Material
Submitted on August 1, 2007
The Heart
Feels the Future
The heart
appears to respond precognitively to emotional events, seemingly able to discern
whether or not an arousing stimulus is about to impinge upon the heart’s owner.
In the research study responsible for this conclusion, conduct ed at the
HeartMath Institute by Dr. Rollin McCraty, subjects sat in front of a computer
screen that presented pictures at a steady rate. Randomly, at unannounced
moments, the computer would display a very arousing picture, either erotic or
morbid. The participants had their brain’s EEGs recorded, as well as their heart
activity, during the experiment.
The data from
these recording instruments, according to a report published in the Journal
of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, showed that the heart anticipated
the arousing pictures by approximately five seconds. Amazingly, the brain also
responded, but slightly after the heart, as if the brain were responding to the
heart and not to the about to be presented stimulus.
Besides
implicating the heart in psychic perception or intuition, it also shows that
perception generally is not the exclusive province of the brain.
Source:
Explore Your
Future Consciousness
Another study,
described in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, was
reported by psychophysiologist Rollin McCraty and his colleagues from the
Institute of Heartmath in Boulder Creek, California. McCraty's group
simultaneously measured skin conductance, heart rate, and brainwave activity
before, during, and after 26 participants viewed emotional and calm pictures.
They found that both the heart (p < 0. 001) and the brain (p < 0. 05) responded
about 5 seconds before the future emotional stimuli, and to their amazement,
that the heart responded before the brain. They also observed significant gender
differences in the processing of this future information (women performed
better, on average, than men). They concluded: "Our findings suggest that
intuitive perception is not a discrete function produced by a single part or
system of the body alone. Rather, it appears that intuition may in fact be a
system-wide process involving at least the heart and brain, together, in the
processing and decoding of intuitive information." They highlighted that "the
fact that the heart is involved in the perception of a future external event is
a surprising, even astounding result, especially from the classical perspective
that assigns the brain an exclusive role [for perception]."
Web source for
entire article:
http://www.mondovista.com/future/index.html
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Oprah’s
Formula for Finding Purpose in Life Echoes Cayce’s Suggestions
Have you
noticed lately that many of today’s gurus offer suggestions that seem right out
of the Edgar Cayce readings? On their own, many teachers and leaders are
discovering the same principles that Cayce espoused. How many of Cayce’s ideas
can you recognize in Oprah Winfrey’s suggested ten steps to finding your purpose
in life?
1. Listen to your inner
voice. It takes
practice to hear your true desires. Your passion will often come as a whisper or
serendipitous event that reminds you of what's important and what makes you
happy.
2. Recognize crisis.
Does your job feel like a grind? Are you spending your free time on something
you love? Take an opportunity to appraise your happiness. One of the keys to
living a purposeful life is seeing that you feel unfulfilled.
3. Dwell in
possibilities. Your
passions could lead you in a lot of different directions to find fulfillment.
Explore your life and unearth all of the things that bring you joy.
4. Tune out the voice of
the world. Make the
strongest voice in your life your own. Finding your purpose could mean going
against the advice of close friends and family. Take a leap of faith and trust
in your dreams.
5. Decide what kind of
person you want to be.
Rather than concentrating on what you want to do, think in terms of what kind of
person you want to be. Let that guide your choices.
6. Bring your heart to
your work. It takes
passion and courage to find a profession that you love. Spending the time to
discover that job is time well spent—it could make all the difference in your
life!
7. Trust transformation.
Hard times are a natural part of life. Don't be afraid to change because of your
experiences. Instead, let them shape and steer your course.
8. Have no regrets.
According to the experts, it's easy to regret the time you've spent being
unhappy or unfulfilled. Realize that during that time, you developed the skills
you need to succeed!
9. Take the first step.
Destiny can't help you until you are willing to step out of your comfort zone.
Get prepared to make changes in your life … and start making them!
10. Be patient.
Finding your life purpose won't happen overnight. In every life, there's a fast
road and a slow road. Most of us take the slow road! Keep your commitment and
take small steps to make it happen.
Web source:
http://boomers.msn.com/articleOPRAH.aspx?cp-documentid=387773>1=10111
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
New Organization For Professional
Intuitives
As society accepts the reality of intuition, professional intuitives are
organizing themselves into organizations that are focused on their professional
identity, interests, and needs. The latest is the Professional Association of
Intuitive Consultants (intuitives.org). Members receives such benefits as credit
card processing, health and liability insurance, educational and certification
services, and networking. The association is open to
professionals who provide healing, channeling, shamanic, spiritual teaching,
counseling, and other intuitive services.
Group to
promote 'intuitive' profession
NASHVILLE,
Ind., June 5 (UPI) -- A U.S. membership organization has been formed to further
the profession of "intuitive consulting" and to support its practitioners, the
group said Tuesday.
