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Les instantanés de la conscience. Where is The Mind?: Science gets puzzled and almost admits a non-local mentalscape. This will be the last "home-produced" blog entry for a while [save the short "Everyday Spirituality" which will follow it as a sign-off] .

Where is The Mind?: Science gets puzzled and almost admits a non-local mentalscape.

West Virginia beckons tomorrow morning and off I will go to whatever that entails. As I said in one of the commentary responses the other day, I hope that reading two journal runs "cover-to-cover" will bring up a few thoughts worth sharing. This day's entry was inspired by two articles bumped into coincidentally which had scientists puzzling about a holographic universe and a non-local mind. Those scientists would cringe to see how I've taken their sign-posts-on-the-path, but that is their hang-up, not mine. The first of these articles [both from the New Scientist] was "Where in the World is the Mind? " That brings in the second serendipitous article. It reminded me then, also, of a moment when I was able to spend a [too short] time with David Bohm, the famous theoretical physicist. Religion May Cause Brain Atrophy. Faith can open your mind but it can also cause your brain to shrink at a different rate, research suggests.

Religion May Cause Brain Atrophy

Researchers at Duke University Medical Centre in the US claim to have discovered a correlation between religious practices and changes in the brains of older adults. The study, published in the open-access science journal, Public Library of Science ONE, asked 268 people aged 58 to 84 about their religious group, spiritual practices and life-changing religious experiences. Changes in the volume of their hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with learning and memory, were tracked using MRI scans, over two to eight years. Protestants who did not identify themselves as born-again were found to have less atrophy in the hippocampus region than did born-again Protestants, Catholics or those with no religious affiliation. Although the brain tends to shrink with age, atrophy in the hippocampus has been linked with depression and Alzheimer's disease. If we remember more, can we read deeper–and create better? Part II.

Is memory essential for creativity?

If we remember more, can we read deeper–and create better? Part II.

Image credit: Philip Bitnar / Koukej Makak Production 2010, Creative Commons. In 1981, a 30-year-old man was driving home from work on his motorcycle. Amazing video shows us the actual movies that play inside our mind. Upon rereading the entire article it does appear that the second clip shown to the subjects was fully reconstructed by what was learned from the brain in the first mapping session.

Amazing video shows us the actual movies that play inside our mind

That is fucking incredible. Agreed. That's just so incredible. It's not perfect, obviously, but who cares?! They reconstructed what a person was seeing! Actually, I think it's sort of the opposite of the headline, which is completely misleading us here. Researchers have used (invasive) sensors in the brain to reconstruct the images that lab animals were seeing, actually creating an image that represented an approximation of what they saw; however, that doesn't seem to be what's going on here.

It's really impressive, but that's exactly what's not going on. Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget. The French poet Paul Valéry once said, “The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.”

Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget

In that spirit, consider a situation many of us will find we know too well: You're sitting at your desk in your office at home. Digging for something under a stack of papers, you find a dirty coffee mug that’s been there so long it’s eligible for carbon dating. Better wash it. You pick up the mug, walk out the door of your office, and head toward the kitchen. By the time you get to the kitchen, though, you've forgotten why you stood up in the first place, and you wander back to your office, feeling a little confused—until you look down and see the cup.

So there's the thing we know best: The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do. Sometimes, to get to the next object the participant simply walked across the room.