Tyler Durden

The most vivid memory I have of my childhood was around 5 years of age. It was a pointless memory, I don't know why it still lingers. It was a memory of me being in my parents' bathroom and I thought about going on vacation to Hawaii. This is probably because I was in Hawaii when I was only 2 years old. I remember hurting my ass on the cement of the edge of a swimming pool when I was this young. It was my first time experiencing pain in my tailbone, so I guess it makes sense that I have that memory. Other than that, I remember a sort of "limbo" before 1 year. It was like I was on autopilot, dreaming while being awake. I don't remember any conscious actions, I don't remember any objects or situations, just darkness. It's probably just an extremely faint memory that it has no substance.

My guess is that certain sounds/frequencies can influence brainwaves/brain-states. There's another study where someone would be put in a giant drum and someone outside the drum would rhythmically beat the drum at a certain frequency, and the subject would experience themselves as a completely different organism. I don't know how that one works. The brain is a very interesting and powerful organ, indeed.

This would mean that matter, fundamentally, isn't actually physical, it is entirely energy. Mind-blowing concept, isn't it...

Ah, yes, that's the word I was looking for...quantum entanglement. Thank you. I don't know how I forgot that word. It could be that the universe is holographic, too, which wouldn't disprove quantum theory, but rather, give it another 'branch", so to speak. M Theory and String theory are the most popular explanations to the phenomena that we've observed, but they're not the only theories. The many worlds theory is just as viable as it was when Hugh Everett first pitched it. If the universe was holographic, that means we are as well, so everything looks "real" to us. It's a theory I've been reading about that has ties to quantum theory, so I'm looking into it further to see if it can be taken seriously.

That's awesome! How long until we can make a "Matrix"?

I think this is a great question. Considering the age of the universe, 15+ trillion years, why didn't the Earth contain life a lot sooner? Surely 1 trillion years after the universe "started", we would've had definite solar system and planet formation, easily. Yet....the earth is only 6 billion years old. Why isn't it older? And furthermore, if Earth is only 6 billion years old, there HAS to be other life-forms in the universe, considering there's over 100 billion galaxies, each containing billions of stars and planets. And these life forms, at least some of them, MUST be more highly advanced than we are, considering how much time has passed during the universe's expansion. There's at least a couple sites on Earth where the ground has turned into complete glass, suggesting very high temperatures. I'm not sure where I read it, but that's strong evidence for a high powered thermonuclear blast, and that is not part of our history. So maybe life did exist more than once on our planet, and we have the timeline wrong. I don't know...there could be a possibility of life living deep underground Earth's surface and us not knowing it (but doubtful). Visitation from other planets is possible as well, especially since humans only occupy a very tiny portion of the Earth's history, so we might not have even remembered them, or been around when they were. Who knows...after all, evidence of civilizations disappear very quickly on a planet with weather patterns, and by quickly, I mean, all it takes is a million years or so for all evidence to disappear. Yet a mere footprint on our moon will stay intact for over 25,000 years.

I doubt its a full-blown heart attack, but it's probably a heart anomaly of some kind. Maybe partial blockage of an artery, or angina like previously mentioned. Doesn't sound like a panic attack though... So the results came back negative for drugs? Specifically painkillers? Strenuous upper-body exercise and withdrawal from opiates can cause this same effect.

Well, doesn't an entire half second (or more) pass between a bodily action and you actually being conscious of the action? Wouldn't this mean that we are technically not in control? From what I recall in biology, signals from muscles in the body to the brain (or vice versa), usually take only 1/10th of a second. So why does it take so long to be conscious of the action? There's the "red-green light" experiment that explains this. Subjects had to pay attention to a wall where a colored dot would be shown (usually red), then the color would change to green very quickly and then back to red. Most of the subjects saw the green light, even though it was only shown for a less amount of time for them to actually consciously observe it. I don't know what that means, but they had to perform a conscious action if they saw the green light, and then the scientists measured the time it took for them to do this. Turns out that there's at least a half second "lag time" in life.

I think they've tried low dosages of ketamine (the horse tranquilizer) as an anti-depressant as well. Sometimes it's used in analgesia, too. Apparently the anti-depressant effects last for weeks at a time after only one dose. here it is: http://www.ketamine.com/antidepressant.html

That definitely sounds like what happened....being on the edge of lucid dreaming but maintaining enough consciousness to make me feel like I was completely awake, so my mind was in a dream but my consciousness was nearly or fully active. I felt like I kept track of time accurately, but then again, I didn't look at any clocks for reference points. Seems to me that this must be something very difficult to do. I've never had it before. Feeling "waves" going through my body was kind of weird, it sort of felt like I was in an ocean, and the waves made my body feel like a buoy. I was reading earlier about advanced meditation techniques and they said to try one with a particular sound or low volume static on the radio, and after a while you will start to enter a bizarre state of mind. I can recall a study where subjects would have their eyes covered with ping-pong ball halves and static radio would be played at a low volume, and after a while the brain enters a hypnotic type of lucid dreaming. Perhaps I came close to the same thing.

