling in black space.

It is profoundly non-symbolic, not a code, and not even informational in the usual sense.
The Real/Not Yet is a domain prior to information as such.

This is why, instead of (or in addition to) a “physics of information,” we may find a physics of the indeterminate Real to be more helpful for understanding the more mysterious aspects of our world.

Occult Forces

The body, for example, is a deeply mysterious place.
Its obstinate opacity, the simple fact that our skin and flesh make it impossible to see the condition of things underneath, remains one of the biggest challenges to medicine, which is forced to rely on dangerous radiological methods for observation–methods that may raise the risk for the very diseases (e.g., cancers) that they are probing for.

On the other hand, the body’s opacity may be one of its most fundamental advantages, from a psi standpoint.
The obvious fact that our bodies are not transparent (like those of some deep sea animals) creates worlds of possibility within us, vast reserves of Not Yet for psi to exploit.

​

Based on a very suggestive article by William Braud on the possibility of targeting past states of incipient illness through a kind of retro-PK a la Helmut Schmidt, Russell Targ (in Limitless Mind) has described a target of psychic healing as effecting a change within the body while sickness is still vague and indeterminate, before a firm diagnosis is “locked in” through observation (for instance, in an X-ray or surgical procedure that makes the source of the illness visible).

“Primitive” cures may (according to this notion) be the deft exploitation or even recruitment of quantum superposition through psychic effects, recruitment of unconscious mind-body connection, and correctly timed real-world observation.

In other words, shamanism may be the art of cultivating or shepherding the emergence of desired actualities through careful timing of concealment and disclosure.

There is much in the literature of European alchemy to suggest that this idea was also part of the Hermetic tradition.
The “fertility” (i.e., potential) of what remains hidden or in the dark (i.e., unobserved) is one of the central themes of Fulcanelli’s 1927 masterpiece, Le Mystere de Cathedrales, one of the most seductive alchemical texts of modern times or of any time.

Early in the book, describing the subterranean chambers beneath Gothic cathedrals, he writes: “Real, but occult, power, which is exercised in secret, develops in the darkness, toils without respite in the deep foundations of the work.”

He circles back and develops this idea at greater length, very provocatively, later on:

What, then, is this primordial condition, which is essential if any generation is to take place?
I will reply on your behalf: the total absence of any solar light, even when diffused or filtered.
Look around you, consult your own nature.

Do you not see that with man and with animals, fecundation and generation take place, thanks to a certain disposition of organs, in complete obscurity, maintained until the time of birth? … There is no process, even down to the work of digestion … which does not take place in the dark. … I know, myself, that the goddess Isis is the mother of all things, that she bears them all in her womb and that she alone can bestow Revelation and Initiation.


​

​

Isis was the Egyptian prototype of Mary, and the Black Madonnas found in some cathedral crypts reflect this ancient symbol of what could be called the “womb of the Real,” the occult quantum potential from which the Actual (the Stone/Christ) is delivered.

The alchemist could be seen as sort of a skilled midwife, helping coax into reality something latent in nature but ordinarily unexpressed or imperfectly expressed.

The maternal symbolism goes to the heart of the Hermetic project, where the primordial chaos to be transformed into the philosopher’s stone is called the Prima Materia–the “first matter” which is also “first mother.”

Throughout alchemy, the interaction between lunar, feminine, indeterminate darkness and solar, masculine, definitive light or knowledge, was the central archetypal “dance” or interplay, skilfully orchestrated by the adept.

Again, as in shamanism, alchemy–which Fulcanelli calls the “art of light”–is not simply “enlightenment” (as Buddhist or Tantric interpreters may understand it) but rather knowing when and for how long to keep things hidden, knowing the proper time to disclose or reveal (i.e., shed light) in order to, again, properly give birth to some possibility that is already latent within matter.

Thus, “occult” in the Hermetic sense is not only a matter of keeping secrets from the rabble, but a whole ontology of the Real as what exists prior to knowledge, “light,” and symbolization.

Hinting more directly at the quantum nature of Hermetic practice, Fulcanelli’s colleague (and possibly alter-ego) Rene Schwaller de Lubicz described alchemy as being fundamentally a matter of “perception and gesture,” implying that the key to alchemical creation really lies in a certain way of seeing (i.e., way of observing), as well as a knack for timing certain crucial disclosures.

This may involve an occult way of knowing that can penetrate the darkness without light, concretely symbolized by the “rose windows” that dimly illuminate the interior of a cathedral and shed spiritual light on the Mass.

This form of knowing, best accessed at night (don’t forget the esoteric meanings of “rose” I discussed in an earlier post), seems to involve upsetting or scrambling the very order of Time and its customary sequences, and reminds me very much of psi.

In imitation of the ever-mysterious Fulcanelli, I will say no more on this subject.*

The Power of Luv

George Hansen has observed that paranormal phenomena all fall within the interstices of our cultural categories; using the terminology of structuralist anthropology, he calls them “anti-structural” (or liminal) phenomena.

Lacan’s Real, as the domain outside or beyond the Symbolic, is the equivalent of anti-structure, and I think it provides an even better conceptual framework for understanding the paranormal in all its blurred-together, impossible, absurd forms.

​

Although often characterized as an actually existing world beyond or underneath the Symbolic, Žižek came to interpret the Real as an insubstantial mirage produced by parallax, the shimmering rift between the Symbolic and Imaginary, a pure semblance or illusion, but one that nevertheless produces a real effect.

(Late in his Exegesis, Phil Dick developed a philosophical category that he called the “surd,” exactly like the Real, which he also linked to a parallactic or “Ditheon” mode of perception:
The surd is a nothing, a flicker in the inconsistent fabric of the universe, vanishing before it even appears, yet uncannily exerting a tug or pull on reality anyway.)

This parallactic understanding of the Real offers a new way of thinking about paranormal phenomena:
that they might not simply fall between our epistemic cracks, but could actually be effects of such cracks, perhaps even materializations of impossibility, like those Magritte or Escher images in which the negative space between objects become objects themselves.

Thus the sub-question beneath that of psychically intervening in the quantum Real is this:
Could it be possible to manifest this no-thing in consensus reality, perhaps shamanically, alchemically, or psychically, so that it could be shared and perceived?

Is this somehow the answer to alchemical creativity, the “something from nothing” promised by the ancient mysteries?
The Jungian idea, for instance, is that UFOs are somehow manifestations of the collective unconscious in a time of cultural shift; what if we reframe this slightly and suggest that UFOs are manifestations of Symbolic-Imaginary “negative space”–conceptual gaps and discontinuities that under certain psychologically intensified conditions can manifest as solid, existent, objects ‘standing out’ in the world?

In Messengers of Deception, Jacques Vallee offers such an occult possibility as one that should at least be considered.

​

Various magical traditions describe the ability to create thought-forms; Vallee mentions tulpas, the materialized imaginal beings of Tibetan Buddhist magic.

Buddhist orthodoxy declares that these are stabilized hallucinations in the mind of the creator, meant to give insight into the fact that all of reality is mind-created.

The ritual magic tradition typically also explains the creation of such forms as manifestations in a psychic interspace (the astral plane) rather than in physical reality, although the folklore surrounding the Jewish mysticism that fed that tradition spoke of animated protoplasmic beings (i.e., golems) running amok in real life.

Perhaps less ambitiously, various spiritual traditions also speak of spectral bodily fluids that manifest on the edge of reality or in altered states of consciousness, and seem like similar conjurings of the stuff of the Real out of thin air.