The
Professional Association of Intuitive Consultants, based in Nashville, Ind.,
near Indianapolis, "seeks to protect and advance both the public interest and
the interests of practitioners," the association said.
It was created
"in response to the growing desire -- among counselors, healers and other
professionals who use intuition in their practices -- for professional support
in education, training, research, advocacy and service, while at the same time
creating, stimulating and maintaining high professional standards and ethical
behavior in the practice of intuition," co-founder and Executive Director L.W.
Ashonosheni said.
Professional
members range from life coaches, massage therapists, transpersonal counselors
and visionary artists to Reiki healers, feng shui practitioners, shamans and
mediums, the association said.
Other
membership categories include educational institutions such as intuitive-arts
and massage-therapy schools and affiliates such as spiritual publishers and
metaphysical stores.
The
association intends to be the pre-eminent, broad-based membership organization
for intuitive professionals, Ashonosheni said.
Weblinks:
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Business/2007/06/05/group_to_promote_intuitive_profession/6366/
http://www.intuitives.org/
-=-=-=-=-=
Monk Dies and
Body Shrinks to Rainbow
A Tibetan monk
dies and the community gathers in prayers for the soul’s journey, as per the
norm. But in the case of the monk named Khenpo A-chos, what happened to his body
after death was anything but normal. Those surrounding the body in prayer
noticed that the body was growing softer, pinker, and was actually shrinking in
size. According to an article appearing in Discover magazine, within a
week of death, there was nothing left of the monk’s body but a couple of hairs
lying upon his pillow. According to Tibetan tradition, he had transformed into
the “rainbow body.”
In response to
the news of this event, which traveled fast, Christian monks came to study the
phenomenon. It was thought that this case might add evidential weight to the
stories of Jesus’ resurrection. The Christian monks heard from those who had
witnessed the event. There were photos of the monk, when alive, meditating,
showing light rays coming off his body. However, there were no photos of his
rainbow body in the process of shrinking and disappearing.
Web source:
Soul Search
Will natural
science pin down our supernatural essence?
by Jane Bosveld
In 1998 a strange story emerged
from a village in the remote Kham region of eastern Tibet. It is said that a
rainbow appeared one day above the cabin of Khenpo A-chos, a devout lama who had
continued to practice and teach Buddhism despite the severe restrictions of the
Chinese government. He was in his eighties, but not sick. Nevertheless, he lay
down on his bed, began reciting the Tibetan mantra “Om mani padme hum,” and
died.
Shortly after the nuns, monks,
and others who studied with him began the Tibetan Buddhist prayers that
accompany death, they noticed that Khenpo A-chos’s skin began to turn soft and
pinkish. His students hurried to another lama to ask about this, and he told
them to cover the body and continue their prayers. They placed a thin yellow
monk’s cloak over him, and as the days passed, they saw that his body was
shrinking. By the end of the week, the students reported, nothing remained—just
a few hairs left on the pillow. Khenpo A-chos had apparently become what is
known in Tibetan Buddhism as a
rainbow body.
This story spread through
Buddhist circles, making its way to the United States, where Brother David
Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, heard it. He realized that the miraculous
event had implications for Christianity: “If we can establish as an
anthropological fact that what is described in the resurrection of Jesus has not
only happened to others but is happening today,” he has said, “it would put our
view of human potential in a completely different light.”
Brother David enlisted the aid
of
Father Francis Tiso, an associate director of the secretariat for Ecumenical
and Interreligious Affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
in Washington, D.C., who also has a doctorate in Buddhist studies. Father Tiso
journeyed to Kham with a translator and recorded the testimony of several people
who had witnessed the events.
The lama who had been consulted
by the students, Lama A-chos (no relation), told him that achieving the rainbow
body “is a matter of inner realization. It’s not a philosophical idea. It’s not
a metaphor.” He also showed Father Tiso photographs of himself taken while
meditating, indicating what looked like light radiating from his body.
Did these things truly happen?
Certainly they were real to Lama A-chos and perhaps even to Father Tiso. “It’s
one of my regrets that I couldn’t take a photograph of his photos. It was too
dark, and a flash would have washed out the photos,” Father Tiso says. “People
criticize the research, saying, ‘Well you didn’t do this or that,’ and of
course, it’s unscientific. But there is an interface between what we might call
mystical phenomena and observable phenomena that one day may be documented.”
The interface Father Tiso is
referring to is the contentious place where people are searching for proof of
the existence of the human soul. What information counts as evidence depends on
how you define “evidence.” On one side there are the mystical phenomena reported
by serious practitioners in all spiritual traditions. These experiences cannot
easily, if at all, be measured or tested by scientific methods. On the other
side are observable phenomena—the backbone of empirical experimentation—that so
far have given only the vaguest hints of a consciousness that persists outside
of the physical body. History is filled with attempts to prove that the soul is
real. In 1921 physician Duncan MacDougall devised the famous
“21 grams” experiment to detect the exit of the soul from the body by
measuring how a person’s weight changes immediately after death. He monitored
six deaths and reported that the people lost anywhere between 11 and 43 grams at
death (not always 21 grams as is popularly reported), which he took as the
material weight of the soul. Follow-up experiments failed to replicate
MacDougall’s findings, and some researchers attributed the weight loss to
straightforward processes like the evaporation of water from the body.
