Hi! I subscribe to Newscientist and some of the information I was sent caught my eye and interest:
This is the big one. The notion that we have free will - the ability to exercise conscious control over our actions and decisions - is deeply embedded in human experience. But the more we learn about the physical universe and the human brain, the less plausible it becomes (New Scientist, 16 April, p 32).
One argument goes as follows: the universe, including the bits of it that make up your brain, is entirely deterministic. The state it is in right now determines the state it will be a millisecond, a month or a million years from now. Therefore free will cannot exist.
Neuroscience has also chipped in. Around 30 years ago psychologist Benjamin Libet discovered that if you ask people to make voluntary movements, their brains initiate the movement before they become consciously aware of any intention ...
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Your senses are your windows on the world, and you probably think they do a fair job at capturing an accurate depiction of reality. Don't kid yourself. Sensory perception - especially vision - is a figment of your imagination. "What you're experiencing is largely the product of what's inside your head," says psychologist Ron Rensink at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "It's informed by what comes in through your eyes, but it's not directly reflecting it."
Given the basic features of your visual system, it couldn't be any other way. For example, every 5 seconds or so, you blink. Yet unless you're thinking about it, as you probably are right now, you don't notice the blackouts because your brain edits them out.
Blinking is just the tip of the iceberg. Even when your eyes are open they're only taking in a fraction of the visual information that is available.
In the centre of your retina is a dense patch of photoreceptor cells about 1 millimetre across. This is the fovea, the visual system's sweet spot where perception of detail and colour is at its best. "When you move away from the fovea, visual acuity falls away really quickly, and colour vision disappears," says Rensink. About 10 degrees to the side of the fovea, visual acuity is only about 20 per cent of the maximum.
What that means is you can only capture a tiny percentage of the visual field in full colour and detail at any one time. Hold your hand at arm's length and look at your thumbnail. That is roughly the area covered by the fovea. Most of the rest is captured in fuzzy monochrome.
And yet vision doesn't actually feel like this: it feels like a movie. That, in part, is because your eyes are constantly flitting over the visual scene, fixing on one spot for a fraction of a second then moving on. These jerky eye movements are called saccades and they happen about 3 times a second and last up to 200 milliseconds. With each fixation your visual system grabs a bite of high-resolution detail which it somehow weaves together to create an illusion of completeness.
That's remarkable given that during saccades themselves, you are effectively blind. Your eyes don't stop transmitting information as they lurch from one fixation to the next, but for about 100 milliseconds your brain is not processing it.
Look in the mirror and deliberately flick your eyes from left to right and back again. You won't see your eyes move - not because the movement is too fast (other people's saccades are visible), but because your brain isn't processing the information.
Given that you perform approximately 150,000 saccades every day, that means your visual system is "offline" for a total of about 4 hours during each waking day even without blinking (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 12, p 466). Yet you don't notice anything amiss.
Exactly how your brain weaves such fragmentary information into the smooth technicolour movie that we experience as reality remains a mystery. One leading idea is that it makes a prediction and then uses the foveal "spotlight" to verify it. "We create something internally and then we check, check, check," says Rensink. "Essentially we experience the brain's best guess about what is happening now."
In conjuring up this "now", the visual system has to do something even more remarkable: predict the future. Information striking the fovea cannot be relayed instantaneously to conscious perception: first it has to travel down the optic nerve and be processed by the brain. This takes several hundred milliseconds, by which time the world has moved on. And so the brain makes a prediction about what the world will look like about 200 milliseconds into the future, and that is what you see. Without this future projection you would be unable to catch a ball, dodge moving objects or walk around without crashing into things.
There's another huge hole in the visual system that can render you oblivious to things that should be unmissable. The jerky movements that shift your fovea around the visual scene don't happen at random - they are directed by your brain's attentional system. Sometimes you consciously decide what to attend to, such as when you read. At other times your attention is grabbed by a movement in your peripheral vision or an unexpected noise.
The problem with attention is that it is a limited resource. For reasons that remain unknown, most people are unable to keep track of more than four or five moving objects at once. That can lead your visual system to be oblivious to things that are staring you in the face.
The most famous demonstration of this "inattention blindness" is the invisible gorilla, a video-based experiment created by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Viewers are asked to pay close attention to a specific aspect of a basketball game, and around half completely fail to see a person in a gorilla suit walk slowly across the screen, beat their chest and walk off again.
Summerlander, I think you'd enjoy the book "Is There Life After Death" by Anthony Peake.
I'm not mentioning it because of the central premise (that I won't even go into) but because of the case histories and experiments showing exactly what this article is talking about.
Very cool.
Thanks, I'll look out for it in the library. I remember flicking through a book called Is There An Afterlife? once by David Fontana. It was an interesting book too especially at the time when I had my first few OOBEs. :-)
This is related to the study that received all the press about students who were precognitive when it came to emotional images (especially porn). They had split second reactions to the image BEFORE they saw it. Similar theories were explored in the book "Blink." Goes to show you there's more than meets the eye when it comes to our senses. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20447-journal-rejects-studies-contradicting-precognition.html
Yes, I read that one too. That makes me suspect that certain dream states can place emphasis on this precognition.
There have been a few precognitive OOBEs reported too. They seem to be projections to future time zones if not revelations of possible futures with a high probability. I suspect this may be more common than we think considering that not all experiences get to be validated by actual future events.
I've had a two precognitive LDs both of which I was 'shaken' awake from, perhaps so I would remember them.
