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Posted on October 20, 2011 by Rob | Comments Off

My Opinion Debunked, a Political Rant and More!

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Rob

In my second-last post, The Battle of the Brains, I wrote:

At the beginning of this post I promised you a possible way to end the battle of the (individual) brains. Well, here it is. I try to make it a point to insert “in my opinion” in all my, well, opinions, no matter how dear to my heart they are. For example, it hurts when I stub my toe and I form a firm opinion that the stone is a more solid object than my toe and is therefore able to hurt me. However, as Einstein pointed out, “Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.” On a molecular level, there isn’t much substance to either my toe or a stone.

Well, I think there’s a problem with that theory. Thanks to Rowdy Mason, I was led to explore Robert Anton Wilson and Eprime a little bit. In Toward Understanding Eprime, RAW writes: “A revision of language structure, in particular, can alter the brain as dramatically as a psychedelic.” I can attest to that, because when I started replacing “facts” (or ‘to be’ verbs’) with the more open-ended “in my opinion,” worlds of possibility opened up and “miracles” became more commonplace in my life (really!). However, I also started to become a little bit wishy-washy.

In the same post, I wrote: “For example, it hurts when I stub my toe and I form a firm opinion that the stone is a more solid object than my toe and is therefore able to hurt me. However, as Einstein pointed out, ‘Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.’ On a molecular level, there isn’t much substance to either my toe or a stone.” When I stub my toe, it hurts, no matter what my opinion about the ultimate reality of stones and toes may be. It would be foolhardy (notice ‘be’ word) of me to say to myself, “This seems to hurt” and kick it again, while holding the thought that “matter is (another ‘to be’ factoid) an illusion” firmly in mind in hopes that my toe would pass harmlessly through the stone. With enough re-programming, I believe that is a possibility, but after a lifetime of stubbed toes, starting from the time I learned to walk, I apparently have become too firmly convinced that matter is solid.

In order to function, we make some fundamental assumptions and behave as if they were “facts.” Prior to 9/11, I operated on the assumption that the United States, while deeply flawed, was fundamentally a society based on humane values. Since then, I’ve increasingly formed the opinion that it is an “Evil Empire” hell-bent on achieving world dominance and dominance by the few at the expense of the many. In the past year, I’ve formed the opinion that if there is a chance at all for America to redeem itself, that chance is Ron Paul. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever backed a Presidential candidate and I’ve never voted. While I’ve kept my opinion open-ended enough to allow for debate, no one yet has convinced me to change that point of view.

I’m sure Ron Paul is as flawed a human being as any, but he represents positive change almost as profoundly as Gandhi or Martin Luther King did. As Paul Craig Roberts recently wrote in America’s Last Chance, “he is the only candidate who is not owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military-security complex, Wall Street, and the Israel Lobby.” He goes on to say that even in the unlikely event that he was elected, he would be prevented from implementing any of his policies, but that he should be backed and, if possible, elected anyway. This is why:

The reason we should vote for Ron Paul is to signal to the powers that be that we understand what they are doing to us. If Paul were to receive a large vote, it could have two good effects. One could be to introduce some caution into the establishment that would slow the march into more war and tyranny. The other is it would signal to Washington’s European and Japanese puppets that not all Americans are stupid sheep. Such an indication could make Washington’s puppet states more cautious and less cooperative with Washington’s drive for world hegemony.

So, while I still believe that all our opinions should be taken with a grain of salt, there are times when firmly standing behind our opinions becomes vitally important. I welcome voices of dissent, but if you’re an American living in America, I’d like you to look beyond domestic issues to the bigger picture and realise that the President you elect has an effect on all of us. If we all had a vote, I am almost certain that Ron Paul would win by a landslide because he is the only candidate telling America to stop messing with the rest of the world. Also, please read America’s Last Chance before commenting. Thanks.

An alien in ancient Egypt?

Who is this guy?

Okay, I’ve stated my opinion. Now I can go back to being a cosmic schmuck for a little while. By the way, there’s no reason why the pyramids couldn’t have been built by master craftsmen who spotted a few curious aliens while they were working. That would be one explanation for this very alien looking creature.

 

 

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Were the Pyramids Built by Aliens?

