YouTube. VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization. Study showing that humans have some psychic powers caps Daryl Bem's career. It took eight years and nine experiments with more 1,000 participants, but the results offer evidence that humans have some ability to anticipate the future.
"Of the various forms of ESP or psi, as we call it, precognition has always most intrigued me because it's the most magical," said Daryl Bem, professor of psychology emeritus, whose study will be published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sometime next year. "It most violates our notion of how the physical world works. The phenomena of modern quantum physics are just as mind-boggling, but they are so technical that most non-physicists don't know about them," said Bem, who studied physics before becoming a psychologist. Publishing on this topic has gladdened the hearts of psi researchers but stumped doubting social psychologists, who cannot fault Bem's mainstream and widely accepted methodology. Michael Talbot - Part 1 Complete- Synchronicity and the Holographic Universe - Thinking Allowed. Karl Pribram: The Holographic Brain (excerpt) - A Thinking Allowed DVD with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.
Ether vibrations. Chapter 6 Aether vibrations Quantum physics that has been around for some hundred odd years now is still mainstream physics most accepted physics.
Although quantum science has revealed the presence of the zero point field with all its virtual subatomic particles and photons that jump into existence from apparently nowhere to return to oblivion nanoseconds later, there is still is no reasonable explanation as to how and why particles and photons can appear and disappear just like that. Also the quantum probability wave is still hard to grasp and visualize. Quantum physics may have proven to be a mathematically correct science; for lay people the wave-particle duality of quantum science it is still very hard to understand. How do we visualize particles that are both waves and solid little marbles? Another difficult thing to grasp is the atom model presented by Niels Bohr where electrons fly in well-defined shells around the nucleus.
The Implicate Order. Neuro.
Allan Jones: A map of the brain. Is this the first ever direct evidence for human mirror neurons? Mirror neurons are one of the most hyped concepts in psychology and neurocience.
V.S. Ramachandran famously wrote that they will 'do for psychology what DNA did for biology'. Although recordings from single cells in the brains of monkeys have identified 'mirror' neurons that respond both to the execution of a movement and the observation of another agent performing that same movement, the existence of such cells in humans has, up until now, been inferred only from indirect evidence, particularly brain imaging. Now Roy Mukamel and colleagues have provided what appears to be the first ever direct evidence, using implanted electrode recordings of single cells, for the existence of mirror neurons in humans. Mukamel's team seized the opportunity for single cell recording provided by the clinical investigations that were being carried out on patients with intractable epilepsy. Critics could argue that rather than having mirror properties, these cells were responding to a concept.
Do mirror neurons explain understanding, or is it the other way round? – Neurologism. (Alternate title: In Soviet Russia, Mirror Neurons Explain YOU!)
A draft of this post has been sitting around for a few weeks, and while I’m happy with today’s sanity check, I still can’t help but suspect that I am missing something in the debate on “action understanding”. So I am happy to be convinced that I have completely misunderstood some key aspect of the mirror neuron story. Mirror neuron “theory” strikes me as an odd mix of interesting experimental results and ambiguous reasoning. Nevertheless, I think the popularity of the mirror neuron idea serves as an opportunity to talk about some ideas that are hard to work into neuroscience writing aimed at a general, non-mathematical audience.
Talking Brains: Mirror Neurons - The unfalsifiable theory. I recently had the pleasure of giving a lecture on mirror neurons at UC San Diego which is a very active locale for folks working on the human mirror system.
I expected a lot of push-back on my critical views of mirror neurons, and I wasn't disappointed. One of my major points of emphasis is and has been that if the mirror neuron system is really important for action understanding, then damage to action execution should result in action understanding deficits. I have pointed out that this prediction doesn't hold, either in apraxia or with more force in aphasia. A typical response to this argument is that "the mirror system" involves lots of areas working together (George Lakoff, who was at the UCSD lecture even seemed willing to include the STS in this network) and so it is no surprise that damage to fronto-parietal areas doesn't result in the expected action understanding deficits.
Rizzolatti G, & Sinigaglia C (2010). “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula”: Mirror Neuron Theory and Emotional Empathy. Nonsite.org - Article - Issue #5 “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula”: Mirror Neuron Theory and Emotional Empathy Download Citation It is often said by scientists that our understanding of the neural basis of empathy is in its infancy, the suggestion being that it is only a matter of time before problems will be solved, as if the difficulties facing the research field are merely technical.
But the implication of my paper is that the issues confronting empathy theorists are as much theoretical or, say, philosophical, as they are technical or scientific. Ruth Leys In a report of the results of an experiment pertaining to a common neural basis for seeing and feeling the emotion of disgust, the claim is made that, just as we have mirror-neuron mechanisms for understanding other people’s intentional actions, so we have mirror-neuron mechanisms for understanding or empathizing with other people’s emotions.
The Wicker Experiment In Detail Background Assumptions 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.