You can check out an excerpt from Antero’s new book, The Eight-Circuit Brain: Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body at Reality Sandwhich:

Antero Alli: Eight-Circuit Brain excerpt

You can buy a DVD of Antero Alli’s talk from Esozone: The Other Tomorrow from Original Falcon:

The 8-Circuit Brain DVD

(note: this is not an official Esozone product, and Esozone does not benefit financially from sales of this product).

So far, scientists here have found little evidence that diet or exercise affects the risk of dementia in people over 90. But some researchers argue that mental engagement — doing crossword puzzles, reading books — may delay the arrival of symptoms. And social connections, including interaction with friends, may be very important, some suspect. In isolation, a healthy human mind can go blank and quickly become disoriented, psychologists have found.

“There is quite a bit of evidence now suggesting that the more people you have contact with, in your own home or outside, the better you do” mentally and physically, Dr. Kawas said. “Interacting with people regularly, even strangers, uses easily as much brain power as doing puzzles, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this is what it’s all about.”

New York Times: At the Bridge Table, Clues to a Lucid Old Age

An article about Red Bull drinking 92 year old bridge players is a good compliment to this New Yorker article about 20 and 30 somethings trying to squeeze as much performance out of their brains as possible.

See also:

Blue Zones

5 real products of the 90s cyberpunk & transhumanist hype

Could Caffeine Reduce Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease?

Also, whenever I start to worry about growing older, I take comfort in what Alejandro Jodorowsky had to say in this interview:

You’re 77 now. How are you coping with growing older?

It’s fantastic! I like it a lot. I don’t want to change myself. If you said, Do you want to be 40 years old [again] and I would say, maybe my body, but not my mind. It’s a nightmare, a social nightmare to get old – to get Parkinson’s, to become an idiot, but every day the brain is making new connections and is developing, like the universe. Your soul is getting better and better because you are losing what is not necessary. It’s fantastic to get old! It’s an incredible feeling of freedom, incredible!

Wired’s overview of contemporary mad scientists:

Daryl Bem - Precognition
Edward Kelly - Disembodied consciousness (”Remote Viewing”?)
Eric Lerner - Origin of the cosmos
Rollin McCraty - Atmospheric effects on physiology
Garret Moddel - Telekinesis
Peter Sturrock - UFOs

Wired: The Truth Is Out There, and the Nation’s Maddest Scientists Are After It

Turns out, misery may not love company — but happiness does, research suggests.

A new study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego documents how happiness spreads through social networks.

They found that when a person becomes happy, a friend living close by has a 25 percent higher chance of becoming happy themselves. A spouse experiences an 8 percent increased chance and for next-door neighbors, it’s 34 percent.

“Everyday interactions we have with other people are definitely contagious, in terms of happiness,” says Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study.

Perhaps more surprising, Christakis says, is that the effect extends beyond the people we come into contact with. When one person becomes happy, the social network effect can spread up to 3 degrees — reaching friends of friends.

NPR: Happiness: It Really Is Contagious

When you’re on a diet, deciding to skip your favorite calorie-laden foods and eat something healthier takes a whole lot of self-control–an ability that seems to come easier to some of us than others. Now, scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have uncovered differences in the brains of people who are able to exercise self-control versus those who find it almost impossible.

The key? While everyone uses the same single area of the brain to make these sorts of value-laden decisions, a second brain region modulates the activity of the first region in people with good self-control, allowing them to weigh more abstract factors–healthiness, for example–in addition to basic desires such as taste to make a better overall choice.

These findings not only provide insight into the interplay between self-control and decisionmaking in dieters, but may explain how we make any number of decisions that require some degree of willpower. [...]

The next step, the researchers say, is to come up with ways to engage the DLPFC in the decisions made by people with poor self-control under normal conditions. For instance, Hare says, it might be possible to kick the DLPFC into gear by making the health qualities of foods more salient for people, rather than asking them to make the effort to judge a food’s health benefits on their own. “If we highlight the fact that ice cream is unhealthy just before we offer it,” he notes, “maybe we can reduce its value in advance, give the person a head start to making a better decision.”

Science Daily: Mechanisms Of Self-control Pinpointed In Brain

(via OVO)

The discovery that mGLuR5 is integral to both extinguishing fearful memories and acquiring new ones could open the door to developing pharmaceuticals to treat PTSD. “You could hypothetically develop a drug that will isolate the receptor,” says Xu. “It could make it easier for a patient to form new memories and override traumatic events.” Currently, PTSD is treated with a combination of exposure therapy, in which patients relive traumatic events in safe environments, and SSRIs or tricyclic antidepressants. Now that they’ve identified this pathway, the team Xu is a part of will focus on eliminating mGluR5 in specific regions of the brain, he says, probably starting with the amygdala. As for the promise of erasing bad memories, Xu thinks it’s not a good idea. “It’s more appropriate to remember [a traumatic] event,” he says. “You just don’t want it to affect your daily life.”