Nevertheless, Gerard Nahum, a
physician and director of medical affairs for the pharmaceutical company Berlex,
has been working on a different kind of follow-up experiment for the past two
decades. All you need, according to Nahum, is an extremely sensitive scale and
an array of electromagnetic sensors. “In principle, it’s a pretty simple
experiment,” he says. He proposes surrounding the body with a spherical array of
electromagnetic detectors (microwave, infrared, X-ray, gamma ray) to pick up any
type of escaping energy. “When a conscious entity dies,” Nahum says, “all of
what’s embodied in it cannot just simply disappear. It needs to either be
transformed into something else within our space-time, or it needs to transcend
its existence here and move on to someplace else where it could potentially
remain intact.”
Nahum has tried to sell his idea
to engineering, physics, and philosophy departments at Yale, Stanford, and Duke
universities; they all turned it down. Even the Catholic Church took a pass.
“They didn’t see that there was a significant upside to performing this type of
experiment because they already knew what the answer would be,” Nahum explains.
Researchers in England, the Netherlands, and the United States are searching for
the soul in a different way, focusing on experiential as well as material
evidence. At places like the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma,
California, researchers examine various aspects of consciousness to see if it
functions independently of the physical brain, implying the existence of an
independent life spirit.
At the
University of Virginia Health System’s
Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS, scientists are studying an array of
anomalous phenomena, including near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences,
and memories of past lives. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at UVHS and director
of DOPS, is a pioneer in the study of near-death experiences. First described in
ancient times, near-death experiences, or NDEs, happen when patients are
critical or when their hearts have briefly stopped. Typically, they describe
seeing visions of a bright light and feeling themselves carried down a tunnel
toward it. Along the way deceased relatives or spiritual figures may appear
offering comfort. It is by almost all reports a transformative experience.
Greyson, a soft-spoken man who
has studied NDEs for 30 years, explains that although he does not necessarily
believe in the existence of the soul, that possibility inspires his curiosity.
“I believe that our current understanding of humans is woefully inadequate,” he
says. “I think the spiritual traditions that we have are good starting points
for researchers to look at what might be going on. I don’t accept them as
definitive answers. I accept them as starting points for developing hypotheses
that we can test, but I’m not happy with the answers we have now, either from
science or from religion.”
Greyson reports that about 10
percent of the people who go into cardiac arrest have an NDE and report knowing
details of activities that occurred while they were unconscious. Frequently,
individuals tell of watching from above the operating table as doctors and
nurses work on their bodies. From a scientific standpoint, the most significant
aspect of many NDEs is that the individual’s brain should not have been
functioning at the time of the event. “We have a lot of well-documented cases
where we have EEG and other evidence that the brain is not functioning, and yet
people will say, ‘I was thinking clearer than I ever have before,’” Greyson
says.
Dutch cardiologist and
near-death researcher Pim van Lommel notes that, at the moment of an NDE, “these
people are not only conscious, their consciousness is even more expansive than
ever. They can think extremely clearly, have memories going back to their
earliest childhood, and experience an intense connection with everything and
everyone around them. And yet their brain shows no activity at all.”
If consciousness is the product
of brain activity, near-death experiences should not happen. At the very least,
the contrary evidence suggests that the standard understanding of consciousness
is incomplete. Peter Fenwick, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry
at Kings College London, wrote in a paper, “The brain-identity theory says that
consciousness ends with brain death. But if it can be shown that people can
acquire information when they are unconscious and out of their body, it would be
indisputable evidence that consciousness is separate from the brain.”
Again, the question comes back
to the definition of evidence. Greyson attempted to document an NDE by
programming a laptop computer with simple colored images (an airplane, a
sailboat, a butterfly, a flower, a kite), one of which was displayed on the
computer screen at random. He placed the laptop on top of a monitor about 10
feet off the floor of an operating room, beyond the view of patients undergoing
heart surgery. In this operation, doctors induced cardiac arrest in the patient.
If any of the patients had been able to escape their bodies and observe the room
from above, they would have been able to see the computer screen and describe it
later.
Greyson ran his experiment on 50
patients, but not one of them reported having an NDE. On the other hand, most
denied that they had ever been unconscious at all. “One of the factors involved
is that, before their cardiac arrest was induced, these patients were all given
medication that inhibited them from forming memories of the procedure,” Greyson
says. “We under-estimated how complete the drug-induced memory inhibition would
be.”
