Ringer

Here's a kids teaching tool as well http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html

No, science doesn't have to be open to *all* evidence, because most of the things people spout as evidence is crap. Anecdotal evidence isn't completely ignored, just when it is used as a basis for proof is it ignored. It can open the door to investigation, but after that it is all but useless due to all the things already talked about. You said you being at his bedside wasn't worthless to him, unless you were there due to this 'feeling' I don't see the reason you would have mentioned it. . . Unless it was an appeal to emotion which can turn into fallacy far to quick to be used in this discussion. What about the time it took you to get there and back? That is plenty of time for a memory to be changed. Even the time of the phone call is more than enough for a memory to be distorted. As I said, I don't know why you mentioned being at his hospital not being worthless as if you would not have been there if not for this 'feeling'. Apologies if I assumed your statement meant something more than it did, but I don't see why it was mentioned otherwise. I do equate them both because no instance of abduction or telepathy have ever been shown to be true other than by anecdotal evidence. They both also have thousands and thousands of years of history, I include demonic abduction as well. Finally, both have been shown, by and large, to be false. Everything a psychic can do people who admit to using tricks can do just as well and people can be goaded into experiencing an abduction. Both can be explained through memory distortion, confirmation bias, and many other cognitive effects. So how are they different? Doctors used leeching all the time not that long ago. The reason you believe it is crazy is because you know there isn't enough evidence to support the idea that it has any medicinal value. Was everyone who allowed their trained doctor to prescribe such a treatment crazy and gullible? I would assume they had faith that the professionals knew what they were doing. Instead of leeches let's use chiropractors. Please actually address the points instead of just saying you don't like the comparison. It's not my purpose to make analogies you enjoy or agree with, these things are genuinely equivalent on many levels and it would be nice if you would actually inform me as to why they are not. As I see it using non-locality, in the sense of traveling faster than lightspeed, to explain psi answers no questions while raising hundreds and still has no experimental evidence. No, but I don't know what your dad's 'gift' was, and assuming I knew such and assuming I knew this gift needed someone else is your mistake, not mine. I don't have psi gifts so I can't read your mind or your past to know every detail of how this game was played. I'm not an expert on any such thing, but again every ability a psychic has had has been replicated using 'tricks' and none have been able to actually show that they have 'gifts' around anything other than people who believe they are psychics anyway. Was his writing not recorded? If so, why rerecord it? Again, everything you talk about can be explained by using tricks. Then you admit you aren't sure of how much time passed between the actual incident and your feeling?

Sorry it took so long to respond, mid-terms and such this past week. Anywho: Yes, it reflects my bias towards non-scientific evidences being completely irrelevant in a scientific discussion. So you are saying that you being with him at the hospital had nothing to do with some other sort of contact besides your feeling? I don't think you mentioned you felt which hospital he was at in describing your feeling. The multitudes of similar anecdotes are worthless unless they are put in context with the negative anecdotes as well. There are also multitudes of anecdotes about alien abduction, witches, etc, so to say it is close minded is incorrect. If your doctor told you to start leeching yourself every night because there were a lot of people saying it helped them wouldn't you ask for evidence for and against instead of just going with it? I read the whole paper and it says nothing concerning non-locality outside the individual's brain. When they used non-locality they used it to describe multiple neurons, not multiple brains. They also have a cause and effect as well as a mechanism for their examples, you still do not since their discussion has nothing to do with yours. Psychics can only be psychics if people believe they are and go along with them? Why would he need to be guided if he had such 'power of the mind'? First part, saying they happened simultaneously, would be impossible to prove considering the time it takes to get the call, answer, talk, know exactly when his pain start and when he was picked up. Next is just saying, "nuh-uh, I wouldn't forget something like that." I don't believe statistical significance means what you think it means.