SEED: Getting Over It

(Via - Can’t remember where I found this. Let me know if you think I stole this from you)

Can we start with cinema. Is your film “Drivetime” about unleashing powers of chaos by using chaos magic? I do not know if I have this right?

Intriguing interpretation. Though I did not intend make “The Drivetime”as a vehicle for chaos magick, I can see how it could be experienced like that. I wrote “The Drivetime” on the heels of kicking an opium addiction while living in the seaside village of Port Townsend Washington back in 1995. Papaver somniferum blooms wild all over the streets about three months each year and I learned everything you need to know about chasing the dragon from Jim Hogshire’s book, “Opium for the Masses” (Loompanics, Ltd). I was desperate to trade up my opium addiction for an endorphin trigger that wouldn’t vanquish my libido. Inspiration hit when my friend Rob Brezsny, the astrology columnist, introduced me to his spin on the term “drivetime” which refers to the psychic overlays linking daytime and dreamtime realities. This drivetime meme exploded in my imagination and got me thinking about the interface between the aboriginal dreamtime and modern-day cyberspace.

I’m at a loss for words as to just how I upgraded my opium addiction to getting hooked on the poetic imagination but that’s what happened. The drivetime was no longer an idea in my head but an all-encompassing reality that needed an outlet besides my body and so, the momentum was on to channel these visions through the multi-tiered outlet of a cyber-fi feature film. My aim in making the film was to proffer for the viewer an experience of the drivetime as I knew it. And so, I suppose maybe I did unleash the powers of chaos using chaos magic afterall.

Full Story: GPOD

By now you’ve probably seen this story floating around about how doodling may improve concentration, but I’m particularly interested in this part of the story:

When people are bored they have high levels of brain activity, Andrade says. “When you’re bored, you think nothing much is going on, but actually your brain is looking for something to do.”

So we daydream. But daydreaming takes considerable mental effort, particularly when we get stuck in a daydream. “So that sucks mental resources and energy away from the other task we’re meant to be doing,” Andrade says.

Which explains why we can feel so tired and burned out after a long, boring but easy day at work or school - or many successive days of boredom.

Full Story: Canada.com

1. We can erase people’s memories.
2. We can regulate people’s moods with microchips.
3. We can use brain implants to steer animals left and right.
4. Infrared brain scans can predict what people want.
5. Human-computer interfaces link human brains directly to computers.

Full Story: io9

(via OVO)

Hmmmm…

Canadian researchers say they can glean simple preferences from a person’s brain by shining near-infrared light into the noggin.

The study, reported in the Journal of Neural Engineering, demonstrated the ability to decode a person’s preference for one of two drinks with 80 percent accuracy by measuring the intensity of near-infrared light absorbed in brain tissue, the scientists said in a statement today.

“This is the first system that decodes preference naturally from spontaneous thoughts,” says Sheena Luu, a University of Toronto doctoral student in biomedical engineering who led the work under the supervision of Tom Chau, a specialist in pediatric rehab engineering at the university’s Bloorview Kids Rehab center.

Full Story: Live Science

(via Wade)

“Most of the real life DHARMA initiatives we cover here are, like the DHARMA Initiative, private organizations. But the high weirdness that the CIA’s Project MKULTRA got into is too important to ignore.”

Full Story: Hatch 23.

One of the various projects of the Esalen Institute was the Physics Consciousness Research Group, founded to study time travel, ESP, consciousness after death, and other fringe subjects. Various people have made the claim that Physics Consciousness Research Group was the inspiration for the movie Ghostbusters. Jack Sarfatti, one of the founders of the Physics Consciousness Research Group, is a physicist and archetypal “mad scientist” - in fact, he claims to be the inspiration for both from Back to the Future and Egon Spangler from Ghostbusters.

Full Story: Hatch 23

SRI International (previously known as Stanford Research Institute) is the clearest influence on the DHARMA Initiative (though DARPA is closer in name. Incidentally, SRI has been known to work for DARPA). SRI is a non-profit research institute working in a broad range of fields including, according to Wikipedia: “communications and networks, computing, economic development and science and technology policy, education, energy and the environment, engineering systems, pharmaceuticals and health sciences, homeland security and national defense, materials and structures, and robotics.”

