Brain strokes can have the same effect

Gamma waves are seen in, besides some psychotic and drug-taking individuals, by those suffering brain damage. At those levels of frequency, many things beyond the 'normal' experiences of people are accessible. Unfortunately a lot of such people are called madmen and relegated in a society that celebrates monotonous 'standardised' norms of behaviour as 'normalcy'. Magic and myths are gone, and science and rational logic are principally responsible for this state of play. Interestingly, brain damage through stroke, etc can also lead to a state where there is greater dominance of one region or the brain than another. This works in a way slightly different from epilepsy, where rather than abnormal and excessive connections between different brain regions, giving rise to altered perceptions and experiences, there is ‘silence’ in one brain region which allows another brain region to become ‘audible’. The following video tells us how.

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

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.

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

Randomness of our Existence - Video uplink

This is a video to be watched in conjunction with the previous post

This is a video to be watched in conjunction with the previous post.