At the center
of many near-death experiences is the sensation of the mind having left the
body. Philosopher Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz
in Germany hypothesizes that out-of-body experiences, or OBEs, may have actually
spawned the idea of the soul. Early humans, he says, probably had such
experiences and may have interpreted them as evidence that their minds separated
from their bodies. This idea then could have evolved into the concept of a soul.
Metzinger calls this his “soul hypothesis” and suggests that once the human
brain had experienced out-of-body events, “it was a highly rational belief to
assume the possibility of disembodied existence.”
The question is, what causes
out-of-body experiences? Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in
Lausanne, actually
induced an OBE in a patient by stimulating the temporal-parietal junction (a
part of the brain important in body orientation). “Each time we stimulated that
area, the patient, who had never had an out-of-body experience before,
experienced one,” he says. “While we were stimulating it, she was awake and not
impaired in any sense, and she told us that she saw the world, including us
three investigators and herself lying on the bed, from this elevated
perspective.”
If, as Blanke suggests,
out-of-body experiences may be a product of a temporary brain stimulus, why do
they leave such a deep and lasting impression? The effects of a near-death
experience (often involving an OBE) literally change people’s behavior. “As a
psychiatrist,” Greyson says, “what was most impressive to me was how people
changed as a result of a near-death experience. It’s just one experience that
takes place in maybe a fraction of a second, and it changes their lives.
Psychiatrists spend years and years trying to help people make fairly small
changes in their lives, and here comes this experience which in a blink of an
eye totally transforms reality. If we can figure out what’s going on there and
tap into that power, it would be an important tool for us to use. Basically,
they come back believing that the golden rule is the way the universe works,
just like gravity. What you do to other people gets done to you, so they come
back with a different attitude toward almost everything. Some people change
their careers, their relationships, how they do things. Some become more
spiritual or more altruistic.”
Greyson has followed individuals
for 20 years after they experienced an NDE. “For the most part,” he says, “the
changes they made after having an NDE have persisted.”
Perhaps the most surprising
scientific evidence for the soul comes from quantum mechanics—specifically, from
investigations of the subatomic phenomena that produce consciousness. Stuart
Hameroff, an anesthesiologist who has spent many years studying brain functions,
has collaborated with renowned Oxford University polymath Roger Penrose on a
model that explains consciousness as the
result of quantum processes occurring in tiny structures called microtubules
in brain cells. “I think consciousness under normal circumstances occurs at the
level of space-time geometry in the brain, in the microtubules,” Hameroff says.
“But the fluctuations extend down to the Planck scale [far smaller than an atom]
because the microtubules are driven bioenergetically to be in a coherent state.
When the blood supply and the oxygen stops, things go bad and the coherence
stops, but quantum information at the Planck scale isn’t lost. It may dissipate
into the universe but remain somehow entangled in some kind of functional unit,
maybe indefinitely. If the patient is revived, the information gets picked back
up again.”
Although Hameroff does not talk
overtly about the soul, he invokes a similar idea—consciousness that exists
separate from the body. The Planck scale is the unimaginably small distance at
which current theories of gravity and quantum physics break down. Events at the
Planck scale, according to some theorists, may fundamentally establish the
nature of reality. For Hameroff and Penrose, the idea goes even further, into
the mystery of consciousness itself.
“Penrose came up with a specific
threshold that is conscious. He made the connection between the quantum
possibilities in the universe and the quantum processes in the brain,” Hameroff
says.
Penrose speculated that there
must be structures in the brain that process these fragments of quantum
consciousness, but he didn’t know what they were. Meanwhile, Hameroff had found
computer-like components in the brain but couldn’t figure out how they worked.
“I needed a mechanism, and he needed a structure, so we teamed up,” Hameroff
says.
Penrose theorizes that there
exists at the Planck scale a realm of Platonic ideals that influence the
workings of our mind. “It’s the tiniest scale imaginable,” Hameroff says. “The
universe is, after all, mostly empty space. If you go down in scale 25 orders of
magnitude below the size of an atom, on the way down it would appear smooth and
featureless. Then you begin to see structure or coarseness or irregularity,
which is the Planck scale, the basement level of the universe. You get patterns
at the Planck scale that are constantly evolving and changing. This is where
Penrose says the noncomputable influences are embedded. Even though they’re
very, very tiny, they repeat everywhere.”
Even if that idea answers where
consciousness comes from, it raises the question: Where did the Planck-scale
processes that cause it come from Penrose’s answer: They came from the Big Bang.
In this view, consciousness—all consciousness—was created at the same moment
when the universe was created. If the soul exists, it, too, might be anchored to
our moment of cosmic origin. This is what Italian astrophysicist Paola Zizzi
terms the “Big Wow,” shorthand for her description of the connection between
“the very early quantum computing universe and our mind.”