Things got weird for SRI during the 60s and 70s, when it was engaged in parapsychology and LSD research. They hired L. Ron Hubbard, tested Uri Geller’s claims, and experimented with remote viewing.

They also compiled a report called The Changing Images of Man, contracted and funded by The Charles F. Kettering Foundation (the real life equivalent of Alvar Hanso?).

Full Story: Hatch 23

“One of the last remaining problems in science is the riddle of consciousness. The human brain—a mere lump of jelly inside your cranial vault—can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space and grapple with concepts such as zero and infinity. Even more remarkably it can ask disquieting questions about the meaning of its own existence. “Who am I” is arguably the most fundamental of all questions.

It really breaks down into two problems—the problem of qualia and the problem of the self. My colleagues, the late Francis Crick and Christof Koch have done a valuable service in pointing out that consciousness might be an empirical rather than philosophical problem, and have offered some ingenious suggestions. But I would disagree with their position that the qualia problem is simpler and should be addressed first before we tackle the “Self.” I think the very opposite is true. I have every confidence that the problem of self will be solved within the lifetimes of most readers of this essay. But not qualia.”

(via Edge. h/t: Integral Praxis)

Mattel’s keeping mum about the technology behind its Mindflex game, but – according to several online sources – the game requires the user to wear a headset equipped with sensors that measure brainwave activity.

This ‘activity’ is then used to guide a small foam ball through an obstacle course of hoops, which can be customised by the gamer.

It’s still unclear how the ball is kept in the air throughout its journey around the obstacle course. Some reports have claimed that a fan’s used, whilst other sources have said that Epoc-esque technology is the key to Mindflex’s power.

Full Story: Register Hardware

(via Grinding)

Even when he was living in a teepee at the height of the hippie movement, he never cancelled his subscription to Scientific American. And even though he started using all those eastern Hindu metaphors that became so popular then, he was also seeing it all in terms of genetics and DNA, very early on. It was not that long after the discovery of DNA – less than a decade — and this really impacted on his vision of psychedelic experiences from the start in 1960. You can pretty much find him intuiting evolutionary psychology even in his earlier writings. He went on evolutionary trips, experiencing the emergence of life and its evolution toward humanity. He assumed everybody would have that trip, which is one place where he went a bit astray. [...]

The other thing you may be referring to is the conversation at the end of the book that Leary had with a hardball Swiss political operative with various intelligence connections while he was in exile from the U.S. government in Switzerland. The entry is almost painful in its sophistication and leaves the book on a solemn note — we are still all prisoners of men who lust for power, from Leary’s point of view.

Full Story: 10 Zen Monkeys

A full issue of the Whole Earth Review from 1989, edited by Terrence McKenna and Howard Rheingold.

The Whole Earth Review: the alien intelligence of plants

(via Chris 23)

Can this possibly be true?

A team of Japanese scientists have created a device that enables the processing and imaging of thoughts and dreams as experienced in the brain to appear on a computer screen.

While researchers have so far only created technology that can reproduce simple images from the brain, the discovery paves the way for the ability to unlock people’s dreams and other brain processes.

A spokesman at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories said: “It was the first time in the world that it was possible to visualise what people see directly from the brain activity.

Full Story: the Telegraph

Reminds me of the movie Until the End of the World

(thanks Bill)

New Leary book with an introduction by R.U. Sirius:

Psychedelic guru, Timothy Leary was a psychologist who experimented, wrote and lectured about his investigations of mind-expanding drugs. Here is a collection of just some of his effusive output, much of it written as it happened.

Follow Leary as he drops acid at a prison with inmates, raises his children while the adults are “swimming on a sea of jewels,” becomes incarcerated, escapes prison, and generally expounds upon the politics of mind-altering substances before and after they become “controlled substances” in the U.S.A.

This is an authorized collection of Leary’s writings and lectures, and includes a dozen photos from the Timothy Leary Archive. Drawings by Jared Power.

Leary on Drugs at re/search publications

Their idea is, in broad outline, straightforward. Crespi and Badcock propose that an evolutionary tug of war between genes from the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg can, in effect, tip brain development in one of two ways. A strong bias toward the father pushes a developing brain along the autistic spectrum, toward a fascination with objects, patterns, mechanical systems, at the expense of social development. A bias toward the mother moves the growing brain along what the researchers call the psychotic spectrum, toward hypersensitivity to mood, their own and others’. This, according to the theory, increases a child’s risk of developing schizophrenia later on, as well as mood problems like bipolar disorder and depression.

In short: Autism and schizophrenia represent opposite ends of a spectrum that includes most, if not all, psychiatric and developmental brain disorders. The theory has no use for psychiatry’s many separate categories for disorders, and it would give genetic findings an entirely new dimension.