Okay. Hypothetical situation. We observe an electron to be in an up-spin state. If the other electron of the pair is light-years away, it would instantly have a down-spin state....am I correct on that? How can this be possible? The energy (or information or whatever it is) that is in these sub-atomic particles, it has to travel faster than the speed of light. Does this mean that, assuming that dark energy connects everything together in the universe to one entity, the universe at large, which is expanding faster than the speed of light in all directions, does this mean that we are also moving at the speed of light, yet, we cannot tell, because of relativity? Or is it quantum teleportation that does this? And how does it do this? I've read some books on quantum physics, but of course, as everyone else, I do not understand it fully.

When I think of the "many worlds interpretation", I consider a multiverse, consisting of the same atoms and sub-atomic particles that make up this universe. The atoms are like a hologram. They are never in our universe at all times, they sort of "flicker", and everytime they "disappear", they would teleport to one of these other universes within the multiverse. This would mean that at the fundamental level of matter, there is no concrete solidity, and furthermore, it could suggest that, assuming that there are higher dimensions within our own universe that we can't see, that something is going on within these dimensions, and travel is impossible from the world we perceive and these other dimensions. Perhaps a T-Rex could be standing right next to you and you don't even know it, and you can pass right through it. Then we start going into the deep end of the pool...

My thoughts on the matter is....does the matter that makes up the universe (dark matter/energy included), behave as a fractal? This would explain a lot of the natural objects we see that have fractal appearances. (a nautilus shell, broccoli, ferns, etc.) In this case, this might suggest that there is a degree of similarity from the quantum level, to the microscopic world, all the way to macroscopic objects, and then to the size of the known universe. There may be somewhat of a pattern connection.

Okay, so last night, I was up really late, until about 3:30AM local time. I finished my homework for my college classes for today, and then I decided to meditate. I occasionally meditate, just whenever I really feel like it. I don't do it too often. This time, however, I had a really good idea on meditation. I went to this one website that allowed me to play an audio clip of different natural sounds. I made the website play a sound of soft ocean waves, and then I turned off all the lights in my room, except for a blue LED light on one of the fans in my computer. The room was almost completely devoid of light, though I could still make out the posters on my walls and other objects in the room. I meditated for about fifteen minutes to this sound of ocean waves, and I completely cleared my mind, except for the sound of these waves. After about five minutes, I started slipping into REM, and I kept this going for the rest of my meditation session. Something strange happened when I finally stopped meditating and I opened my eyes. Somehow, the sound of the waves and my past experience with seeing ocean waves on the beach was now incorporated into my visual field. My entire room was flowing in waves, and my body could feel these waves. What the heck happened here? Did my brain make a connection between the sound of the waves and my visual cortex? Was it a temporary experience of synesthesia? It certainly seemed like one. And furthermore, was this just a neural connection that happened, or did it trigger the production of some sort of hallucinogenic tryptamine in my body? I've read that DMT may be produced in the pineal gland in humans, and could be released during REM, and I'm wondering if I experienced a short-lived natural "trip" off of my meditation. Thoughts?

FAPP (for all practical purposes), opiates COULD be used as anti-depressants, but they're only going to work for so long. Someone who has PTSD or a neurological disorder might resort to using narcotics to dull out their emotional pain with a high enough dosage of a particular opiate, but in the long run, opiates, administered continuously over a period of time, decrease the amount of active opioid receptors in the brain, which, once the person has discontinued their use of opiates, they have less opioid receptors that are active, and thus, the body's natural analgesics cannot bind to an adequate amount of receptors anymore, thus causing physical pain during withdrawal. Anti-depressants work in a different way, as already mentioned, but they too, can only work for so long before they reach a "peak effectiveness", and then they are no longer of benefit, unless the doctor ups the dosage of the drug, but still, at some point the drug will stop being effective and the patient returns to "baseline". This is why they are prescribed. They are designed to bring a patient's levels of serotonin, dopamine, and norephinephine up to normal levels, but oftentimes they bring them to skyrocketing levels, and thus the patient ends up more depressed than before, once they stop taking the drug. Exercise and healthy eating habits, and hydration, are probably the best cure-all for depression. It will cause some soreness in the muscles and the body will naturally react to eliminate pain and elevate someone's mood. Of course, there are some people who are extremely depressed and they need something in addition to exercise. Opiates almost always worsen depression, same with a lot of the old anti-depressants. They can also cause new neurological problems, such as anxiety, decreased libido, and decreased interest in previously fun activities, etc. This is why you will almost always see someone who has used opiates for a while for recreational purposes, start to shut out anything else in their life except for using opiates, because it keeps their mood elevated. If they were to go through withdrawal and never take opiates again, suddenly the world around them feels "dull" and they feel disconnected. Given enough time and detox, however, any opiate addict can return to a sense of "fulfillment" without drugs. Also, to answer someone's skepticism regarding inhibition of the GABA sites, yes, opiates do, to a certain extent, inhibit these sites. Alcohol and benzodiazepines also inhibit these sites. Oftentimes, when an opiate addict cannot score their painkiller of choice, they will resort to taking a benzodiazepine such as diazepam or clonazepam, which inhibit GABA, and it lessens their withdrawal symptoms from the opiate, but really, all they're doing is substituting one drug for another.