Penrose’s ideas hint at a
physical mechanism for consciousness that persists after death. “If a patient
isn’t revived,” Hameroff says, “it enters the universe at large, and maybe it
gets picked back up again by someone someday, who knows?” At the Division of
Perceptual Studies, there are file cabinets bulging with case studies of people
who think they know. Most of them are children who remember past lives: who they
were, where they lived, what they looked like, what work they did, all sorts of
details of a life.
Psychiatrist and physician Ian
Stevenson, who founded DOPS, began gathering stories of past lives in 1960. He
also made personal trips to verify and document the details, including reports
of children with birthmarks corresponding to wounds the “previous personality”
received and phobias related to the cause of death. Stevenson died early this
year, but child psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker, author of Life Before Life: A
Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives, is continuing
his work. Tucker has helped build a database of 1,400 cases of possible
reincarnation. At his office at DOPS, Tucker explains that with the stronger
cases “kids tend to start talking about these memories at an earlier age. They
talk about them with more emotion. They give a lot of details, including
specific names about the previous life.”
Investigating reincarnation is
an even thornier research problem than studying NDEs. Although almost every
culture has stories of people whose souls returned after death, the evidence for
that return consists mostly of recollections and anecdotes. Tucker does his best
to examine as many of the memories in each case as possible. Sometimes he
locates family members and consults local historians to confirm information.
Nevertheless, Tucker says, “We would never say that we have proved that
reincarnation occurs. I think we can only say that we’ve produced evidence for
it.”
The question comes back: What
kind of evidence counts? For science, case studies like Tucker’s are never going
to be enough to prove that a human soul survives death and is reborn. Like the
rainbow body, they will remain as nothing more than folklore for those who
require empirical proof. As the Buddhist holy man Lama A-chos told Father Tiso,
“This is not a matter for the eyes; it is a matter for the heart.” The ongoing
search for the soul may require both.
Weblink:
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/soul-search
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Morals Have
Biological Basis
It feels good
to give to others because there is a reward center in the brain that fires when
we do give to others. That’s the result of brain activity research conducted at
the National Institute of Health. In this research, subjects had their brains
imaged while they imagined different scenes. In one scene, they receive a large
sum of money and have to decide whether to keep it or give it away. The study
showed that a part of the brain that usually lights up with food or sex became
activated.
On the other
hand, patients with damage to a particular part of the brain are unable to
resolve moral dilemmas through feeling. Rather than express the consternation
over the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” predicaments in these dilemmas,
the brain damaged person offers a emotionless, factually-based approach.
Some worry
that attributing moral actions to brain events will remove the sense of personal
responsibility from morality, such as exists in our sense of free will.
Source:
If It Feels
Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural
By
Shankar Vedantam
Washington
Post Staff Writer Monday, May 28, 2007; Page A01
The e-mail came from the next
room.
"You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll
had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the
National Institutes of Health, had been scanning the brains of volunteers as
they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of
money to charity or keeping it for themselves.
As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll
came bursting in. The scientists stared at each other. Grafman was thinking,
"Whoa -- wait a minute!"
The results were showing that
when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the
generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in
response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior
moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the
brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
Their 2006 finding that
unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of
spiritual leaders such as Saint
Francis of Assisi, who said, "For it is in giving that we receive." But it
is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way
into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means
to be good.
Grafman and others are using
brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a
built-in moral compass. The results -- many of them published just in recent
months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be
hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that
began in other species.
No one can say whether giraffes
and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has
been inside a giraffe's head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their
own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its
neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.
What the new research is showing
is that morality has biological roots -- such as the reward center in the brain
that lit up in Grafman's experiment -- that have been around for a very long
time.
The more researchers learn, the
more it appears that the foundation of morality is empathy. Being able to
recognize -- even experience vicariously -- what another creature is going
through was an important leap in the evolution of social behavior. And it is
only a short step from this awareness to many human notions of right and wrong,
says Jean Decety, a neuroscientist at the
University of Chicago.
The research enterprise has been
viewed with interest by philosophers and theologians, but already some worry
that it raises troubling questions. Reducing morality and immorality to brain
chemistry -- rather than free will -- might diminish the importance of personal
responsibility. Even more important, some wonder whether the very idea of
morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary
tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.
Moral decisions can often feel
like abstract intellectual challenges, but a number of experiments such as the
one by Grafman have shown that emotions are central to moral thinking. In
another experiment published in March,
University of Southern California neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio and his
colleagues showed that patients with damage to an area of the brain known as the
ventromedial prefrontal cortex lack the ability to feel their way to moral
answers.
When confronted with moral
dilemmas, the brain-damaged patients coldly came up with
"end-justifies-the-means" answers. Damasio said the point was not that they
reached immoral conclusions, but that when confronted by a difficult issue --
such as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it
hits a major city -- these patients appear to reach decisions without the
anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.
Such experiments have two
important implications. One is that morality is not merely about the decisions
people reach but also about the process by which they get there. Another
implication, said Adrian Raine, a clinical neuroscientist at the University of
Southern California, is that society may have to rethink how it judges immoral
people.