Full Story: the Chronicle Herald

This “holistic”  mode of consciousness (which Luthor experiences briefly at the end of All Star Superman) announces itself as a heartbreaking connection, a oneness, with everything that exists…but you don’t have to be Superman to know what that feeling is like. There are a ton of meditation techniques which can take you to this place. I don’t see it as anything supernatural or religious, in fact, I think it’s nothing more than a developmental level of human consciousness, like the ability to see perspective - which children of 4 cannot do but children of 6 can.

Everyone who’s familiar with this upgrade will tell you the same thing: it feels as if “alien”  or “angelic”  voices - far more intelligent, coherent and kindly than the voices you normally hear in your head - are explaining the structure of time and space and your place in it.
This identification with a timeless supermind containing and resolving within itself all possible thoughts and contradictions, is what many people, unsurprisingly, mistake for an encounter with “God.”  However, given that this totality must logically include and resolve all possible thoughts and concepts, it can also be interpreted as an actual encounter with God, so I’m not here to give anyone a hard time over interpretation.

Full Story: Newsarama

(via Arthur)

The hallowed halls of academia are not the place you would expect to find someone obsessed with evil (although some students might disagree). But it is indeed evil”‘or rather trying to get to the roots of evil”‘that fascinates Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Cognitive Science here. He’s so intrigued, in fact, that he has developed a sort of checklist for determining whether someone is demonic, and is working with a team of graduate students to create a computerized representation of a purely sinister person.

“I’ve been working on what is evil and how to formally define it,” says Bringsjord, who is also director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Lab (RAIR). “It’s creepy, I know it is.” [...]

This exercise resulted in “E,” a computer character first created in 2005 to meet the criteria of Bringsjord’s working definition of evil. Whereas the original E was simply a program designed to respond to questions in a manner consistent with Bringsjord’s definition, the researchers have since given E a physical identity: It’s a relatively young, white man with short black hair and dark stubble on his face. Bringsjord calls E’s appearance “a meaner version” of the character Mr. Perry in the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society. “He is a great example of evil,” Bringsjord says, adding, however, that he is not entirely satisfied with this personification and may make changes.

Full Story: Scientific American

Also known as Lady Neidpath, Feilding is not a scientist, but spends a six-figure sum of her own money each year to explore the inner workings of our mind: how we think; where creativity comes from; and how we can harness this knowledge. Through her charitable trust, the Beckley Foundation, she instigated the first scientific trial in 35 years to use LSD on human subjects. Based in Beckley Park, the Oxfordshire estate where Feilding has spent all her life, the foundation’s remit is to push for drug policy reform and fund research that will delve into the altered states of consciousness induced by meditation, deep breathing and powerful psychoactive drugs such as LSD. Even trepanning, the ancient practice of drilling a hole in the skull, is a line of modern inquiry as a treatment for Alzheimer’s. It is research that - in the UK at least - no one else appears willing to back.

“We are on the verge of making real breakthroughs,”  she says.

Why would an English Lady want to spend her money on high-risk projects with poor-to-zero financial returns? Feilding’s fascination with consciousness started at an early age. Interested in spirituality through her Roman Catholic upbringing, she was sent aged 16 to India to visit her godfather, a Buddhist monk. She went on to study mysticism and comparative religion at Oxford University and dabbled with drugs throughout the Sixties. But her interest in the medical applications of such substances sprung from a friendship with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who invented LSD, and who pushed for the medical benefits of the drug to be investigated. Hofmann died this year aged 102, shortly before the foundation published his last book, Hofmann’s Elixir: LSD and the New Eleusis, a collection of his essays and lectures.

Full Story: Times

(via OVO)

It sounds like science fiction, by scientists say it might one day be possible to erase undesirable memories from the brain, selectively and safely.

Using a complex genetic approach, U.S. and Chinese researchers believe they have done just that in mice, but the feat is far from being tested on humans.

Study co-author Joe Z. Tsien, co-director of the Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, says the “work reveals a molecular mechanism of how [memory deletion] can be done quickly and without doing damage to brain cells.”

Full Story: Yahoo!

(via Cryptogon)

“Wired magazine’s own ‘Senior Maverick’ talks with Ken Wilber about some of the ideas behind Kevin’s blog The Technium, which explores the various ways humanity defines and redefines itself through the interface of science, technology, culture, and consciousness. Kevin also shares some of his own thoughts about the role of spirituality in the 21st century, going into considerable depth around his own spiritual awakening several decades ago.”

(via Integral Life. h/t: Integral Praxis)

(The Technium Blog)