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Rob

I don’t know, but I proved my point.

I’m really pleased with myself this morning. In my last post, my primary point was to suggest that, in so many words, if we put our heads together cooperatively, we could come up with solutions to problems. I used a couple of examples to illustrate my primary point, which was that in nature we see examples of brilliant engineering and cooperation towards reaching a desired goal without having to sit down and work it out on paper, whereas, it seems to me, we humans have become a fractured species.

I also wrote about the building of the pyramids. I knew that by putting forward the aliens argument I was heading for trouble and wrote:

When you read that I found it more plausible that aliens helped make the pyramids above, did you heartily agree with me, laugh and cancel your subscription to my newsletter or something in between? Had it been something in between, we could have started a dialogue.

Well, my two comments illustrate what I was getting at perfectly. In the first one, Neil Slade took the time to rationally explain another, even more rational solution to the aliens-in-charge theory. In the second one, a reader just whipped out a couple of insulting sentences, calling me a “cosmic schmuck.”

One thing I did leave out of my argument was an interesting tidbit about the building of the pyramids that I read someplace and that was that graffiti has been found etched in some of the stones. The graffiti strongly suggests that the builders of the pyramids were not slaves, but willing and enthusiastic workers working together towards a common goal.

As for the comment about the “great Anton Wilson”: yes, he’s a really interesting guy, but I’m not sure that putting him on a pedestal and suggesting that he would have sent me a searing rebuttal is the best way to go about making your point. The “great” Alfred Korzybski, who came up with the system that’s come to be known as general semantics, suggested something very similar to what I suggest about “in my opinion.” This is how they put it in the Wikipedia entry about him:

His system included modifying the way we consider the world, e.g., with an attitude of “I don’t know; let’s see,” to better discover or reflect its realities as revealed by modern science. One of these techniques involved becoming inwardly and outwardly quiet, an experience that he termed, “silence on the objective levels”.

Anyway, in my opinion, Neil Slade gets an A+ for his comment while Rowdy Mason gets a D-.

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Posted in Activism, brain science, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

The Battle of the Brains

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Rob

16 December: Please read the follow-up post, Were the Pyramids Built by Aliens, after you read this post. You may be surprised by the answer!

I received a much appreciated article length reply to a recent post from Neil Slade, so drop everything, go to A Fresh Look at the Split Brain and the Frontal Lobes, scroll down to the comments and read what he has to say.This post is only randomly connected to his comment, so don’t consider it a summary or a critique – just vaguely connected thoughts.

He starts off with a title, RIGHT BRAIN versus LEFT BRAIN, hence the title of today’s post. However, the battle I’m referring to is the battle that goes on between separate brains – yours and mine – and how to perhaps end it. Neil writes:

As humans figured out how to make better spears, armor, and other technology that allowed small numbers of people to control vastly larger numbers of people and creatures, suddenly, the advantages of left brain mechanics looked mighty tempting.

What I can’t understand and what nobody has adequately explained to me is what motivated people to invent weapons of mass destruction in the first place. What instigated this disastrous shift from right brain to left brain thinking and how did we function before we became so entrenched in our left brains?

In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes speculates fairly convincingly that until about 3000 years ago, individual consciousness in humans didn’t exist. Until then, our right brains ruled and we did things unconsciously. Just as our hearts beat and our blood circulates without our conscious intervention, we ate, slept, built stuff and even created elaborate myths and legends without even thinking about it. He cites early versions of texts like the Iliad that are written very differently than more recent versions or more recent additions to prove his point.

There are holes in his theory and it remains a controversial one, but that may have something to do with his definition of consciousness and perhaps a lack of recognition of a transition period or the possibility that just as a few people today have “paranormal” abilities, a handful of people back then may have been as freakishly self-centred as we are today. At any rate, my cursory reading of Jaynes’ opened up worlds of possibility to me.

Let’s take the pyramids, for example. The rational explanations for how they were designed and built are pathetic at best, especially when you consider the weight of the stones and the consistent geometrical patterns that occur in pyramids throughout the world. It is more rational to believe that they were built under the supervision of aliens than it is to believe that some big honchos got their engineers to design them and then forced tens of thousands of slaves to build them. Think about it. Wouldn’t ten thousand slaves require a hundred thousand soldiers to keep them in line?

aliens in egypt?

