gib65

There's a study out there that proves the body loses 3/4 oz. of weight at the instant of death. Has anyone heard of this study? Does anyone know where to find its publication? If anyone believes in these results, do you know if it's been replicated? If you believe in these results, do you have any other explanation other than the "soul" leaving the body?

Because the proof wouldn't work that way.

I think any of the basic psychoanalytic terms like "ego" and "id" are only good/useful insofar as they describe the inner workings of the mind. That being said, I think a distinction has to be made between describing how mental processes feel and what's actually going on. If you want to know what's actually going on, I don't think you'll get very far with psychoanalysis. I think you'd be better off talking about neurology or physiology. The mind is best described in subjective terms, which means the way it feels is really all there is to be said about it, and therefore concepts like the "ego" or "id" are only as good/useful as they are accurate in describing how the mind feels.

Hi, There seems to be a general principle that if a drug binds naturally to a neural receptor, then there must be indigenous neurotransmitters for that receptor. Some have argued that this means the drug can't be all that harmful. I'm just wondering how much truth there is to that. I mean, sure there might be a neurotransmitter that's naturally produced by the body which binds to those receptors, but the use of the drug brings on completely different effects, subjectively and behaviorally. In other words, the drug is mimicking the indigenous neurotransmitter in a very unnatural way or under very unnatural conditions. Take cannabis, for example. THC binds to receptors that neuroscientists claim are designed for an indigenous neurotransmitter. However, I’ve NEVER experienced anything like the effects of marijuana under any condition other than when I smoke it, so if these indigenous neurotransmitters are supposed to occur naturally, why have I never experienced these effects naturally? Now, I've played around with a hypothesis that because getting high feels very much like a dream state, then maybe the indigenous neurotransmitter is responsible for making us dream. Whether or not my hypothesis is right doesn't matter. What matters is that, if this is true, this provides an example in which the use of marijuana would trigger the brain into going into a dream-like state in conditions under which it is not supposed to be dreaming - that is, the brain is still trying to process information coming in from the senses (usually dreaming is triggered well after the senses have gone into hibernation). So although THC might be mimicking this indigenous neurotransmitter, it is doing so under less natural conditions, and therefore might still pose a danger to the brain. Does anyone think so?

Well, I'll be damned. As I said, though, I can only see impending doom if the militairy gets their hands on this kind of technology. No one will be safe. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I don't trust technology of this caliber in the hands of the government or the militairy. It would give them too much power. I'd take heed in the last few paragraphs of that article: "While trials on monkeys will tell us a lot about the prosthesis's performance, there are some questions that will not be answered. For example, it is unclear whether we have any control over what we remember. If we do, would brain implants of the future force some people to remember things they would rather forget? The ethical consequences of that would be serious. "Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them. Another ethical conundrum concerns consent to being given the prosthesis, says Anderson. The people most in need of it will be those with a damaged hippocampus and a reduced ability to form new memories. "If someone can't form new memories, then to what extent can they give consent to have this implant?" " I'd still have to say, though, that although the link you posted, Bascule, sounds a bit more credible, the one about the militairy using it to create a army of super-soldiers still sounds too much like science fiction. I don't doubt that one day it may be possible, but I see that day still being far into the future. I can only hope that, when that day comes, man kind will have learnt to live and govern itself with a lot more responsibility than it does now.

That's debatable. I can't really prove whether or not doing brain/microchip transplants, even if it's on just the hippocampus, is plausible or implausible, but neither can you. The "believability" of something like this is too much of an opinion. I have my doubts because 1) even though computers circuits and neural circuits have a lot in common, there are still a lot of differences, and 2) there is still a lot about neurology that we are in the dark about, and this is not just in regards to the brain as a whole, but to neurons, the fundamental building blocks of the brain. Another reason for my doubts is that a looked at the titles of a few other articles on that site, and here's what they are: House comes with free bride Carnivorous lizard found in toilet Evolution in the bible, says Vatican Red the world's richest cat Man seeks fat people to fuel his boat Police seize 24 tonnes of illegal cheese Pandas wed in Thai zoo River of cocaine flows through London Man escapes prison as 'identical twin' I really have to question the authenticity of these. Even if the article is right, I'd be very surprised if this project didn't end disasterously. To me, it just seems like cockamany to think that we can so easily replace the hippocampus with a computer chip and have the results we expect. Not to mention, it also sounds very irresponsible.

The one striking piece of evidence against this is that modern homosapiens are no more than 200,000 years old. I suppose you could go back a few million years to times when a more primative form of "man" was walking the Earth, but I don't know how you could consider them to be "technologically advanced".

I don't buy that for a second. Our technology may be advanced, but it's not THAT advanced. We barely even understand how the brain works, much less mimic it with computer chips.

I think that makes sense as far as software goes. In software programs, the IP (Instruction Pointer) only reads one instruction at a time, and it increments itself linearly after every instruction is executed - so, it reads and executes instruction 1, then instruction 2, then 3, and so on. Once in a while, it encounters an instruction that tells it to jump to another instruction (like instruction #3682) at which point it continues linearly. This sounds much like the brain in that it will process information locally and then "jump" to an totally different area. But unlike computers, the brain has no "central processing unit". For every instruction the computer executes, it must take that instruction, send it through the CPU, and then return to the point it was before with the results. This results in a sort of bottlenecking, or a one-instruction-at-a-time rule. The bind problem states that there is no such bottlenecking in the brain because there has not been any discovery of a neurological CPU. All processing happens sporadically around the brain in parallel, as though each neural center has its own local CPU. What I was wondering is how specific does the binding problem get. For example, I know there is the dorsal and ventral pathways that both start from the visual center in the occipital lobe, and process visual information for the location and movement through space of a perceived object (the dorsal pathway) and what the object is (the ventral pathway). Now, if you placed a carrot to the left of me and an apple to the right and asked me to point to the carrot, I would be able to do this with ease. This means I would be using location information in order to point (dorsal pathway) as well as recognizing which object is the carrot (ventral pathway). Therefore, the dorsal and ventral pathways must be communicating at some point. Signals from either one must be converging somewhere. Does the binding problem say that this doesn't happen?