Psychopaths often feel no
empathy or remorse. Without that awareness, people relying exclusively on
reasoning seem to find it harder to sort their way through moral thickets. Does
that mean they should be held to different standards of accountability?
"Eventually,
you are bound to get into areas that for thousands of years we have preferred to
keep mystical," said Grafman, the chief cognitive neuroscientist at the National
Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "Some of the questions that are
important are not just of intellectual interest, but challenging and frightening
to the ways we ground our lives. We need to step very carefully."
Joshua D. Greene, a
Harvard neuroscientist and philosopher, said multiple experiments suggest
that morality arises from basic brain activities. Morality, he said, is not a
brain function elevated above our baser impulses. Greene said it is not "handed
down" by philosophers and clergy, but "handed up," an outgrowth of the brain's
basic propensities.
Moral decision-making often
involves competing brain networks vying for supremacy, he said. Simple moral
decisions -- is killing a child right or wrong? -- are simple because they
activate a straightforward brain response. Difficult moral decisions, by
contrast, activate multiple brain regions that conflict with one another, he
said.
In one 2004 brain-imaging
experiment, Greene asked volunteers to imagine that they were hiding in a cellar
of a village as enemy soldiers came looking to kill all the inhabitants. If a
baby was crying in the cellar, Greene asked, was it right to smother the child
to keep the soldiers from discovering the cellar and killing everyone?
The reason people are slow to
answer such an awful question, the study indicated, is that emotion-linked
circuits automatically signaling that killing a baby is wrong clash with areas
of the brain that involve cooler aspects of cognition. One brain region
activated when people process such difficult choices is the inferior parietal
lobe, which has been shown to be active in more impersonal decision-making. This
part of the brain, in essence, was "arguing" with brain networks that reacted
with visceral horror.
Such studies point to a pattern,
Greene said, showing "competing forces that may have come online at different
points in our evolutionary history. A basic emotional response is probably much
older than the ability to evaluate costs and benefits."
While one implication of such
findings is that people with certain kinds of brain damage may do bad things
they cannot be held responsible for, the new research could also expand the
boundaries of moral responsibility. Neuroscience research, Greene said, is
finally explaining a problem that has long troubled philosophers and moral
teachers: Why is it that people who are willing to help someone in front of them
will ignore abstract pleas for help from those who are distant, such as a
request for a charitable contribution that could save the life of a child
overseas?
"We evolved in a world where
people in trouble right in front of you existed, so our emotions were tuned to
them, whereas we didn't face the other kind of situation," Greene said. "It is
comforting to think your moral intuitions are reliable and you can trust them.
But if my analysis is right, your intuitions are not trustworthy. Once you
realize why you have the intuitions you have, it puts a burden on you" to think
about morality differently.
Marc Hauser, another Harvard
researcher, has used cleverly designed psychological experiments to study
morality. He said his research has found that people all over the world process
moral questions in the same way, suggesting that moral thinking is intrinsic to
the human brain, rather than a product of culture. It may be useful to think
about morality much like language, in that its basic features are hard-wired,
Hauser said. Different cultures and religions build on that framework in much
the way children in different cultures learn different languages using the same
neural machinery.
Hauser said that if his theory
is right, there should be aspects of morality that are automatic and unconscious
-- just like language. People would reach moral conclusions in the same way they
construct a sentence without having been trained in linguistics. Hauser said the
idea could shed light on contradictions in common moral stances.
U.S. law, for example, distinguishes between a physician who removes a
feeding tube from a terminally ill patient and a physician who administers a
drug to kill the patient.
Hauser said the only difference
is that the second scenario is more emotionally charged -- and therefore feels
like a different moral problem, when it really is not: "In the end, the doctor's
intent is to reduce suffering, and that is as true in active as in passive
euthanasia, and either way the patient is dead."
Weblink:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052701056.html?referrer=emailarticle
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Source:
Mind Wars
Brain Research, Nanotech and the Military by Richard Thieme - Global Research,
July 5, 2007
"What we don't
know is so much bigger than we are." Haitian Proverb
Oh, how I wish
that reviewing a book like this were simple and straightforward! That would mean
we live in a world of transparency, government accountability to citizens, easy
access to sources, primary sources willing to go on the record, and data trails
that lead readers to those same sources so everyone can see for themselves.
But alas, we
do not live in such a world.
Mind Wars:
Brain Research and National Defense by Jonathan D. Moreno is a broad but
necessarily incomplete overview of neuroscience, nanotechnology and related
areas applied to the arts of war, with an examination of ethical issues raised
by this work, all considered in a historical context by a scholar who has
researched the field.
The key to
decoding the book, however, is on page 4 of the introduction.
"I am no loose
cannon," writes Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph. D., the Emilie Davie and Joseph S.