One of the fascinating obsessions in Terence McKenna’s account of his experience in Amazonia,True Hallucinations, is the mysterious violet, blue, or black fluid that Amazonian shamans are reputed to vomit and/or sweat during Ayahuasca ceremonies and then use for divination and magic, not unlike the ambiguous “ectoplasm” of Victorian spiritualism (above):
“These matters are extremely secret,” McKenna writes:

Informants insist that the shamans spread the stuff out on the ground in front of them, and that one can look into this material and see other times and other places.

According to their reports, the nature of this fluid is completely outside of ordinary experience:
it is made out of space/time or mind, or it is pure hallucination objectively expressed but always keeping itself within the confines of a liquid.
​

McKenna’s desire to learn about this stuff stems partly from his own earlier experience in Tibet, during a DMT-fueled sexual encounter with a British woman:

Then I saw that where our bodies were glued together there was flowing, out of her, over me, over the floor of the roof, flowing everywhere, some sort of obsidian liquid, something dark and glittering, with color and lights within it. … What was this fluid and what was going on?

I looked at it.
I looked right into it, and it was the surface of my own mind reflected in front of me. Was it translinguistic matter, the living opalescent excrescence of the alchemical abyss of hyperspace, something generated by the sex act performed under such crazy conditions? … I christened the obsidian fluid we had generated ‘luv,’ something more than love, something less than love, perhaps not love at all, but some kind of unplumbed potential human experience very little is known about.

​

Translinguistic matter … an unplumbed potential human experience that very little is known about…
Although McKenna says he had smoked DMT, I suspect someone had actually slipped some Lacan into his pipe.

That obsidian-black matter beyond language, called “luv,” released in an act of bliss and acting as the medium of nonlocal information, sounds like nothing other than materialized jouissance, released in the rapturous rupture of the Symbolic order.**

Coagulating Jouissance

Is it perhaps possible for jouissance to spatially ‘materialize’ in some strange way or under certain circumstances, as an outcome of the temporal reordering implied by psi perception?

In previous posts I have described how misrecognized precognition could create an atemporal feedback loop that adds gravitational weight (i.e., meaning) to a minor coincidence, thus producing what people experience in hindsight as a synchronicity.

What if, on analogy with this, there could be an “aspatial” feedback loop that gives material density (or the appearance of density) to an idea, which through a similar chicken-and-egg tautological logic of being observed before it comes into being, feeds back on the prior observation, taking on a kind of temporary, palpable solidity or substantiality?

​

This admittedly crazy-sounding idea occurred to me not long ago after staring at a duck/rabbit image I have tacked up on my office wall. As I described in my “Rashomon Mind” post several months ago, I was doing this exercise in hopes that I could eventually make the image stabilize on a neither/nor state, thereby defeating or neutralizing the duck/rabbit’s oscillating force.

I would thus triumphantly disprove a century of psychological doctrine that the mind cannot tolerate contradiction.
It has proved harder than I expected, and my results are still inconclusive.

What I did not expect, however, and what astonished me, were certain brief visions that this practice generated … including briefly seeing the duck/rabbit as a solid, 3-D object pushing out of the paper.

Weirdly, I could briefly not only see but mentally “feel” the duck/rabbit’s solidity in space, like a heavy 5-inch-long lump of gray metal.
This was a typically fleeting ’Solaris-Mind’-type vision or hallucination, gone in a split second, but I suspect that this ‘felt sense’ of a solid physical object in one’s presence, as a result of meditation on a model of a desired object, could be the basis of tulpa experiences in much more adept meditators, or thought forms for adept magicians.

I don’t know, but perhaps it could also be the basis for palpably experienced magical phlegm described by McKenna.
When you stare at something long enough, you hallucinate it in a new, weird way.

In my synchronicity model–and this continues to be borne out in my observation of precognitive dreams–a central role is often played by trivial/mundane coincidence, which serves to make a future event, or multiple future events, into a seed around which the synchronicity forms.

In what I’m describing here, some brief expectation or misperception could serve, similarly, as the nucleus of the effect.
Such a thing could explain the theatrics and fraud that seems to be common in the study of even ‘genuine’ mediums and psychics.

A little bit of fraud or trickery to implant the expectation not only in others’ minds but also in one’s own mind could be a necessary seed to facilitate the conjuring of the substance of the Real out of the void, perhaps utilizing the “group effect” of shared expectation.

McKenna’s “luv” seems like such a possible materialization:
transitory and flickering, mirage-like, because it is a contradiction, arising from a paradoxical “loop” in the atemporal dimension of substance, mass, and meaning–a kind of intensification of the Real, generating itself as a cause, vanishing as a mirage afterward.

As in the self-confirming circular causation of synchronicity, a thought form conjured literally out of nothing could contribute to the mental state that gives rise to it–at least temporarily, while the conditions are exactly right, before evaporating.

If a mental state of ‘anticipation-of-seeing-X’ could be produced and stabilized by a talented trickster/shaman, a drug, or a piece of sophisticated illusionistic or mind-control technology, it might have the effect of actually temporarily manifesting an object that fulfills observers’ expectations, perhaps even exerting real causal effects in the world before it evaporates; a UFO or similar manifestation could actually feed on the strong emotional reactions of witnesses in order to take form.

Could this explain the theatrical aspects of some UFO sightings and apparitions?

​

The question is, again, would such a thing be only a hallucination?
It is one thing to trick oneself or maybe a small group of intoxicated people in the dim candle- or moonlight into seeing something compelling, but could there be “real reality” to these fleeting visions?

It sounds preposterous on one level, yet it occurs to me that the paradoxical substance of enjoyment, conjured into existence through careful manipulation of personal totems, would be a kind of shamanic model, in miniature, of how matter might arise as a product of contradiction in a parallactic relativistic universe where no two realities are alike and the future and past don’t neatly join along a nice seam.

By creating contradiction and intensifying it in the confined theaterlike setting of a shamanic ceremony/performance, might creation ex nihilo be what the most gifted shamans and ectoplasm spiritualists are demonstrating?

Is this what Fulcanelli was hinting at, when he said he knew that all things emerge from the womb of Isis?
Very suggestively, the central concept in Rene Schwaller’s Hermetic theory is Salt (part of the classical alchemical triad with Sulfur and Mercury), which he describes as having a “styptic”–that is, coagulating–function.

By “Salt” is he referring to light or observation itself (i.e., perception) as ‘coagulating’ a desired state of matter out of the quantum potential, perhaps by carefully timing the moment of observation?

Or is he referring to some literal conjuring of matter out of nothing, out of the primal chaos of the Real, the Buddhist void of no-self itself?
I wonder if psi is the basis of this, and could enable an acausal ‘bootstrapping’ of reality.

Is this bootstrapping what created (or, precipitated) the universe to begin with?
Was God just a mega-shaman who drew the universe out of his dark chest as a kind of cosmological phlegm?

 

[Skarekrow]

Interesting?
Now I wonder what it could be?
They’re warming us up.

NASA Will Announce A Major Mars Discovery On Monday

http://www.iflscience.com/space/nasa-announce-major-discovery-regarding-mars-monday​

 

[Skarekrow]

The Shadows of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mirror



​

Mirrors are powerful objects to humans.
From John Dee's scrying mirror, the metaphor of a black mirror popularized by the eponymous television show, and admonitions to cover a mirror under many circumstances, like the Jewish shiva or superstition.

Take Bloody Mary.
There are many interpretations of this legend, but here's what I learned as a kid.

At midnight, stand in darkened room facing a mirror and chant "Bloody Mary" three times.
She'll appear in the reflection and bad things will happen.