Aliens in Egypt?

It’s also more rational to believe that left brain (or left brain style) reptilians who had already messed up their own planet came here and messed with our DNA either just for fun, as an experiment, or because they wanted to dominate us and use us for their own nefarious purposes than it is to believe that the right brain – left brain switch just happened all by itself.

If I remember correctly, Julian Jaynes speculated that a cataclysmic event forced the switch, but I don’t buy that. The right brain is far more equipped to deal with the unexpected than the left brain, which can only operate from one known to the other.

Spider webDoes it sound implausible that the pyramids could have been built without extensive planning and design work or that an epic poem or song could arise spontaneously? All you have to do is watch a spider build a web or listen to a bird sing a song and you’ll see that it’s entirely possible. Is it possible for a bunch of people to work together in harmony without rules and regulations imposed from above? Think about the incredible achievements of an colony of ants or bees and you’ll see they are far more efficient workers than we are. Speaking of bees, did you know that they are suffering from “bee colony collapse disorder” thanks to our wonderful pesticides and other chemical goodies? That’s the most plausible theory, anyway.

At the beginning of this post I promised you a possible way to end the battle of the (individual) brains. Well, here it is. I try to make it a point to insert “in my opinion” in all my, well, opinions, no matter how dear to my heart they are. For example, it hurts when I stub my toe and I form a firm opinion that the stone is a more solid object than my toe and is therefore able to hurt me. However, as Einstein pointed out, “Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.” On a molecular level, there isn’t much substance to either my toe or a stone.

A big termite mound

A BIG termite mound

When you read that I found it more plausible that aliens helped make the pyramids above, did you heartily agree with me, laugh and cancel your subscription to my newsletter or something in between? Had it been something in between, we could have started a dialogue. It wouldn’t be as good a solution as simply knowing, like mound building termites know exactly what to do even when they’re not within shouting distance of each other, but it would be a start in the right direction.

When we realise that our opinions and those of others are just opinions and nothing more, we become humble and open minded. This automatically puts us in a cooperative frame of mind and perhaps, if we practice it enough, we can shift back into having a symbiotic relationship with one another instead of fighting all the time.

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Posted in brain science, Conspiracy Theory, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Beyond the Split Brain

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Rob

I received some very interesting correspondence from Neil Slade after last week’s post. For one thing, he reminded me about the Curious Case of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who had the “great good fortune” of being able to observe her own stroke in progress. I’ve tacked on her TED talk about it below, noticing that over one million seven hundred thousand people have viewed it. Obviously, the split brain is a subject of interest and her story is so extraordinary, it’s worth saving and listening to from time to time. In a nutshell, her stroke virtually destroyed her entire left brain and she came to the realisation that:

I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, all we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful.

This wasn’t my first introduction to Jill Bolte Taylor and I mentioned her in my Sea of Joy chapter, The Split Brain, which, thanks to Iain McGilchrist, now needs further revision. One thing JBT taught me was that my attempts to get a nice balanced view of the brain were doomed to failure. Worse, as McGilchrist points out, the brain is not symmetrical. I love symmetry, so that is an unsettling revelation.

Anyway, as I wrote in The Split Brain:

The contradictory characteristics of brain behaviour have been a source of great embarrassment to some researchers, who have clung tenaciously to the idea that the brain is a compartmentalised construction and nothing more.

My concluding words were, “It is here that we have to leave the lump of grey matter behind and start surfing the Holographic Brain“. If a holographic brain sounds like a bizarre concept to you, please read the entry, because you’ll need to be able to accept it as a possibility before you move on to Thomas Campbell and his Big TOE. Campbell’s TOE (Theory of Everything) is that we live in a digital world or rather, all our perceived realities are digital realities. The more I listen to him, the more compelling his arguments become. For an introduction to Tom Campbell and his Big TOE, read my blog entry, Thomas Campbell,  William Blake and John Lennon: A Strange Symbiosis and watch the video attached to it.

