Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind BERKELEY — Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers. As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers. The approximate reconstruction (right) of a movie clip (left) is achieved through brain imaging and computer simulation Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm.
L’altruisme est-il de l’égoïsme caché ? La réalité de l'altruisme est souvent niée, sous prétexte qu'il dissimulerait l'égoïsme. Ainsi, le sociologue américain Peter Blau (1918-2002), qui définissait la théorie de l'échange social comme un échange où l'un des deux partenaires peut s'engager sans connaître exactement la contrepartie qui lui sera proposée, affirmait : « Un apparent altruisme imprègne la vie sociale ; les gens sont désireux de faire du bien et de rendre la pareille. Mais sous ce désintéressement apparent, on peut découvrir un égoïsme sous-jacent ; la tendance à aider les autres est souvent motivée par l'attente qu'agir ainsi procurera des bénéfices sociaux. » D'autres, et notamment divers psychanalystes, donnent également à ce comportement une connotation négative. Qu'en penser ?
How to Be Alone: An Antidote to One of the Central Anxieties and Greatest Paradoxes of Our Time by Maria Popova “We live in a society which sees high self-esteem as a proof of well-being, but we do not want to be intimate with this admirable and desirable person.” If the odds of finding one’s soul mate are so dreadfully dismal and the secret of lasting love is largely a matter of concession, is it any wonder that a growing number of people choose to go solo? The choice of solitude, of active aloneness, has relevance not only to romance but to all human bonds — even Emerson, perhaps the most eloquent champion of friendship in the English language, lived a significant portion of his life in active solitude, the very state that enabled him to produce his enduring essays and journals. And yet that choice is one our culture treats with equal parts apprehension and contempt, particularly in our age of fetishistic connectivity. Solitude, the kind we elect ourselves, is met with judgement and enslaved by stigma. Illustration by Alessandro Sanna from 'The River.' Donating = Loving
How Trees Calm Us Down In 1984, a researcher named Roger Ulrich noticed a curious pattern among patients who were recovering from gallbladder surgery at a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. Those who had been given rooms overlooking a small stand of deciduous trees were being discharged almost a day sooner, on average, than those in otherwise identical rooms whose windows faced a wall. The results seemed at once obvious—of course a leafy tableau is more therapeutic than a drab brick wall—and puzzling. Whatever curative property the trees possessed, how were they casting it through a pane of glass? That is the riddle that underlies a new study in the journal Scientific Reports by a team of researchers in the United States, Canada, and Australia, led by the University of Chicago psychology professor Marc Berman. Are such numbers fanciful? What is most interesting about this data, though, is one of its subtler details. It’s nice to think that research like this can affect public policy.
untitled Ten Popular Mind Control Techniques Used Today The more one researches mind control, the more one will come to the conclusion that there is a coordinated script that has been in place for a very long time with the goal to turn the human race into non-thinking automatons. For as long as man has pursued power over the masses, mind control has been orchestrated by those who study human behavior in order to bend large populations to the will of a small “elite” group. Today, we have entered a perilous phase where mind control has taken on a physical, scientific dimension that threatens to become a permanent state if we do not become aware of the tools at the disposal of the technocratic dictatorship unfolding on a worldwide scale. Modern mind control is both technological and psychological. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. A concerted effort is underway to manage and predict human behavior so that the social scientists and the dictatorial elite can control the masses and protect themselves from the fallout of a fully awake free humanity.
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months | Books For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other. When I started writing a book about this more hopeful view, I knew there was one story I would have to address. On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smouldering wasteland. This story never happened. I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? The article did not provide any sources. I was bursting with questions.
Human consciousness is simply a state of matter, like a solid or liquid – but quantum Thanks to the work of a small group neuroscientists and theoretical physicists over the last few years, we may finally have found a way of analyzing the mysterious, metaphysical realm of consciousness in a scientific manner. The latest breakthrough in this new field, published by Max Tegmark of MIT, postulates that consciousness is actually a state of matter. “Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness,” he says. With this new model, Tegmark says that consciousness can be described in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory, allowing us to scientifically tackle murky topics such as self awareness, and why we perceive the world in classical three-dimensional terms, rather than the infinite number of objective realities offered up by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Consciousness has always been a tricky topic to broach scientifically. A stunning image of the neurons in a human hippocampus