Fortunately, the worst that happened to me was scaring the shit out of my seven year old self.
According to Wikipedia, Bloody Mary shows young girls if they will marry or if they will die.

Opie and Tatem's indispensable A Dictionary Of Superstitions expresses a measure of caution with looking glasses:

In the chamber of death .. a dread is felt of some spiritual being imaging himself forth in the blank surface of the mirror .. I suspect that the true reason for shrouding the looking-glass .. is that given me in Warwickshire, that if you look into the mirror in the death-chamber, you will see the corpse looking over your shoulder.

​

What are we seeing if nothing paranormal is afoot?
The obvious, and unexpected, answer is "ourselves".

A recent study with the catchy name "Dissociation and hallucinations in dyads engaged through interpersonal gazing" by Giovanni Caputo, late of the University of Urbino, reveals people who stare at other people for extended periods begin to hallucinate.

Chitra Ramaswamy at The Guardian notes, "90% hallucinated a deformed face, 75% saw a monster, 50% said their partner’s face morphed into their own and 15% saw a relative’s face."

​

The latter two statistics are intriguing, where faces became more familiar and familial.
Ancient burial practices focused on imparting immortality upon the deceased.

Neolithic plastered human skulls and ancient Egypt's ushabti are physical representations of the deceased, reminding our forebears of the deceased's wisdom and, likely, manifesting as visual and/or auditory hallucinations.

These artifacts are part of the archaeological underpinnings of Julian Jaynes's compellingly controversial theory of the bicameral mind: that before humans became properly conscious, our actions were guided by the voices of ancestors and gods originating from our brain's right hemisphere.

Jaynes's description of consciousness, in relation to memory, proposes what people believe to be rote recollection are concepts, the platonic ideals of their office, the view out of the window, et al.

These contribute to one's mental sense of place and position in the world.
The memories enabling one to see themselves in the third person.

Bringing us back to Bloody Mary and Giovanni Caputo.
People staring at themselves in the mirror are looking at a different self, the unconscious visible in the conscious body.

After ten minutes of eye contact humans apprehend their other half, kept in check by the rational left hemisphere.
These hallucinations may communicate the subconscious's instincts and reactions kept silent during waking life.

Wisdom formerly ascribed to archaic gods and the dead.
Do you trust yourself enough to give it a shot?

​

 

[Skarekrow]

Psychic mediums tested under tightest laboratory conditions.
Proven accurate.
What will debunkers say now?

Dr. Julie Beischel’s newly published research on assisted after-death communication sets a new standard of proof, but don’t expect science to change its stance on psychic mediums.


​

Before becoming the preeminent researcher of medium communication, or as she likes to call it, “assisted after-death communication”, Dr. Julie Beischel was a newly-minted PhD in pharmacology and toxicology who was trying to come to grips with the loss of her mother.

Grief had led Dr. Beischel to the door of Dr. Gary Schwartz whose controversial research into medium communication had drawn national attention.
After several years of collaboration during which Dr. Beischel designed and implemented experiments which have become widely recognized as setting the gold standard in such research, Julie left the University of Arizona to found the Windbridge Institute.

Her research into medium communication and its effect on the bereaved continues to shed light on a phenomena that flies in the face of what science is telling us about life and death, and has the potential to redefine who we are.

Join Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dr. Julie Beischel:

Alex Tsakiris: You’re researching psychic mediums?
Is this some kind of joke?
Research and science doesn’t go with the term medium communication does it?

Dr. Beischel: Science is just a tool.
It’s just one way we learn how the universe works so it can be applied to anything.

And there were a lot of people with strong opinions about what the capacity of mediums is.
Can they report accurate and specific information?

So I took the scientific method and I applied it to mediumship. Again, it’s just a tool you can apply to anything and so yes, it does go together because it’s something we don’t fully understand yet. So yes, [mediumship] is the perfect thing for science to tackle because we don’t understand it.

——————————

Dr. Beischel: What we’ve found in all three of those ways that we look at scoring, we’ve achieved statistically significant positive results in a study done in 2007, and a replication study that we just published earlier in 2015.

So the original study was 16 readings and this most recent study is 58.
So that’s a total of 74 readings in which under these more than double-blind conditions mediums could report accurate and specific information about the deceased when no sensory information could be plausible for where they got their information…

Listen Now:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Click here for Final Transition Conference
Click here for Dr. Beischel’s Website​

Read Excerpts:

Dr. Beischel: George Clinton; George Hamilton; George Carlin; George Strait; George Bush–either one; George Noory; George Foreman; George Washington…all you have is the name George.

Now you have to describe personality, physical description, hobbies, cause of death, messages for the sitter…And you and your 19 friends have to do that to a statistically significant degree 58 times.

Alex Tsakiris: And that gets to the real question implied in this whole thing that we dance around and that’s why isn’t this research more widely accepted?
So you’re doing research experiment #2.

You’re trying to get people to jump on the bandwagon as you’ve just described and say, here, I’ve laid it all out, go replicate it.
But there is this underlying resistance to it because it is so threatening to science-as-we-know-it.

So what is the answer?
Your answer seems to be more good research and that science will prevail but do you really think that that’s the way this plays out?

Is anyone in the “scientific” community going to roll over and say, well, there it is.

Dr. Beischel: You know what?
I don’t care.

This is a replication study.
We’ve shown that it occurs twice now in two different population of mediums, and we’re the Windbridge Institute for Applied Research.

At the end of the day we care about how this affects people’s daily lives.
And we’ve talked about grief and the possible effect of mediumship readings on the bereaved.

And this research demonstrates that it’s possible that they’re not just doing a cold reading; that it’s not just rater bias; that they’re not engaged in fraud.
So something’s happening and people are engaged in it and it’s making them feel better.

So let’s tackle that.

Alex Tsakiris: One of the questions that you seem to be asking with this latest round of research is what is the effect of all this on the mediums?
And you seem to be looking at the psychophysiological effects and finding out that mediums have some different health issues than non-mediums do.

Can you tell us briefly what that research is all about and what you’ve discovered?

Dr. Beischel: I recently presented some results from this study at the Society for Scientific Exploration meeting.
And what we were seeing, just anecdotally, mediums on our team were reporting a lot of health issues.

So we thought maybe there’s something about performing a mediumship reading that has some negative effect on the body.
Maybe you get pumped full of cortisol.

Maybe you have a lot of adrenaline.
So we thought we’ll just do a shotgun approach and we’ll look at basic physiological measures — heart rate, blood pressure, that sort of thing.

———————————-

Dr. Beischel: Sixteen of the mediums took this health survey and 13 of them reported autoimmune disorders.
So if you just picked 16 women off the street of the same age that would be statistically almost impossible that 13 of them would have autoimmune disorders.

The same thing with migraines — the female population of mediums report a lot more than should be in this population of migraines.
And so I started to look into that and my current hypothesis, and I’m not the first person to say this, they also have a lot of childhood trauma.

And there’s a very clear association in mainstream research between childhood abuse and trauma and adult disease including autoimmune disorders and migraines among a million other things.

So I surveyed them about child abuse and they also scored off the charts in traumatic experiences in childhood.
So my current theory is it’s not mediumship that causes disease but it’s trauma that causes disease and mediumship.

 

[Kgal]

Psychic mediums tested under tightest laboratory conditions.
Proven accurate.
What will debunkers say now?

Dr. Julie Beischel’s newly published research on assisted after-death communication sets a new standard of proof, but don’t expect science to change its stance on psychic mediums.


​

Before becoming the preeminent researcher of medium communication, or as she likes to call it, “assisted after-death communication”, Dr. Julie Beischel was a newly-minted PhD in pharmacology and toxicology who was trying to come to grips with the loss of her mother.

