[qpan]

quote:Originally posted by Senseless

Ill will definativly answer the question about our souls and hearts.

Out soul is real though, and here is my proof.

They say that when you are under hypnosis or dreaming or meditating you are using the LEAST !!!!!! amount of brain activity!!!!

Well, that proves nothing. A large amount of brain activity is due to your senses. When you are asleep, all your sensory organs are switched off. In addition to this, your body moves far less when you are asleep compared to when you are awake and therefore you have reduced brain activity from that too.

If brain activity increased when we were dreaming, what would be the point in sleeping at all? Sleep allows your body and mind to rest so that you are right and ready for the next day.

The reason that no-one has proved/disproved that the soul exists is that it is so hard to conduct a conclusive experiment. In truth, we know very little about how the brain functions, and it can be historically shown that when people don't understand something, they invent some mystical force which they proclaim must cause the effects they see.

"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it."
-Edgar Allan Poe

[qpan]

quote:Originally posted by Senseless

meditation is associated with a SUPREME intelligence. Albert Ienstine used to think his best under hypnosis!

Greg Badalian

That is complete bull. There are claims around that Mozart composed one of his great pieces while in a hypnotic trance. Can people not just accept that some people are just extremely talented and gifted? Or must they attribute their genius to something else?
Mozart was probably just concentrating hard. Surely you can't call that a hypnotic state? Just like when you are "in the zone" when playing a sport - is that hypnotism too?

"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it."
-Edgar Allan Poe

[jai]

i guess in some ways you can call it a hypnotic state, if you define a hypnotic state as being when you are accessing the subconscious to a greater extent and with purpose. i know that when i tattoo or paint, i zone out and in some ways it does feel very much like when i have undergone hypnosis.

or when you are accessing the right side of the brain, the side associated with spacial response and abstract thought. is this correct about the right (as in right hand side) side of the brain? that it is used more with these processes? i read that some where and whenever i have read about hypnosis or subconscious thought it is always said the right side of the brain is where this activity seems to come from.

however i certainly do agree that the amount of brain activity during certain states is no form of proof of a soul. and yet i am not sure that the soul does not exist? maybe it is just a tendancy to want to believe in magic, to make life more interesting?


yaaaaay!!!!!!!

[qpan]

The brain is a very interesting topic of discussion. Apparently, the two halves of the brain have separate personalities - your brain does not really function as a single unit at all!

Some scientists were doing experiments on people who have had their link severed (to stop seisures). As you may or may not know, the right side of the body is controlled by the left brain and the left side of the body by the right. If a normal person is shown different pictures in each eye, they can draw a representation of either picture using either hand. The subjects were shown different images to each eye, but it was found that they could not draw images using their right hand of the pictures they saw in their left eye and vice versa. This was all due to the link being removed. The people still functioned normally with their everyday lives though, apart from a few cases of "alien hand," which is when your hand decides to attack you and you have no control over it whatsoever. Alien hand occurs on the left hand of a right handed victim and the right hand of a left handed victim. This suggests that whichever hand you write with houses "more" of your conscious self, and that its the other (non-conscious according to "you") half of the brain which causes your hand to attack you.

This is a very interesting article i just found by googling:

http://www.viewzone.com/bicam.html

Make sure you read the science bits - you'll probably be very surprised by the things you read!

"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it."
-Edgar Allan Poe

[jai]

thanks qpan, will have a sticky at it tonight. what you have said aligns perfectly with what i thought i knew.  it has just been about 10 years since i was reading it and i wasnt sure if it had become a personal myth or if it was real. good to know that i imagined it correctly.


yaaaaay!!!!!!!

[deweys hamster]

so is "alien hand" the same kind of thing that affects those people who have an arm or leg that they think is not theirs? don't know what it's called, but these folk want to have the offending limb amputated

[chris]

Whilst I've been away this thread has covered a huge amount of ground. But to raise a few points which refer back to various points that have come up during the discussion...

Behaviour is genetically determined to a certain extent. But studies comparing identical twins separated at birth have failed to find any robust evidence for shared preferences or dislikes.

The brain is continually moulded by life experience, although this process occurs more easily in younger years than subsequently. At their peak, young children pick up and assimilate 10 news words a day. You try that now ! Even by teenage we require a teacher to help us grasp a foreign language. Yet all that was required for a baby was to listen to mum and dad !

In essence we are born with an undeveloped brain which is rather like a blank sheet of paper. The rough workings are there but they require 'tuning' through repeated experience. Take the visual system as an example. The connections from the eye to the brain are present at birth, but they are not precise - there are mistakes. But within a few weeks of birth, competition between different groups of nerve cells leads to the precise patterning of inputs (the ocular dominance columns) required for good vision.

Now superimpose onto this rough map the role of genetics. Say, for instance, there is a gene that leads to an increased density of inputs to the auditory system, providing someone with the opportunity to develop perfect pitch. Unless that person picks up an instrument and starts learning music, they will never exploit that potential.

So the brain is the meeting point of development (driven by genes) superimposed upon which is the influence of the environment and the life you lead. The bad news is that, as I suggested at the beginning of this piece, our brains are most plastic when we are at our youngest, so the saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" is, unfortunately, to a certain extent true.

Now to talk about the split brain preparation - this was the work that won Roger Sperry the nobel prize. A number of subjects underwent division of the corpus callosum (a large fibre bundle which connects the 2 halves of the brain together) in order to provide relief from epilepsy.

Just as the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, everything you see on the left side of your body is processed by the right side of your brain. This left 'visual field' actually receives inputs from both eyes (cover your left eye and you'll still see some of the left visual field on the left). The inputs from the 2 eyes are combined on the opposite side of the brain.

This means that when a picture is flashed up in the right visual field it is 'seen' exclusively by the left side of the brain, and vice versa. In the split brain subjects, people shown say a cup in the right visual field were able to correctly name it as such (because the left brain encodes language). But when they were shown a cup in the left visual field, they knew what to do with it but they couldn't say what it was. This is because they couldn't transfer the identification of the object to the left brain to generate its name. Complicated, but very elegant work. Hence the nobel prize !

Chris

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception"
 - Groucho Marx

[qpan]

quote:Originally posted by chris

Behaviour is genetically determined to a certain extent. But studies comparing identical twins separated at birth have failed to find any robust evidence for shared preferences or dislikes.

Are you sure? The studies i read showed that provided the separated twins were approximately equally privelidged (i.e. they both went to school in the same country, parents of similar "social class"), they were shown to have very similar tastes as well as near identical IQ's. Granted, if one was spearated to california and the other went to somewhere like Bangladesh, you would expect them to have differing preferences and different IQ's.

I totally agree that nature and nurture are both extremely important in our upbringing - but this neither proves nor disproves free will.
If you make the assumption that there is no such thing as free will, then even nurture is completely dependant on DNA. The blank canvas of the brain is created with specifications depending on your genes, but how you fill the canvas is down to external stimuli from other humans as well as the environment. If there is no free will, then everything that happens around you just "happens," like a clock ticking, and you are just a gear inside the clock, unable to alter the time yourself.

"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it."
-Edgar Allan Poe