One was my future boyfriend introducing himself by name who said "he was the one" but that I shouldn't tell him when I met him (since undoubtedly this would have freaked him out). Sure enough two weeks later I met a man with this name who would become my boyfriend and be instrumental in my life. This is someone I wouldn't normally have dated but I gave him a chance and it changed my life. I believe when we come to crucial crossroads that our higher self interjects these messages instead our usual stumbling along figuring it out for ourselves.
(The other dream was information a co-worker needed and it helped save his job since the scenario I described materialized that day so he was emotionally ready for it.)
I also awoke on the morning of the Japanese earthquake to see a vortex spinning in my room. Not sure what that meant - either to stay in the vortex (Abraham Hicks term) about earth changes or it was a glimpse of the whirlpools I saw on the news that day from the tsunami.
Lately my husband and I will say a (usually unusual) phrase and then the TV will air exactly the same phrase seconds later. It's a fun way to get validation that we're tapped in.
There were various experiments done which indicated that the brain reacted to external stimuli *before* they actually occurred.
I wish I had the links....
Yes, this is one of the better research studies out there. Saw the author on The Colbert Report. Very convincing.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19712-is-this-evidence-that-we-can-see-the-future.html
that's kind of what blink is about.
Anybody interested in more evidence of precognition should check this video of Dean Radin "Science and the taboo of psi" out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew
Quote from: XNomadX on May 18, 2011, 02:26:37
Anybody interested in more evidence of precognition should check this video of Dean Radin "Science and the taboo of psi" out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew
You should also read his book "Entangled Minds" - it's a meta-analysis of psi research over the past like 70 years. when you average out all of the results we're talking somewhere in the order of millions or billions to one against chance that psi phenomena is real and measurable.
All this material is quite interesting, but I'm curious as to how it strikes you personally. Does it challenge your current beliefs? PR's last post left me wriggling. Can you guys emotionally detach yourselves from conclusions that run counter to your ideas? Have y'all eschewed belief altogether for pure "knowing"?
Quote from: personalreality on May 19, 2011, 11:24:54
You should also read his book "Entangled Minds" - it's a meta-analysis of psi research over the past like 70 years. when you average out all of the results we're talking somewhere in the order of millions or billions to one against chance that psi phenomena is real and measurable.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll make sure to check the book out. Thanks
QuoteAll this material is quite interesting, but I'm curious as to how it strikes you personally. Does it challenge your current beliefs? PR's last post left me wriggling. Can you guys emotionally detach yourselves from conclusions that run counter to your ideas? Have y'all eschewed belief altogether for pure "knowing"?
Does it challenge my current beliefs? Not really, I don't commit myself to any belief, I always approach everything I see and experience with an open mind with a fair amount of skepticism to maintain at least a moderate level of sanity. Not fearing what would become of me after death certainly helps. I don't find the prospect of dissolution that bad in all honesty. To answer your second question, no, I don't attach myself emotionally to any theory or belief. I tend to look at life from the point of view of a detached outsider with the least amount of bias as possible in the hope that I would acquire a clearer understanding of the nature/purpose of life assuming there is a purpose at all. So why am I here? Well... curiosity, my mind is of an inquisitive nature and I find all of this stuff to be quite fascinating. What about you? For the record, I identify myself as an iconoclast as well.
I wish I could say i've past the need for belief but the one thing I do know is that I'm chock full of 'em. I'm certain that with the beliefs is a degree of emotional attachment. However, I don't overly identify myself with the beliefs. There was a gentleman on these boards who became quite indignant when others of contrary opinion, would not cow to his views. Heated on both side to be sure. My process is to the point where I wouldn't enter the fray because I don't feel the need for everyone to agree with me. I work for a very religious fellow. We used to exchange over the bible and his worldview. In 13 years, he doesn't know my metaphysics, nor does he care to find out. I'm good with that. I wish I could say I'm past belief,past desire, past delusion, but I'm not. I guess I'm just not that enlightened. Meh, it's a process, yes?
-Jim-
Quote from: Thread Killer on May 20, 2011, 19:33:38
I wish I could say i've past the need for belief but the one thing I do know is that I'm chock full of 'em. I'm certain that with the beliefs is a degree of emotional attachment. However, I don't overly identify myself with the beliefs. There was a gentleman on these boards who became quite indignant when others of contrary opinion, would not cow to his views. Heated on both side to be sure. My process is to the point where I wouldn't enter the fray because I don't feel the need for everyone to agree with me. I work for a very religious fellow. We used to exchange over the bible and his worldview. In 13 years, he doesn't know my metaphysics, nor does he care to find out. I'm good with that. I wish I could say I'm past belief,past desire, past delusion, but I'm not. I guess I'm just not that enlightened. Meh, it's a process, yes?
-Jim-
I can respect that. Like you said, life is a process. In my opinion, we all evolve when we are ready so I don't see the point in trying to proselytize anybody to any opinions/beliefs. And who knows what being enlightened means, anyway? I'm pretty sure that you'll get a plethora of opinions regarding the meaning of that word alone. Self-honesty is the best way forward, in my opinion, so you seem to be on the right track. It's cool that you don't give a damn regarding the opinion of others; I am the same as well. For the record, everything I say is just my opinion, so don't let any of my writing influence you negatively. Cheers, Eric
Cheers indeed, as I am writing this and enjoying a Wisers and water. Canadian Whiskey. Ever forward, and good evening.
-Jim-