Grief had led Dr. Beischel to the door of Dr. Gary Schwartz whose controversial research into medium communication had drawn national attention.
After several years of collaboration during which Dr. Beischel designed and implemented experiments which have become widely recognized as setting the gold standard in such research, Julie left the University of Arizona to found the Windbridge Institute.

Her research into medium communication and its effect on the bereaved continues to shed light on a phenomena that flies in the face of what science is telling us about life and death, and has the potential to redefine who we are.

....

HAH! This is great to see! What are the naysayers gonna say now.....eh?
I'm going to listen to the podcast.

 

[Skarekrow]

Interesting the lengths that materialist science will go to prove they are right…just more of the same taboos and dismissing of data while it’s glaring them in the face.

Scientists Investigate If Pets Telepathically Sense When Owners Are
Returning Home (+Video)

'Debunking' of psychic pet experiment questioned

[video=youtube;DkrLJhBC3X4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=DkrLJhBC3X4[/video]​

British psychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman is often consulted by media outlets as a skeptic of parapsychological claims.
For almost 20 years, controversy has surrounded his much-publicized “debunking” of an experiment in pet telepathy.

In June, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, who conducted the purportedly debunked experiments, published a summary of the debate in an attempt to vindicate his findings–that a dog named Jaytee displayed an amazing ability to sense when his owner was returning home.

Pam Smart adopted a terrier named Jaytee in 1988.
He would stay with her parents while she was away from home, and they noticed that he would go to the window and wait there expectantly before Smart returned home.

It didn’t matter what time of day she arrived, and he would be there for minutes before she came within sight of the house.
In 1994, she saw an article in the Telegraph newspaper asking for people whose pets seem to sense they are coming home to participate in an experiment conducted by Sheldrake.

Sheldrake has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge University and studied philosophy and history of science at Harvard University; he is known for his research on unexplained animal behavior as well as telepathy in various forms.

In about 100 experiments with Jaytee, Sheldrake ruled out various ordinary explanations.
Smart came home at varied times, ruling out routine.

She came home in taxis, in friends’ cars, or by foot, all to make sure the dog wasn’t just recognizing the sound of her car from afar.

When Wiseman conducted four experiments, he got essentially the same results, said Sheldrake, but he interpreted the data differently.
In both Sheldrake’s and Wiseman’s experiments, Jaytee would go to the window briefly throughout the day, but only when Smart was on her way home would he stay there and wait a significant amount of time.

Sheldrake plotted his own results and Wiseman’s results on graphs showing a dramatic spike in time spent at the window when Smart was on her way home–a rise from about 5 percent to about 80 percent.

While Wiseman has agreed that his data did show this pattern, he said that his criteria were different.
He started his experiment by defining Jaytee’s “signal” that Smart was returning home as the first time in the day when Jaytee went to the porch for no apparent reason (Reasons other than Smart’s return included spotting other dogs outside, people walking by, et cetera. These trips to the porch weren’t counted.).

He wrote, in a response to Sheldrake’s criticism:
“Before conducting our first experiment we realized that, to avoid possible post-hoc data selection, it was necessary to determine the criterion that would count as Jaytee’s ‘signal.'”

He continued:
“Our experiments set out to test the claim that Jaytee clearly signalled [Smart’s] journey home by going to her parents’ porch for no apparent reason. Testing this claim did not require plotting our data and looking for a pattern, but instead simply involved determining whether Jaytee’s ‘signal’ matched the time that [Smart] started to return home. … We therefore believe that the claim we tested, and the methods used to test that claim, are fully justified.”

In a 1997 special aired on British television, titled “Secrets of the Psychics,” Wiseman discussed his Jaytee experiments.
He said he filmed Jaytee continuously for a three-hour period and found that the dog went to the porch about once every 10 minutes; he said it was just a coincidence that Jaytee also went to the porch when Smart was on her way home.

Following Wiseman’s television “debunking,” headlines popped up in many newspapers along the lines of, “Pets Have No Sixth Sense, Say Scientists” (This headline was from The Independent).

Sheldrake maintained that Jaytee’s presence at the window was clearly more prolonged and significant when Smart was returning.
Wiseman argued in his 2000 response to Sheldrake’s criticisms that the patterns shown in Sheldrake’s graphs could be explained by Jaytee becoming more anxious as time goes on.

This would lead the dog to be at the window for longer when Smart was returning, since that would happen at the end of the experiment’s time period.
Sheldrake wrote in response, however, that: “In a series of control tests when Pam was not coming home during the test period, there was no sign of ‘anxiety’ with Jaytee going to the window more and more as time went on.”

He conducted further experiments on a dog named Kane, and published a study in Anthrozoos in 2000. In the introduction to that study, Sheldrake wrote:
“In random household surveys in Britain and the United States, an average of 48 percent of the dog owners said their animal anticipated the return of a member of the household. A fifth of these dogs were said to show their anticipation more than ten minutes in advance. Many dog owners claim that his behavior occurs even when the person returns at an unusual time and when the people at home do not know when they are returning.”

 

[Skarekrow]

HAH! This is great to see! What are the naysayers gonna say now.....eh?
I'm going to listen to the podcast.

I think this may have a lot to do with some of my own health issues.
I have had three times now, been approached (all women) unsolicited and told that I was a medium.
I have had my share of paranormal experiences as you know, but I wouldn’t say that I have ever had conscious direct connection with someone deceased.
Perhaps, it all takes place while I’m asleep.
I do get very strong negative or positive emotions from places and people from time to time, and from time to time, I will go to shake hands or hug someone and have to fight off tears because I get overwhelming feelings of grief or pain, or sadness.
At this point I don’t know if I should try to embrace this and develop it or try and shield myself from it all.

I don’t know if it has anything to do with my own autoimmune arthritis situation…what are your own thoughts?
What do you feel Kgal?

 

[Skarekrow]

Another excellent interview!
Enjoy!

New research reveals surprising connection between
environmental sensitivity and psychic phenomena

Recognized expert in ‘Sick Building Syndrome’, Mike Jawer has discovered a potential link between environmental sensitivity and psychic phenomena.


​

Join Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Michael Jawer, author of The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion about his research on environmental hazards and its connection to psychic experiences.

Mike Jawer: One concept that could be helpful is boundaries.
This is a big part of the book and a big part of how I come at things.

It’s this idea that all of us are somewhere on a spectrum of thick versus thin boundaries.
It talks about how people differ as far as their connection with other people and the environment.

Some people are, and you can just tell if you’ve been with them for a while, they’re kind of thick boundary people.
They don’t really reach out as thoroughly as other people.

They seem pretty rigid or armored and very decisive in saying this or that; using ‘or’ rather than ‘and’.
Then on the other side of the spectrum you have people who you can tell after a few minutes, they’re very flexible, they seem to be empathetic, they seem to be sensitive… and whatever the opposite of armored is.

These are the people who have a tendency for psychic experiences.
It’s not that the others couldn’t, but all the information that I’ve gathered and others have suggested that it’s thin boundary people who literally have less between them and the environment.

And if the environment is emotional–fundamentally I think that it is, that’s my thesis–they’re the ones who are more apt to experience that loss of boundary; and sort of venture out and feel what other people wouldn’t necessarily feel.

Listen Now:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Click here for Michael Jawer’s website
Click here for Michael Jawer’s blog on Psychology Today

​

Read Excerpts:

With respect to the reductionist paradigm, Mike suggests that neuroscience is making progress toward new ways of thinking about the mechanics of the mind.