Kornfeld Professor and Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the
University of Virginia. "I am deeply entrenched in the non-threatening, even
boring, academic establishment. I've taught at major research universities, hold
an endowed chair at an institution not known as a hotbed of radicalism " and on
the disclaimer goes, a plea to the reader to recognize that the author is no
kook, no "conspiracy theorist," but a respectable, conventional man.
Moreno sounds
those notes again, on p. 107, for example, when he states that he has
considerable "experience with government-on the staffs of presidential advisory
committees, in [giving] congressional testimony, and so forth."
Those
qualifications define the subtext of this work and in many ways the subtext is
the primary content. They also suggest one reason why the exploration of the
frontiers of military research and development and the penetration of the
military-industrial -academic- scientific- media complex is so difficult these
days. Insiders know but can't tell; outsiders can tell, but don't often know,
and when they do know, ridicule and other forms of disinformation can make what
they know seem like fanciful speculation. So they err on the side of extreme
caution.
Jonathan
Moreno is qualified, without a doubt, to survey what is in the public domain
about neuro-weapons and diverse applications of numerous branches of research
that blur the distinctions between government, military, and medical,
technological and scientific research, and he is also qualified to discuss the
ethical implications of this research. So why does he need to insist that he is
qualified? Because black budget (clandestinely funded) science and technology is
so large a percentage of all scientific R&D and so hidden from public view that
even to approach the subject is to enter a force field of distortion and
paranoia. One might as well explore UFOs or time travel-domains of actual
research, in fact, but which must be discussed with a wink or, as Moreno's
disclaimers indicate, the trumpeting of one's credentials, above all credentials
of character-respectab ility and conventionality- so that one is not
marginalized by the mere fact that one has chosen to explore the domain.
Inevitably,
researchers of exotic technologies experience a condition called "strangeness, "
a kind of cognitive dissonance, and have to push against it to reestablish clear
boundaries.
Why has this
come about?
Because a
national security state has evolved since World War 2 and is now the water in
which we all swim. Moreno describes the history of that evolution and shows that
a great deal of research, including research in the behavioral sciences, has
been determined by a perception of military necessity. Access to the research is
determined by the "need to know" and most readers of this book are "outsiders."
Moreno himself is an insider of sorts, having served as an expert for numerous
government venues, but his credibility depends on continued access and access
depends on behaving rightly. Saying the right things in the right way defines
correct behavior; hence disclaimers that distance him from fringe thinkers
without institutional support or structural authority, like this reviewer.
Steven H.
Miles, M.D., the author of "Oath Betrayed/Torture, Medical Complicity, and the
War on Terror," states that he is often asked if he fears for his life because
he discussed public documents, thirty five thousand pages of them, which reveal
that medical complicity. That he is even asked such a question, Miles says, "is
an epiphenomenon of being a torturing society. A torturing society is a society
that is abraded by the process of dehumanization. In that process, we
essentially create our own mirrored netherworlds. "
A mirrored
netherworld is exactly what is signified by Moreno's repeated insistence on
credentials that ought to be obvious. His netherworld is a force field of
distortion that attends any venture through the looking-glass of security
clearances to explore areas that are exotic, dangerous, and mostly secret. That
force field is an epiphenomenon of the national security state.
Moreno's
history of post-WW2 research begins with identifying the transformation of
America into a "garrison state," a nation that views the world as a dangerous
place that requires the United States to project power everywhere in and
increasingly out of the world to be secure. National Security Council document
NSC-68, published in 1950, defined this strategy which is still pursued today.
"It is mandatory that in building up our strength, we enlarge upon our technical
superiority by an accelerated exploitation of the scientific potential of the
United States and our allies," the document states. Currently, academic research
receives several billion dollars a year, with MIT receiving half a billion, the
largest single share. Much of the research is dual use, with commercial as well
as military applications, but would not have been funded were it not for the
latter.
"Mind Wars"
surveys current research that has come to light. I was not surprised by any of
the details of this book, although someone with less of a fetish for the subject
might well be.
Moreno asks
what novel ethical questions are raised by the emergence of new applications for
war which will alter human identity by modifying memory, cognition, and core
physical, emotional and spiritual capabilities. The enhancement of cognitive
processes such as memory, for example, raises questions about why we evolved as
we have. We forget things for good reasons-it is not helpful to be tormented,
and our brains would be overwhelmed if we remembered everything, including
masses of irrelevant data. Near-total recall would pose new problems as would
enhancement of affective processes related to religious experience-e. g., how
many mystics do we need? Evolution of the species suggests that a few mystics
per thousand are plenty. But if genetic, chemical, and technological
enhancements can trigger mystical experiences, might too many people bliss out
in ecstatic contemplation of the One? Would too many of us become mice pressing
buttons connected to pleasure centers and die happily rather than eat? Would
enhancements of memory and cognition give an unfair advantage to the children of
the rich much as steroids give big- headed baseball players the ability to hit
the long ball?