So no one has anything to say about the binding problem? What if I asked a simpler question: What is the binding problem? I mean, what does the binding problem state exactly, just so I'm not misunderstanding it.

So no one has anything to say about the binding problem? What if I asked a simpler question: What is the binding problem? I mean, what does the binding problem state exactly, just so I'm not misunderstanding it.

What part(s) of the brain are involved in math skills?

I've heard of the binding problem in the neuroscience: how seperate mental functions carried out by separate brain parts come together to form perceptions of something "whole". They say there is no part of the brain that all the electric signals being processed converge to - that is, no part that seems to integrate all this information so that we can have perceptions of whole things. I was wondering how far reaching the bind problem is considered to be. I mean, for example, I know that it means to say that there is no central part of the brain where ALL information converges to for integration, but what about less wholistic things? For example, when I look at an apple, I see that it is round and red. I also know that the roundness and redness of the apple are two distict pieces of information that are processed by different parts of the brain. But haven't there been parts of the brain found to store information about whole objects such as apples - like the memory of what an apple is, or the concept of an apple, or the perception of things shaped like apples (things like "geons"). I've read about a man who mistook his wife for a hat, which means there must be a part of the brain responsible for perceiving or conceiving of whole objects and recognizing what they are (as hats or apples). Have studies not shown that the parts of the brain responsible for perceiving shapes like the roundness of the apple and colors like the redness of the apple might somehow have neural connections to the parts of the brain responsible for perceiving whole objects?

Hi, How do photons and the amount of energy they carry relate to the wavelength and amplitude of light waves? For example, if you compare light with a wavelength of 400nm and one with 800 nm, what can be said about the photons? Do the photons of the 800 nm light wave carry twice the energy or are there just twice as many photons (i.e. is the amount of energy one photon carries constant or variable)? Or does the wavelength not determine anything about the amount of energy a photon carries or how many photons there are? What about amplitude?

Is it possible that some people are misdiagnosed with ADHD when the problem is really a bad memory? I mean, the symptoms could be the same. Imagine that you were giving someone a set of instructions and then later you found that they only did half of them. You might first think that they weren't paying attention, but what if they WERE paying attention and they just didn't register half the instruction into memory. They wouldn't be able to defend themselves because what would they say? "Yeah, I know you told me that, but I forgot." No, he'd say "I don't remember you telling me that." I guess if it's a problem of recall, he might have the former response, but if it's a problem with registering it in the first place, he'd have the latter response. You think?

Speaking of intelligence factors, does anyone know of any good online tests for short-term memory? I have a terrible short-term memory and I'd like to do a few tests on myself.

Chapter 4, hour 3: They talk about our universe being a giant "brane" from which our particles cannot escape. But the way this concept of "branes" is introduced is that they are extensions of strings along a higher dimension. If this is the case, and if the particles that cannot escape from the brane are strings, then how are we to understand this? I mean, at first, they seem to be saying the branes are extensions of the particles, then they seem to be saying the branes are something other than the particles (something the particles are trapped on). What's going on here?

"Association" meaning what, like word association or memorizing?

Didn't someone come up with the concept of a "probability wave" to resolve this dilemma? That is, particles propogate as probability waves where the peaks of the wave represent the region of highest probability where you will find the particle when you try to measure it.

Yes, the Stanford-Binet one sounds right. Now, there's one task in particular I'm curious about, the one where the testee tries to match the red/white blocks with an image in a booklet. I believe the aptitude this one is testing is visual imagery (the ability to visualize things in the mind). Is this right? What kind of things would someone scoring high on this aptitude be good at? Drawing? Theory building (in physics or philosophy)? Computer Programming? Have any studies been done on this?

I did an IQ test a long time ago and I forget what the name of it was. It involved the following tasks (among others): -Sorting a series of cards with cartoons on them depicting situation, and I was supposed to put them in their most logical order (a series of events that tell a story). -Answers to general questions that test knowledge and common sense. -Short-term memory test where I was to repeat a series of numbers spoken to me. Another such test where I was to repeat a series of numbers in the reverse order in which they were spoken to me. -Arranging together 9 blocks which were half red, half white (separated along the diagonal) such that they matched a 2D shape shown in a booklet (like Tangrams). There were other tests as well, but I don't recall. Does anyone recognize these tasks as belonging to a specific IQ test?

So it's more like compressing something rubbery like a tire rather than something doughy like a donut. Is that right? A tire's molecules will not bond together by pressing to parts together, unlike other substances like dough or butter or fluids... am I taking the donut analogy to literally?

In hour 3, chapter 1 (the movie in the top, right corner), they talk about space ripping and how, according to Einstein, it cannot be done. They give an example of a donut. They say to imagine it is space. Then they say you can morph it and change it into any shape, but you cannot eliminate the hole because that would entail ripping it. My question is, why couldn't we just squish the donut? That would compact the hole and no ripping would be required. In the actual application of this analogy, what would happen to space if it closed in on itself? Can space "join unto itself"?

Well, how do they do it?