Mike Jawer: In the book I’m pretty critical especially in the last chapter about reductionist neuroscience because I think any reductionist approach is counterproductive and ultimately not helpful.

Alex Tsakiris: Hold on, I think it’s falsified.
And I think there’s a huge distinction that we need to make there.

It just doesn’t fit the data.
Yet they keep advancing it, and the emperor has no clothes.

So the more we feed into this neuroscience model–it’s just bullshit.
It doesn’t hold up to the data.

Mike Jawer: Well it’s held up pretty well over hundreds of years.
I’m not saying that I’m reductionist myself.

I want to make that very clear.
And it, like all disciplines of science, has to evolve and the problem that neuroscientists have is they accept certain tenants about humanity that hold them back.

And you mentioned embodiment and that’s the main thing that I use to challenge neuroscience.
It’s coming around gradually.

It’s going to take a while but it’s moving in the right direction because neuroscientists need to understand that we’re not brain-based organisms.
I talk about the body as an orchestra [and] you have different players, and the brain might be the conductor let’s say.

But you’re not going to get any sound without the tubas and without the flutes and the trombones, the violins and so forth.
And they’re all parts of us.

There’s a field called psychoneuroimmunology which I discuss at length in the book.
Neuroscientists are gradually embracing and understanding that there are a myriad of connections between the brain and the rest of the body.

Citing Dr. Kevin Nelson’s theory of ‘REM intrusion’ as a possible cause of near-death phenomena, Mike suggests that universal emotion informs these experiences.

Alex Tsakiris: You’re doing an awesome job of trying to synthesize these different ideas and make them fit into a new–very open engagement with the data.
Having said that, I look at what you said about near-death experience and one of the first things I came across is your citing of Dr. Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology.

Mike Jawer: The University of Kentucky.

Alex Tsakiris: [He’s] someone who we’ve had on this show.
But soon after I heard him on his show talking about his REM Intrusion theory, I had on Dr. Jeffrey Long who not only assisted Dr. Nelson in putting together that research but then had to come out and tread that research.

No one talks about REM Intrusion with regard to near-death experience anymore.
It was a silly idea to begin with.

It was a poorly done study.
It just doesn’t have any legs but where we’re left with near-death experience is the questions you ask in the book.

I think this is not explainable inside our current model.
So I don’t understand how we can creep up to it and say, well people who are more sensitive have near-death experiences.

Or you talk about Dr. Bruce Greyson who found the same thing.
But all that is dancing around the main point: if you no longer have a brain; if you no longer have a body which is the claim of near-death experiences–these people are outside of their body, that’s the claim.

They are hearing from outside of the body.
They are seeing from outside of the body.

Again, this is the claim.
The embodiment thing falls way.

The neurological model falls way.
We have to look for something new don’t we?

Mike Jawer: Yes, I think that we do.
I don’t buy Dr. Nelson’s attempts to wedge near-death experiences into a sense of how the brain is barely operating.

I think I quote it in the book because I want to mention that there are neuroscientists that are looking at this as best they can.
I think [Dr. Nelson] was trying from his perspective to shed some light.

Alex Tsakiris: He was trying to jam it back into the neurological model.
He was trying to put a finger in the dike and hold the paradigm together.

It’s the same with Shermer.
These guys aren’t creeping toward making some big shift, they’re just trying to hold the thing together as the evidence piles up and says the emperor has no clothes.

Mike Jawer: I don’t disagree with you.
I guess I view it a little bit differently in the sense that–the model that I’m suggesting toward the end of the book [and] I move into this with discussion of near-death experiences: emotion is universal.

Mike talks about his study of emotion being the conductor of paranormal experiences which helps us tap into the mysteries of the universe.

Alex Tsakiris: A term that you use that you maybe want to explain is gateway–an “emotional gateway.”
I thought that was a cool way of putting it.

Mike Jawer: That was the original title of the book actually–the working title and the website for the book and the subsequent investigations of mine: www.emotiongateway.com. And I do believe that emotion, the more that I look at it.

Emotion seems to be a gateway into what we consider the paranormal.
And here I want to say that I’m not sure ultimately it is paranormal.

I think that the universe is much different than we take it to be, and it’s more grand there’s more going on than we can typically understand.
But emotion itself seems to be a vehicle for transporting people somehow into a different space, and a different time or for experiencing influences from another space or time.

Near-death experiences seem to be something like that.

Summarizing the goals of his research, Mike hopes that people will use his data as a framework for gauging their own experiences.

Mike Jawer: What I’m trying to put out there is a framework for people regardless of what they intuit or what they believe, or what they suspect, and look at this information along this particular framework.

Boundaries–thick to thin boundaries–and emotion is a unifying phenomenon in life and the universe, and everything.
I think it’s intriguing.

I think it gives people regardless of where they start out a leg to stand on and talk about these things together.

 

[Skarekrow]

I think I’m just fucked….*le sigh*

Research into the Sensitive Personality​

---

A growing body of research supports the notion that certain types of people are predisposed toward extraordinary sensitivity.
These findings approach sensitivity from two equally valid perspectives:

1. As a reaction to minute changes in a person’s internal state; and
2. As responsiveness to changing conditions outside the individual.

This look at the science and psychology of sensitivity begins with the nature of sense perception itself.

Inborn Sensory Differences

“No two people live in the same sensory world,” observes Paul Breslin, a neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

“The world you see, the food you taste, the odors you smell — all are perceived in a way unique to you.”
Testing at the Monell Center demonstrates, for example, that a bitter chemical known as PTC (phenylthiocarbamide) can be tasted by some people at the vanishingly small concentration of 18 parts per billion.

But if the concentration is high enough — say, 360 parts per million — everyone can taste it.
In the realm of scent, there’s a similar finding:
some people with cystic fibrosis can detect certain smells at levels ten thousand times weaker than the norm

The implications of this research are profound.
When one considers that virtually everything we know about ourselves and the world is based on information obtained through the senses, the fact that objective differences exist between people suggests that our ‘consensus’ reality may encompass a far wider spectrum than previously appreciated.

High Sensitivity

Elaine Aron, a clinical psychologist, has written extensively about Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs), a term she coined based on interviews or consultations with thousands of individuals.

Aron describes HSPs as: “born with a tendency to notice more in their environment and deeply reflect on everything before acting…They are also more easily overwhelmed by ‘high volume’ or large quantities of input arriving at once.”

While some HSPs report having at least one sense that is very keen, their entire bodies process information more thoroughly than other people.

HSPs are thus more affected by pain and various medications, and have more reactive immune systems and more allergies.

HSPs are also highly empathetic, feeling their own emotions and paying heed to others’ most intensively.
They tend to have rich inner lives, with complex, vivid dreams.

They can come across as highly perceptive, creative and intuitive when able to surmount what often is a natural inclination toward shyness, fearfulness, stress, and withdrawal.

High and Low Reactors

Two Harvard University psychologists, Jerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman, have done much to document that people fall naturally into one of these two categories.

In their book The Long Shadow of Temperament, Kagan and Snidman note that approximately one-fifth of the young children they’ve studied are ‘high reactors’ who demonstrate high levels of discomfort or distress at novel stimuli or situations.

The 40% who are ‘low reactors,’ in contrast, welcome and adapt to new experience.
This pattern typically extends into adolescence and beyond.

Sensory Defensiveness

Psychologist Sharon Heller expounds on what she terms ‘sensory defensiveness’ in her book Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight.
The individuals she points to have been unusually sensitive as long as they can remember.

