The interface of brain, mind and culture - the interaction between biology, philosophy and culture, with an evolving arc of spiralling complexities.
Saturday, 12 July 2008
Madness and Spirituality can be two sides of the same coin.
One has to go beyond the usual experiences of ‘normal’ people to experience these states. That is one has to experience and express EEG waves that are beyond the usual alpha to delta spans. Many spiritual gurus are known to show gamma waves in disproportionately high levels
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
Was Einstein Mad, Weird or Abnormal?
Einstein’s brain was thought to be abnormal as the parietal lobe and the temporal lobe were inter-meshed. This gave rise to experiencing the universe and his world in ways very different to most of us. He has said that he visualised much of what he later converted into mathematical equations due to a strange anomaly of his brain. The parts of the brain that are normally separated by a 'fissure' or a gap were in his brain merged. This gave rise to aberrant communication between nerve fibres which in most humans do not usually communicate during perception. This makes his brain abnormal and his theories therefore 'abnormal' too?! For if other brains that are thought to be abnormal (like that of my patient's or the man in the epilepsy clip are abnormal) and whose contents are also thought to be abnormal, then why should we confer a special status to Einstein. He was known to be quite absent minded and lost in his own world - quite an eccentric if you were to live with him! But what made him a genius is his capacity to translate his 'theories' into mathematical formulae - that ultimate symbolisation of reality that cannot be otherwise be visualised or contemplated.
Monday, 7 July 2008
Chemical storms can do the same job but you’d become mad.
Moving on, there could be another cause to his experiences. Option 3: He was psychotic. Psychosis is a state of mind where dopamine, noradrenaline and glutamine (neuroexcitators) are found in greater abundance than usual. Schizophrenia is the most common form of severe psychosis that alters a person's thinking, feeeling, perception and behaviour so significantly that the change in the 'normal' personality is striking. This leads to a brain that is hyperaroused, hyperactive and hyper-imaginative. The latter also implies a brain that is in a heightened state of activity or displaying gamma or high frequency EEG waves.
Gamma waves are a form of EEG waves that are known to ‘bind’ different parts of the brain so that there is greater communication between parts of the brain that don’t normally communicate with one another. The link will tell you a lot more about these waves and how Richie Davidson, a scientist with an interest in bridging the mind-spirit-brain conundrum is approaching this issue.
The core disintegration in the normally integrated aspects of mental functioning is now increasingly being linked to high frequency gamma waves.
Electrical storms in our brains make things more random
Continuing from where we left off yesterday, my patient’s UFO experience could have another cause. Option 2: he was experiencing a mild form of temporal lobe epilepsy where religious and other experiences are often felt with such an intensity of emotions (read faith) that the experience is accepted as a belief and the truth. Something similar may happen with those reporting alien abductions except that the emotion primarily experienced is one of fear rather than pleasure and ecstasy. This is because the fear pathways within the brain are firstly quite close to the pleasure pathways and in case of epilepsy aberrant and abnormal connections between different regions of the brain is common, so that the epilepsy triggers the fear pathway
Sunday, 6 July 2008
The randomness of our Existence
Its all random, what we think and how we feel, if and only if, we don’t carry baggage and pre-conceived notions and viewpoints. Schrodinger's cat and existence in multiple domains and multiverses become eerily common sensical. Patients with schizophrenia often report having a double in another world, in another universe, who is an exact replica of the person but living a different world with different experiences. I had such a patient who said that the 'two' were connected by 'an arc' which is drew like a rainbow with altered perspectives much like the Moebius strip. He also claimed alien abduction and implants in his head. One can wish it away as a form of madness, but I offer the following differentials. Option 1: He was telling the truth and just because we haven’t found alien forms yet, does not mean they don’t exist. If that proposition is true, then he lives in multiverses, or at the very least experiences phenomena that most of us don’t. There are many Discovery channel reports that ask more questions about this than answer. Watch the following video in the next post
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