And that brings me to the point of this entry. Note how I wrote “the more  compelling his arguments become” above. To “argue” is a distinctly left brain activity because it’s verbal in nature. There’s a huge problem with any verbal “argument” (whether benign or hostile): arguments are not grounded in reality or, as Iaian McGilchrist pointed out about the left brain, yield “a world that is ultimately lifeless.” Campbell presents his arguments in order to help us begin the process of disentangling ourselves from the narrow scope of our left brain, intellectual thinking processes and imagine alternate realities. That process of imagination is a right brain activity and hence is more holistic, balanced and ultimately realistic.

Personally, I think amygdala tickling and other visualisation techniques work simply because they are imaginative techniques. Whether or not the science is precisely correct is beside the point. The science helps, because we are so trapped in our illusory Newtonian, mechanistic world, we need an escape route and a compelling argument provides that route. Jill Taylor Bolte was lucky because she was a true believer in the world of matter and her stroke was a “stroke of insight” into the infinitely larger world of the “right brain” (in quotes because that is an illusory concept itself).  Most of the rest of us have to take a slower route, since our “left brain” is like a magnet pulling us back to earth.

Tom Campbell is interesting because he has explored many worlds, but doesn’t view any of them as particularly important. What he stresses again and again is the importance of LOVE as the ultimate reality that animates all temporary realities. As Walt Whitman wrote and is echoed by both Campbell and in JTB’s words quoted above:

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love

(more than) Enough said. Enjoy the video:

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A Fresh Look at the Split Brain and the Frontal Lobes

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Rob


An old friend indirectly led me to the video I’ve embedded at the bottom of the page. It’s a very easy to follow cartoon version of a lecture by Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. When I listened to it for the third time a few minutes ago to get quotes for this article, I found myself transcribing the whole text: it was that good. Mercifully, I’ll refrain from making you read the whole thing, since watching it is much more entertaining and, I think, enlightening, since the cartoons engage both hemispheres of the brain.

We need to use both sides of the brain

Both hemispheres are important

McGilchrist jumps right in and addresses the issue of the “debunking” of the split brain theory, saying that “the division of the brain is something neuroscientists don’t like to talk about any more”; the reason being that it simply isn’t true that one side of the brain is solely associated with reason and the other strictly limited to emotion. After that fact was established, “in a fit of despair” people gave up talking about it. Nonetheless, he argues, “the brain is profoundly divided” and, more worryingly, continues to become more lopsided, until today we live in a left-brain dominated world.

What’s wrong with that? Well, as McGilchrist points out, the right hemisphere “has a disposition for the living rather than the mechanical”, can see things in context, understands metaphor and can grasp implicit meaning. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, “yields a world that is ultimately lifeless.”

After re-introducing us to the split brain, Dr. McGilchrist starts talking about the frontal lobes. This was where his talk got really interesting for me, because I’ve had a frontal lobes dilemma lately. Based on my experience with “amygdala tickling”, I had come to the conclusion that frontal lobe activation automatically made one more compassionate and loving. However, neuroscientists refer to it as the “executive center” and see it as being impartial or amoral. McGilchrist seems to agree, saying that “the purpose of the frontal lobes is to inhibit the rest of the brain.” It stands “back in time and space from the immediacy of the experience.” This results in a decision maker who is able to do either of two things:

  1. It can “outwit the other party” (he calls this the Machiavellian mind).
  2. It can empathise (he refers to this as the Erasmian mind).

This came as a revelation to me and pieces of so many puzzles started falling into place – so many puzzles, in fact, I don’t even want to go into them all here or you’ll die of boredom. However, I do want to mention this (from another article I’m working on):

I learned amygdala tickling from Neil Slade‘s website. He emphasises stimulating both hemispheres by visualising tickling both the right and left amygdala. Most meditation techniques emphasise detaching yourself from your habitual “mind chatter” (a left brain activity) which is always good advice and probably helps bridge the gap between hemispheres, but personally, I think we need to make more active efforts to redress the imbalance. As Dr. McGilchrist says, the left hemisphere is “entirely self consistent largely because it’s made itself so” and “it’s very vocal on its own behalf” while “the right hemisphere doesn’t have a voice.”

Why is this so important? Please watch this video to the end and you’ll see why. Don’t panic – it’s only about 10 minutes long and is very entertaining:

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