Their parents will often recall that, as infants, they may not have liked being cuddled, or that they had an exaggerated reaction to sounds, tastes or smells.

However, writes Heller, “any trauma that disrupts the nervous system at any age can generate sensory defensiveness," including head injury and psychological abuse.

Such severe or long-standing trauma can “alter brain chemistry and literally rewire the brain."

Sensory overload, however acquired, can increase stress as well as vulnerability to illness.
Heller implicates the body's fight-or-flight system.

In people who are sensory defensive, she says, this system is constantly in operation.
Environmental stimuli that wouldn’t trigger a stressful reaction in other people cause a chronic stress response in these individuals.

Once the immune system is depleted and the body succumbs, the stage is set for a variety of ailments, including:

1. chronic fatigue
2. sleep difficulties
3. decreased ability to concentrate
4. high blood pressure
5. headaches
6. irritable bowel syndrome
7. ulcers and gastrointestinal problems
8. allergies and skin disorders
9. aching muscles
10. chronic pain
11. depression

Sensory Processing Disorder

This condition was first described by an occupational therapist, the late Dr. Jean Ayres, as revolving around difficulty handling information coming through the senses.

She likened SPD to a “traffic jam in the brain,” whereby the individual fails to recognize where a given sensation is coming from and whether that sensation is important or trivial, dangerous or benign.

Children, whose nervous systems are still developing, are especially affected.

Two senses, beyond the usual five, appear to be affected: the proprioceptive and vestibular systems.
These indicate, respectively, where our limbs are in relation to the rest of our body and how our body is oriented in space.

Examples of difficulties with these senses include:

1. Having shaky balance or difficulty maintaining an upright position
2. Not using the left and right sides of one’s body in a coordinated manner
3. Being unsure how to carry out new or unfamiliar movements
4. Bumping into people and things and being generally clumsy

In addition, children with SPD may have extreme reactions to sensory stimuli that their peers take for granted. (In this respect, the condition overlaps with High Sensitivity and Sensory Defensiveness.)

Such children will feel overwhelmed, confused, and/or tormented on an ongoing basis.
Their frustration, in turn, frequently translates into problematic behavior: irritability, jumpiness, full-blown tantrums.

To parents, teachers, and peers, this behavior occurs for no apparent reason and is interpreted as moodiness, stubbornness, spaciness, or just plain disrespect.

Children with SPD become ostracized and labeled as discipline problems or as learning disabled.

Some kids with SPD report anomalous perceptions.
Allergies and other immune issues crop up as well.

Thin Boundaries

The personality construct of Boundaries was developed by Ernest Hartmann, a psychiatrist and sleep disorder researcher.
He asserts that each person can be characterized on a spectrum of boundaries from thick to thin.

Thick boundary people “strike us as very solid and well organized; they keep everything in its place.
They are well defended.

They seem rigid, even armored; we sometimes speak of them as thick-skinned.”
At the other end of the spectrum, thin boundary individuals are “especially sensitive, open, or vulnerable.
In their minds, things are relatively fluid.”

Other characteristics of the thin boundary personality type are:

• A less solid or definite sense of one’s own skin as a body boundary
• An enlarged sense of merging with another person when kissing or making love
• A penchant for immersing oneself in something — whether a personal relationship, a memory or a daydream
• Sensitivity to physical and emotional pain, in oneself as well as in others
• An enhanced ability to recall dreams but also a tendency to experience nightmares

Thin boundary individuals, Hartmann proposes, are unusually sensitive from an early age, so they react more intensively to the usual traumas and difficulties of childhood.

They are easily hurt, with intensely emotional memories carried into adulthood.

At least 5,000 people have taken the Boundary Questionnaire and more than 100 papers reference this robust concept.
Hartmann believes it is not just a useful way to describe salient psychological differences but will be shown to reflect actual variations in neural and somatic functioning.

Somatization

Rather than assume that physical sensitivities predate or condition the psychological consequences, perhaps an individual's highly-charged psychological issues can be transmuted into physical symptoms such as asthma and other forms of allergy, chronic pain and fatigue, and sleep disorders.

This is the approach taken by Ian Wickramasekera, a psychologist intrigued by the psychosomatic nature of certain illnesses.
"Put simply," he writes, "the [individual] is being…made sick by distressing secret perceptions, memories, or moods that [he/she] blocks from consciousness."

The affected person can become hypersensitive and/or absorbed in the problems of others to such an extent that somatic symptoms develop out of his/her 'surplus empathy.'

This process he terms Somatization.

Over-Excitabilities

Kazimierz Dabrowski (1902-1980), a Polish physician interested in personality development, studied 'gifted’ individuals and noted five recurring traits.

These he termed ‘over-excitabilities’:

• Psychomotor — a surplus of energy, restlessness, curiosity
• Sensual — a strong reaction to sensory stimuli; pronounced aesthetic awareness
• Imaginational — strong visual thinking, vivid fantasy life, remembers dreams, enjoys poetry or metaphorical speech
• Intellectual — intense focus on particular topics, enjoys questioning and complex reasoning, problem solving
• Emotional — heightened emotional reactions, need for strong attachments, empathetic, difficulty adjusting to change

'Over-excitability,' the translation of Drabowski's concept into English, is meant to convey the sheer abundance of energy possessed by gifted individuals and manifested in these areas.

He believed that, by virtue of such energy, they not only think differently from their peers, they also register perceptions more intensively and feel things more deeply.

Interestingly, profoundly gifted children (e.g., prodigies) are known to relate accounts of what appear to be ‘past lives.’
These children — particularly between the ages of 3 and 5 — may speak of their “other mothers” from “before” when they lived someplace else.

They may (often with intense feeling) identify places they supposedly frequented and things they supposedly did.
They may also tell of seeing or speaking to relatives or friends who have died, and insist that the interactions are real.

Absorption

The thin boundary trait of immersing oneself in something is termed 'absorption.'
As articulated by psychologists Auke Tellegen and Gilbert Atkinson in 1974, it is “a disposition for having episodes of total attention… result[ing] in a heightened sense of reality of the attentional object, imperviousness to distracting events, and an altered sense of reality in general."

Some statements conveying this capacity are the following:

• “The sound of a voice can be so fascinating to me that I just go on listening to it.”
• “While acting in a play, I have sometimes really felt the emotions of the character and have 'become' him or her…forgetting both myself and the audience.”
• “I can sometimes recollect certain past experiences in my life with such clarity and vividness that it is like living them again.”
• “If I wish, I can imagine (or daydream) some things so vividly that they hold my attention in the way a good movie or story does.”

Absorption is closely related to both hypnotic susceptibility and dissociation (the sense of being distant from oneself, numb, or on automatic pilot).

Lines between what is manifestly real and what is imaginary become blurred as the person becomes immersed in some reverie or experience.

Such deep experiences are sometimes perceived as mystical or transcendent.

Fantasy-Proneness

Psychologists Sheryl Wilson and Theodore Barber in 1983 profiled what they called the ‘fantasy-prone personality’ based on a study of 52 female subjects.

These women engaged in vivid fantasy much of the time, and experienced what they imagined “as real as real.”

Their capacity for fantasy was often evident from an early age, and appeared to be built on a profound involvement with sensory experience.

A fantasy-prone person will, for example, while "watching a bird or looking at a tree…suddenly lose the sense of their body and feel they are the bird or the tree."

Or they will 'see,' 'hear,' 'smell' and 'feel' what is being described during a conversation — an ability remarkably close to synesthesia. Imaginary companions, imaginary worlds, and imaginary sensations may be conjured up and experienced as if they are the real thing.

The experience is akin to a full-fledged hallucination.

