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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Is the world I see the world I live in, or a construct of my brain's making?

« on: 08/01/2004 19:45:16 »

Reality is what you perceive it to be.  Every person's reality is different.  The mentally ill are only ill in the sense they perceive reality in a way different from what we do.  Insanity is a minority of one!

Common reality would be the group consensus on perception.  For instance, person sees a flying saucer hovering over New York City.  9 million others do not.  The common reality is that there is no flying saucer.  For that 1 guy though, there sure as hell is.  Which is reality?  Does the group perception dictate reality?  In most cases, sure, but I think it's fallacy to always accept that.  

Then there are the people with sollipsism who think that everything is a creation of their mind and that when something is outside of their perception, it ceases to exist until perceived again.  I know someone who really thinks like that...truly bizarre.



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Chemistry / Re: InOrganic Chemistry

« on: 06/11/2003 04:26:02 »

Ok, I asked a couple different people (physical chemists, way too smart for their own good) about this reaction today.  

In a nutshell, here's your answer:  

This reaction, the decomposition of concenrated HCl to component hydrogen and chlorine, would probably not occur.  The TiCl4 is not reactive to acids (or much of anything considering it has neither lone pair electrons or empty orbitals) so  would not catalyze this reaction.  Additionally, one of them seemed to think that given sufficient activation energy, the water in the HCl (even conc. Hcl has water in it) would decompose into hydrogen and oxygen (liberating HCl gas) before HCl would decompose.  

Hope this helps.  Inorganic chemistry is interesting, but a pain.  Wait til you get to physical chemistry.  =P

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Physiology & Medicine / Re: Is it common or useful to be able to control goosebumps, and pulse, at will?

« on: 25/10/2003 08:58:54 »

Many practitioners of arts like yoga or qi gong can do wacky things like slow their heart rates to abnormally low levels, pass things through their bodies that shouldnt pass, or generate heat in localized areas.  

I'm still pretty low on the rungs of my studies in biochemistry and physiology,  (that's for grad school, my nearly-completed undergrad degree is in plain ol' chemistry)  so I don't have a vast understanding of the mechanisms of these skills.  But I can tell you that I spent some time in years past studying qi gong and reiki, and I've seen people do some pretty amazing things to themselves and others.  I don't proclaim any of these things to be supernatural, but I do think that one can mess with biological functions of the body that are supposed to be "automatic."  

Some real research on the validity of holistic healing modalities would make for some kickass graduate thesis work.  If anyone's done any kind of studies that provide evidence either for or against various types of alternative medicine, I'd love to hear about it.



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