As everyone has said, and as any one with science experience should know, that anecdotes are worthless so please throw those out the window. I say this because even if you do have good points they will be completely overshadowed by you making completely non-scientific statements. As you have noticed, many scientists skim something before reading in depth. If that skim shows a few blatantly pseudo-scientific statements as well as bad methodology they will not even bother reading it (I say they, but I do this as well though I don't think of myself as a scientist). This isn't because they are close minded, it is because if the author doesn't follow proper scientific methodology, makes blatant mistakes, refuses to take into account falsifying experiments, etc. there is no way to hold them to any scientific standard. Not because scientists are 'high and mighty' and believe themselves better than the author(s), but because if those standards are the basis of science. I have also had these experiences, as have so many other people. But what you are not taking into account is all the times that you had similar feelings with negative results. This is called conformation bias. You remember things that reinforce your ideas. This with other cognitive biases like memory plasticity, illusory correlation, availability bias, anchoring, etc., etc., etc., make anecdotes completely worthless. What you are saying about the mechanism makes no sense. If it has no mechanism there is no cause and effect, unless you are using a different definition of mechanism than I am aware of. Materialistic mechanistic explanations have been absent for most of human history. Without these explanations millions of alternate explanations were considered, including that consciousness itself is not materialistic or mechanistic. The thing is, not a single one of those explanations have held up under scientific scrutiny. If consciousness was non-local, under most circumstances it's functionality shouldn't be altered by local agents, such as drugs or concussion. Obviously this doesn't happen. So, as a psychologist, you hold yourself to be above cognitive biases such as memory distortion as well as above accepted scientific practices? If I am mistaken please correct me, but that is what it sounds like. As to the experiments, there is a difference between statistical significance and practical significance. Most, if not all, of these psi studies were conducted with very small sample sizes making any sort of practical significance almost impossible to identify. There have been meta-studies with mixed results depending on how the meta-study was done: http://www.csicop.or...ms_vs._reality/ Another problem with these experiments is that there are no examples I am aware of that people would showed these psi abilities keep them over any extended period of time. So why would one assume that these people have abilities instead of it being chance? You may say these studies show it to be so, but most of these studies are published in para-psych journals that most likely would have a strong publication bias avoiding publishing negative outcomes. [edit] Things you may want to read http://www.psychologyjourney3ce.nelson.com/faculty/pdf/Psych.WEB.Para.pdf http://www.ebo.de/publikationen/pk_ma.pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/000712699161378/abstract

What mechanism for telepathy? I would also like to know that after what everyone has said, non-topic oriented discussions aside, what parts of this do you still hold to.

Owl, you seem to have said you have a B.S. in psychology with emphasis on behavior and have an M.S. certificate. The M.S. certificate would have to have been in clinical or counseling of some sort for you to have worked in institutional settings, yet in the beginning you stated that you have been studying consciousness for most of your psychology career. Counseling is not studying consciousness as far as I am aware, so how does this come about? As to the healing and things at a distance, consciousness, as in awareness, happens at a macro level. So even if quantum entanglement did work that way one or two entangled particles would have virtually no effect on you. It would take quite a bit of interactions at a single spot in both of the peoples brains. Since all the ions and molecules in the brain are constantly being moved, removed, and replenished the effect would practically be nil.

Apologies if my memory is faulty, but I thought the main principle of the HWE is that a population will have a constant allele frequency throughout generations unless acted upon through selection, drift, etc. Since at least one of these things are involved in virtually every population the equilibrium can never be kept. But, I guess that even though that principle is violated the allele frequency can stay constant, though I'm unsure as to how since I am not all that experienced in this area.

I just want to add that just because a population is deviating from the HWE, that doesn't mean it is doing so because of deleterious genes. HWE is violated any time any sort of evolution is occurring, not just when something bad is happening.

IIRC other pigments are for very specific conditions, such as underwater where longer wavelengths are more likely to pass through, and are an exception to the rule. Since esbo is asking very general terms I didn't see a point going into even more technicalities, and I'm not very familiar with the different mechanisms that other pigments use other than some of their names.

Blackbirds aren't black for the purpose of absorbing energy, he's really asking a question that can't be answered because there aren't any known surfaces that do this. I don't mean this in any way disrespectfully, but I think that is part of the problem. You think too much without understanding what you are thinking about. I cannot stress enough how important mechanisms are in understanding why and how plants are how they are. Look at different photosynthetic pathways, without understanding how the mechanisms work for, say, a CAM plant, you could ask why it doesn't allow carbon fixation at all times instead of just at night. That's a process the plant needs to survive so why would a plant only want to do something like that, which also need energy from sunlight to proceed, at a time when it would be less useful? Well it's an adaptation to arid environments, so if plants kept their stomata, pores, open all the time for that process they would lose all their water. Short version: You can't make assumptions about a process you don't understand then start assuming something else would work better. Believe what you want, nature doesn't need you to accept what it does to be true. When you look at the visible light spectrum, it's just an extremely small portion of the entire electromagnetic that happens to react with molecules in our eye. This is a pointless question until you prove that those would work better.