To a great extent, fantasy-prone persons see themselves as psychic and report many anomalous perceptions, such as telepathy, precognition, being out-of-body, seeing or hearing apparitions, and having an anomalous influence on electrical appliances.

Transliminality

The idea that certain people have an exceptionally fluid ‘connectedness within’ has a distinguished history.
An early exponent was psychologist William James, who, along with many of colleagues, was much taken with ‘subliminal consciousness.’

Today the concept is advanced by Australian researcher Michael Thalbourne, who has updated and refreshed it.

Thalbourne defines transliminality as “the tendency for psychological material to cross thresholds in or out of consciousness.”
Persons who are highly transliminal, he says, would be expected to have mystical, creative, and psychic experiences based on material bubbling up from the preconscious.

Such perceptions would rarely occur to individuals low in transliminality.
Studies done by Thalbourne and his colleagues disclose nine aspects of this personality trait:

• Creativity
• Mystical or religious experience
• Magical thinking (i.e., believing that one can or does influence external events not normally open to personal influence — or seeing affirmation of one’s attitude or wishes in the external environment)
• Manic-like experience
• Absorption
• Fantasy-proneness
• Paranormal belief and experiences
• Interest in dream interpretation
• Heightened environmental sensitivity

Context Induced Experiences

A key question that arises with regard to both fantasy-proneness and high transliminality is: What, exactly, is crossing into awareness?
To what extent is the imagery or perception an accurate representation of what’s in the external environment, versus a reflection of one’s internal feelings or preoccupations?

Put another way, how likely is it that this type of individual is so empathetic and so suggestible that legitimate external stimuli prompt his/her internal imagery machine to manufacture an experience that’s mistaken for real?

Apparitions can certainly be provoked by an intense need for something: think of island castaways conjuring up a realistic rescue ship or parched nomads visualizing an oasis in the desert.

And some people can easily be tricked into ‘sensing’ that which does not exist.
This was memorably demonstrated one April Fools on BBC Television, when viewers were told by a respected professor that it was now possible to broadcast smells — and that the aromas of onion and coffee could be perceived by anyone doing enough concentrating on his/her end of the television.

Hundreds of viewers wrote in to say that they had, indeed, picked up those particular scents (along with a few others not mentioned).

Genetic Basis for Sensitivity

One of the key results of the Environmental Sensitivity Survey (PDF, 10pp, 240KB) is that ‘sensitive’ respondents were more than twice as likely as controls to indicate that an immediate family member was affected by the same physical, mental, or emotional conditions as they themselves checked on the survey.

This suggests that anomalous perception itself may have a genetic basis.

Several pieces of recent research stand out.
Carla Shatz, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, has shown that a particular protein molecule — previously thought to be solely a part of the immune system — plays a critical role in early brain wiring.

While her discovery was made in mice, the same might be found to apply to humans.
In fact, Shatz notes that the gene associated with this protein in humans is located on a chromosome segment that has been implicated in a number of neurological disorders, including dyslexia.

"It is time for people to think out of the box," she remarks.
"All bets are off when it comes to how these immune molecules are functioning in the brain."

A relationship between dyslexia, migraine headache and allergies had been postulated by the late Norman Geschwind, a predecessor of Schatz’ at Harvard.

In this context, it may be noteworthy that 14% of the respondents to the Environmental Sensitivity Survey indicated they were dyslexic — versus none of the controls.

Another researcher, Lisa Boulanger of the University of California — San Diego, is exploring whether the seeds of autism might be planted in babies whose mothers are affected by viral infection during a particular juncture in their pregnancy.

Could it be that an over-stimulated immune system affects the baby’s developing brain?
Boulanger points out, as others have, that autism is often accompanied by sensory overload, and sees this as a clue: perhaps the children of mothers who had challenges to their immune system during pregnancy lack the ability to filter out extraneous sensory information.

“All of these things are just correlated in a very interesting way,” she observes.

Speaking of interesting, a remarkable inherited difference has been found for — of all things — dancing.
An Israeli study of 85 dancers and advanced dancing students found that they have variants of two particular genes whose expression is linked to spiritual experience as well as social communication.

This suggests that certain people literally “born to dance,” according to researcher Richard Ebstein.
“The genes we studied are…related to the emotional side of dancing — the need and ability to communicate with other people and a spiritual side to their natures that not only enables them to feel the music but to communicate the feeling to others via dance.”

Memory, too — or at least certain forms of it — appears to have a genetic basis.
Persons with a particular gene variant have been found to be twice as good at remembering emotionally charged events as individuals with the more common version of the gene.

Given that individuals with ‘thin boundaries’ retain vivid childhood memories — particularly of perceived trauma — the implications for sensitivity are obvious.

It’s likewise been found that people with variations in a particular stress-related gene appear to have been affected more strongly by abuse at an early age than comparable individuals without this particular genetic variation.

The terrible legacy may persist into adulthood in the form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

If such a susceptibility is inherited, it’s fair to wonder if anomalous experience — which the sensitivity survey links to childhood trauma — has a genetic basis as well.

 

[Kgal]

What we need is a miracle pill coated with chocolate created by Miracle Max!

I'll come back to answer your question. Right now I'm laughing..... the Princess Bride is one of the best films ever!!

[video=youtube;d4ftmOI5NnI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=6&amp;v=d4ftmOI5NnI[/video]

 

[Skarekrow]

Not female, but I can relate to most of these…this goes with the post a couple back ^^^
Enjoy!!

What Traits Are Characteristic of a Sensitive Neurobiology?​

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Self-described ‘sensitives’ who completed the Environmental Sensitivity Survey(PDF, 10pp, 240KB) report, among other things:

• Longstanding allergies
• Chronic pain and fatigue
• Depression
• Migraine headaches
• Pronounced sensitivity to light, sound, and smell

These individuals also tend to report that immediate family members suffered from the same conditions.
This raises the question of whether a genetic basis for extraordinary sensitivity may exist.

The Findings

The survey found 8 factors that appear to be significant in the profile of a sensitive person:

• Being female
• Being a first-born or only child
• Being single
• Being ambidextrous
• Appraising oneself as imaginative
• Appraising oneself as introverted
• Recalling a plainly traumatic event (or events) in childhood
• Maintaining that one affects - or is affected by – lights, computers, and other
  electrical appliances in an unusual way

Synesthesia – the scientifically recognized condition of overlapping senses, such as hearing colors or tasting shapes – was reported by approximately 10% of the sensitive group but not at all among controls.

This finding gives added weight to the possibility that anomalous perceptions stem from an underlying neurobiology of sensitivity.
An individual’s neurobiology is shaped by nurture, too – which the survey findings affirm.

Recall of a traumatic event in childhood was indicated by three times as many sensitives as controls.
Furthermore, a startling 14% of sensitives reported having been struck by lightning or suffering an electrical shock, whereas none of the control group did.

---

The Implications

It seems likely that certain people are, from birth onward, disposed to a number of conditions, illnesses, and perceptions that, in novelty as well as intensity, distinguish them from the general population.

If so, anomalous experience might have a bona fide neurobiological basis that makes it accessible to scientific inquiry.

The factors mentioned above, which appear to be significant in the makeup of a sensitive person, are consistent with a good deal of current knowledge.

Science is determining, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no two people live in the identical sensory world.
How each of us is arrayed to process incoming stimuli – and the characteristic way we process feeling – will tell a highly individual tale.

Gender Differences

Women predominate among all forms of environmental sensitivity.
This should not be surprising since the female of the species is innately different than the male.

In fact, the closer we look at gender, the more significant this basic biological difference becomes.

Women exhibit markedly greater sensitivity across all five senses.
They have a lower threshold and tolerance for pain than men.

They are also vastly more susceptible to a range of autoimmune diseases.

Many brain structures differ in size between the genders.
The hippocampus (which has a role in memory) is larger in women, while the amygdala (the brain’s ‘alarm circuit’) is larger in men.

Production of various neurotransmitters differs as well.'
Perhaps even more importantly, the back portion of the corpus callosum (an elongated bundle of nerve fibers carrying information between the brain's two halves) is wider and larger in women than in men.

This latter fact supports the idea that, throughout their lives, females may boast greater communication between the hemispheres.

In general, men are wired to be more attuned to what’s going on outside of their body, while women are wired to be more vigilant to what’s happening inside.

And study after study shows that women are more adept at remembering emotionally-tinged information.

Naturally, one might say, women are more prone than men to report anomalous perceptions.

First-Born or Only Child

Some evidence suggests that first-borns are more likely to suffer from various allergies because they have a greater susceptibility determined in utero.

Many children who have imaginary companions tend to be first-born or only children.
These findings may help explain why a large proportion of self-described sensitives stated in the survey that they are first-born or only children.

Being Single

The survey showed that sensitives are more likely than controls to be single or divorced/separated, and (the flip side) less likely to have ever been married.

One interpretation is that sensitives tend to have personal issues that make marriage more problematic for both them and their partners.

Alternately, since the average age of the control group was slightly higher, it could be that some of the sensitive respondents are approaching an age at which they get married, rather than being married already.

Being Ambidextrous

Many more sensitive respondents than controls indicated they are ambidextrous.
Given what we know of the corpus callosum, it’s distinctly possible that a greater degree of interchange exists between the hemispheres in persons who are sensitive.

This would explain not only why women are disproportionately sensitive but why at least some sensitives tend to use both hands rather than preferring one.

Current research also suggests that persons with a higher degree of ‘mixed handedness’ show a greater tendency toward magical thinking (e.g., paranormal belief), a higher likelihood of experiencing déjà vu, and a greater benefit from placebo treatments.

These personality traits could be manifestations of ‘hyperconnectivity’ in the mixed handed brain.

Self-Assessment as Imaginative

The fact that sensitives (both men and women) rate themselves significantly higher on imagination makes perfect sense if we remember that sensitivity is likely associated with being thin boundary, fantasy-prone, inclined to absorption, and highly transliminal.

These perceptual/Personality styles should indeed equate to viewing the world (not to mention oneself) quite differently.
Imaginative? Creative? Artistic? You bet.

Self-Assessment as Introverted

The survey item on self-assessment of temperament (introversion/extroversion) yielded an interesting gender difference.
Sensitivity is evidently associated with the self-perception of introversion – but only for women.

Men, especially among controls, apparently consider themselves introverted or restrained as a matter of course.
This discrepancy, one could venture, has at least as much to do with learned style as innate biology.

Migraine

In the United States, 12 percent of the population suffers from migraine.
Women are three times as likely as men to be affected, though the disparity is not life long: it holds between the onset of puberty and the occurrence of menopause.

Current thinking is that individual sufferers have a more sensitive nervous system than most.
Factors that can bring on a headache include stress, noise, glare, certain odors or foods, and even weather conditions (changing temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, winds).

Individuals prone to migraine may also be extra sensitive to their own, internal ‘landscape’ of feeling.
There is reason to believe that the dynamics of migraine effectively parallel those of emotion.

Oliver Sacks, the renowned neurologist, asserts that migraine is “conspicuously a psychophysiological event...an oblique expression of feelings which are denied direct or adequate expression.”

When a person is caught unawares by powerful feelings, and has no suitable way to acknowledge and/or discharge the inner agitation, a migraine may result.

(Edit: on a personal note, right after my Dad died I got my first migraine, so this makes sense)

Role of Recollected Trauma

An especially noteworthy distinction between sensitives and controls relates to the recall of a traumatic event in childhood.
To explain this, we might note that sensitives are also more apt to identify an immediate family member who suffered from alcoholism or depression/mood imbalance.

If we assume that parents who are in the grip of these conditions are likelier to mistreat their children – or go into funks that precipitate a family crisis – then it only makes sense that these children should recollect traumatic experiences.

An alternate explanation draws from the understanding that some individuals are, from infancy, more excitable, more reactive, and more easily stressed than other people.

As children, wouldn’t they be more likely to be adversely affected by events that, to less sensitive children, might not seem so ‘traumatic’? In other words, innate environmental sensitivities could be the driver of adult personality – rather than, as many researchers would have it, the other way around.

Near-death researcher Kenneth Ring holds a similar view.
His survey respondents volunteered a greater incidence of childhood abuse, trauma, and illness than controls.

On psychological profiles, they manifested greater dissociative tendencies.
Ring’s opinion is that these individuals are “sensitives with low stress thresholds” who, through “their difficult and in some cases even tormented childhoods…have come to develop an extended range of human perception.”

Perceived Electrical Sensitivity

One of the survey’s most interesting results is the extent to which persons who consider themselves sensitive claim that their very presence affects lights, computers, and other electrical appliances in an unusual way.

This could, of course, be viewed as a manifestation of certain people’s tendency to apply highly improbable explanations to fairly typical events.

Personality characteristics presumed to play a role include fantasy proneness, absorption, suggestibility, and transliminality.

However, as an unusually high percentage of the ‘sensitive’ survey respondents indicated that they’d been struck by lightning or otherwise suffered a severe electrical shock (a memorable and potentially verifiable event), electrical sensitivity could represent a bona fide aspect of sensitivity.

In the 1980s, British researcher Michael Shallis surveyed hundreds of people – the vast majority of them women – who’d claimed to be electrically sensitive.

Certain associations jumped out: with allergy; (70% of Shallis’ sample); susceptibility to loud sounds and bright lights (70% again); a claim to have been struck by lightning (23%); to be affected by advancing thunderstorms (60%); and to have had a psychic experience (69%).

Shallis himself deduced a connection between strong feelings, electrical sensitivity, and reported anomalies.
He acknowledges that we don’t know what we don’t know, remarking that electromagnetism -- "the physical force most apparent to us at the level at which we perceive the material world" – may be the vehicle for life forces that, at present, we simply do not comprehend.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is the blending of senses that, in most people, are separate and distinct.
While non-synesthetes may say metaphorically, "This wine tastes wonderfully dry" or "I sure feel blue today," the synesthete actually experiences such perceptions.

For him/her, a taste can be round or pointy, a word can taste like potatoes, the sound of a violin can be felt on the face, a letter or number or even a smell can have its own vivid and recurring color.

What also makes synesthesia remarkable is its automatic and vivid nature.
Synesthetes regard their co-mingled perceptions as real as anyone else’s; they are not merely imagined in the mind’s eye.

Neuroimaging data bear this out.
Nearly all synesthetes have experienced their impressions from an early age – and presumed that their families and friends did, too.

Indeed, the phenomenon is known to run in families, suggesting that it is inherited.

The condition also has an oft-noted relationship with hypersensitivity.
One synesthete puts it this way: “I tend to get overloaded quickly: like there's just too much sensory perception coming in at one time, and I have a hard time sorting it out and coping with it...Shopping can do it. Being in a store where there's a lot of noise, colors, smells - it's just too much.”

There’s also a tantalizing link with anomalous perception – first brought to light by researcher Richard Cytowic – and borne out by results of the Environmental Sensitivity Survey. (PDF, 10pp, 240KB)