The CO2 doesn't come into play until the Calvin Cycle of photosynthesis, which isn't important to this discussion because it's not light dependent. A simplified explanation is that chlorophyll uses the energy from light to make electrons higher in energy. These high energy electrons are used to push hydrogen ions across a electrochemical gradient so ATP can be made. ATP, adenosine triphosphate, is an extremely important molecule that is used in most chemical reactions that occur in organisms, including how plants make sugars. Why you would need to know this is because this is why plants are green, because those certain wavelengths seem to impart the amount of energy necessary for the plant to be autotrophic. Unless you can show that different wavelengths would be better suited to creating these molecules you cannot say the plant would be better if it absorbed those wavelengths.

Language only affects the ways people categorize colors, not the way they are perceived. It would be like saying a professional painter can see more colors than I do because I couldn't name all the different colors that they could. There are tribes who only have words for dark and light, but I doubt they don't see any colors. Computers can do many things much better than humans, but at the same time there are things that humans can do that is unbelievable difficult to make a computer to do. Computers have a very difficult time separating necessary movement and unnecessary movements when trying to learn goal oriented behavior although even a baby knows the difference. An example is if a computer tries to learn to open a jar by watching someone do it. If they stop to answer the door a computer may 'believe' that is part of the process. Another difference is the redundancy within brains is something very few computers even come close to.

Since the anus and rectum are able to be stretched it would not be necessary to have a initially large rectum for anal sex. Also, selection wouldn't select for more anal sex because it doesn't affect reproduction in a positive way. As to why anal sex seems to be prevalent, it seems to have more to do with things like lack of sexual partners, dominance, sometimes bonding, and how people enjoy trying different things. An assumption about sexual preferences, as far as things like anal and sexual positions, being selected for are usually flawed because it assumes that natural selection is acting on anything more than just having sex, i.e. why would masturbation be selected for. [edit] The cave man thing was an April Fools joke. [/edit]

As a scientist shouldn't you understand that anecdotal evidence means nothing? Throwing experiences around doesn't prove anything. The diagram of personality types seems to be little more than an astrology look alike. Could you possibly link the actual paper to your study instead of a book?

But roots are not where the primary food source of plants are. Although some plants may store things like starch underground it is not where they are made. I'm not sure about what you mean by the veins flowing in a whirling pattern, what is inside of them flows in a pattern or they are organized this way? Also, since wood is a product of secondary xylem it should have the electrical properties of the vascular tissue, wouldn't running a current through it cause a charge and allow the wood to become magnetized? I don't know a whole lot about EM but if the vascular tissue of trees can affect charged particles in the way you are suggesting we should be able to measure it's ability to affect EM fields. I don't know enough about snowflakes to comment other than the pattern, IIRC, is fairly well explained by the nature of hydrogen bonding. Why would they be in woody plants specifically? Why not would it not be in herbaceous vascular plants since it the transportation only needs vascular tissues? What specific particles are coming from Earth's electric field. Why is it only snowflakes and woody plants would be affected by these particles? But water transport in plants isn't active. Transpiration causes roots to take up water through adhesion and cohesion without the use of chemical energy so it is a passive transport system. From what I have read only the roots grow in the winter in Aspens, even so many plants grow, albeit very slowly, in the winter. Abscission is also caused by hormones, ethylene IIRC, and can even be caused by spraying this hormone on plants without anything extra. What is a high electric pressure area? Somewhere with a greater charge? Isn't electricity part of magnetism? Why would there be a duality? Yes, it's a carboxylic acid and cytokinins have an alcohol group that can act as an acid, and they both promote plant growth. But abscisic acid has a carboxylic acid and alcohol group as well and it plays an important role in plant dormancy. Also, auxin has the opposite effect on growth in roots and is found in more plants than just woody ones with the same effects. If it were to be these charged particles affecting growth it would not be just in woody plants. It's not specifically sensitive to gravity, though it is released by amyloplasts that sense gravity in the root. Part of the reason larger plants tend to grow straight up is that it is a lot more stable to grow, more or less, straight for something large. Also, new secondary xylem is produced every year, since xylem are dead cells they will not be affected by auxin. So any bending that happened before this growth is covered over and over again. But when those trees are first growing you can get them to bend and there are some trees that will have a slight bend at the top due to the suns angle. If the charged particles come from the root why would you not charge the soil to some degree? Is there an overview or pictures in your ppt of your experimental set up (I apologize, I haven't had time to look at them). I would assume the reason for geotropism stopping would be amyloplasts that are gravotropic are located in the root meristem or root cap, I can't remember which. If it is the high rate of cell division causing electrostatic attraction the stematic meristem would have the same effect. I suppose you could test this by finding a very sensitive instrument to measure the charge in these places and compare them to places of little or no cell division under similar circumstances.

How would these effects take into account different types of branching, flowering, etc. Some plants have alternating branching patterns while some are directly across from each other. If the growth of branches were directed by magnetic fields wouldn't the branching patterns be more regular? How does it take exceptions to plants that grow on each other such as ivy plants and trees and plants that branch into each other a limited amount. It's easy enough to use chemical explanations to show why branches and plants don't grow into each other very much. Auxin is a photosensitive chemical that promotes growth in the stems and branches of plants. Auxin flows away from the direction of the sunlight, this causes them to bend in certain directions towards a light-source. Since they are growing in the same direction they won't run into each other as much. Even with this they run into each other sometimes, but since this would limit the amount of sun given to the photosynthetic parts to the shorter plant it would not be able to make the necessary energy to continue branching that way. Now I can't download your ppt at the moment, but did you make sure it was the EM field affecting the root with proper controls? If the charge was put in the soil it could have limited the amount of water by electrolysis or otherwise harmed the soil. If it was in the plant itself it could affect the amount of adhesion to the xylem of the plant necessary for water movement.

I don't follow. Are you disagreeing?

Although we don't, and probably can't, really know if there was a single original organism the best guess is we come from a single common ancestor. The similarities between all living organisms would be very unlikely if we developed from different sources.

Auxin in adult plants will cause growth in the stems and will inhibit growth in the roots. It doesn't cause cell division so much as cause the cells to get larger. For increase in the cell division cytokinins are your best bet. But like any hormone too much will cause it to die or just stunt it's growth. I'm sure a google search will give you some answers on the best amount.

But that's not what you said. You said there was no safe amount of alcohol.

No, an expansion is just increase in volume while mass stays the same. An explosion is a rapid expansion with a release of energy. Since there was no real release in energy, because where would it go, the BB is just a rapid expansion. At least that's how I understand it, I could be wrong.

It may just be me, but none of your first part makes any sense.

Depending on what you mean by thinking, for most things you don't need think in words. Really the only time you need to think in words is when you are thinking about words. When you are trying to remember where something is you aren't usually giving yourself a description of the place, you think of the place. When you think of a cat you don't just think of the word "cat" you may picture a cat, think of the sound they make, etc. What their thoughts would be like is impossible to say, just like if I were to ask you what your parent's thoughts are like. People that are deaf do have a language, in the US it's ASL. Sign language is processed just like other language except it doesn't use auditory stimuli. I would assume the parts of the brain used for speech are extremely useful for abstract thoughts, though language in itself is not completely necessary other than the ability to communicate those thoughts. That ability, communication, is what allows us to built upon ideas of the past, but it is not necessary for that communication to be auditory.

http://academicearth.org/

You have to realize, though, that there are millions of people who dream 'realistic' dreams and try to give them some sort of meaning. I have had many dreams of bad things happening, and then something similar to my dreams happen. It isn't that I saw some tragic event before it happened, it's just tragic events happen all the time and before that event there are most likely thousands, if not millions, of people dreaming of tragic events. If you do a google search of virtually any event there are people claiming to have dreamed of the event before it happened and you will find a ridiculous amount of people saying they had those dreams. But now think about all the times you had a dream of something terrible happened and nothing did. That is not something worth talking about for most people, so all of those billions of dreams you never hear about that never came true far outweigh the things that have. It's the same thing that allow people to fall prey to cold readings. People make vague, almost nonsensical, connections so things like dreams make sense to their everyday lives and forget the things that don't play a part. Now the same things goes with thinking of people. If you want to play a game with yourself to test this. Keep a notebook and pen with you at all times and anytime you think of anybody you know write their name down, even duplicates, and when you thought of them. Anytime the people you have thought of call you put a mark next to their names. Now at the end of the week, or month or year, I'm certain you will find that the majority of people you thought of didn't call you.