Moreno was
hampered in his research because many scientists "clammed up" when asked about
their work which means that we can only speculate about many of the projects.
Their silence means that while we know we don't know, we don't know what we
don't know. Hence, cognitive dissonance.
That
dissonance never left as I read this book. It's what happens when I read the
fiction of Philip K. Dick. Dick no longer reads like speculative science fiction
smacking of paranoia because the landscape he describes is the world we now
inhabit, a moebius-strip world in which distortions feed back into the
perception of everyday life. The world we encounter in "Mind Wars" is like the
world in Dick's "A Scanner Darkly," in which a policeman discovers that the
subject he pursues is himself. In "Mind Wars," Moreno is a participant in the
world he describes as well as an objective observer; the edge of the glass
curves and returns a distorted image.
His own
emotions, for example, when he communicates the shock of certain discoveries,
transform his feelings into subject matter the reader must consider. He
communicates his surprise when he learned that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber,
participated in "a Harvard study aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating
undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress." (p. 69)
Moreno does not simplistically attribute all of Kaczynski's behaviors to this
event, but he does speculate on the impact of "a psychological experiment that
involved psychological torment and humiliation that could have left deep scars"
over a period of three years.
I had a
similar reaction when I learned of a formative episode in the life of Donald
Defreeze, a.k.a. Cinque, leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. DeFreeze and
other members of the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst and subjected her to
brainwashing using classical mind control techniques. It is seldom asked how
DeFreeze learned to brainwash so effectively. Colin A. Ross, M.D. in "Bluebird,"
a study of the deliberate creation of multiple personalities, notes that
DeFreeze, while an inmate at Vacaville State Prison, was "a subject in an
experimental behavior modification program run by Colston Westbrook, a CIA
psychological warfare expert and advisor to the Korean CIA." (Bluebird, p.212).
Westbrook returned to the United States from working undercover in Viet Nam and
"entered Vacaville State Prison under cover of the Black Cultural Association
and there designed the seven-headed cobra logo of the SLA and gave DeFreeze his
African name, Cinque." (Bluebird, p. 212)
The accounts
of both Kaczinski and DeFreeze suggest that their crimes might have been
"blowback," unintended consequences of covert intelligence operations that
rebound on perpetrators.
If those
accounts were not public, however, and we speculated in that vein about DeFreeze
and Kaczinski, it would be easy to dismiss our speculation as "conspiracy
theories" or sloppy thinking. We know those two accounts are not the only
experiments that might have backfired, but prudence suggests we not extrapolate
from the known data, lest we be ridiculed. That's what respectability in a world
of strangeness requires. But in light of those accounts, it is not unreasonable
to ask, what other rough beasts have slouched out of covert research to be born?
So there is
often a disconnect between the history that we know and discussions of current
research sanitized by willful innocence. This is crazy-making. I understand why
Moreno does not want to be found on the wrong side of the looking glass. Yet
Moreno wrote an excellent history of how "informed consent" evolved from the
horrors of our own history. There is a parallax view of the stick of history
which enters the water but seems to be discontinuous rather than a straight
line. The distance of a historical account disinfects the moral dimension of
events; we may be shocked when we read of the torturous experiments of Ewen
Cameron and Sidney Gottleib, for example, doctors who participated in MKULTRA, a
series of CIA experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shock, and sensory
deprivation, but because those experiments ended in the seventies, they read
like scripts for a horror movie instead of a daily newspaper. Moreno's
discussion of ethical issues is similarly sanitized and sane, appropriate to the
seminar room on a college campus, with its warmth, light, and comfortable
chairs, but far from the trenches in which experiments takes place. His calls
for accountability sound eminently reasonable but are theoretical and abstract
because the details we need in order to explore ethical implications in a real
historical context, one with flesh-and-blood men and women feeling real
emotions, are hidden in darkness.
As a result,
readers remain outsiders because we do not "need to know." We learn afterward
some of what has taken place, when details filter into the light of ordinary
day, but the ethical imperatives of a quickened public conscience can not be
applied retroactively. The secret deeds are already done.
The technology
of hypersonic sound (HSS) illustrates how the worlds of scientific researchers
and outsiders bifurcate, creating an epistemological divide when we outsiders
try to understand what is happening on a basic level.
Hypersonic
sound is "a column of sound that does not spread out like conventional sound but
stays locked like a sonic laser." (p. 147). If you enter the column, you hear
it, but outside it, you do not. HSS can be used to target individuals while
ensuring that those around them hear nothing.
It does not
take a devious mind to imagine a variety of uses for hypersonic sound, nor to
imagine its misuse, even as a trivial amusement. Some accounts of HSS describe
pedestrians on sunny days walking into a column of sound in which they hear a
waterfall. Seconds later, the sound is gone. The demonstrator laughed, watching
the non-consenting public try to puzzle out experiences for which they had no
prior frame.
More
pernicious uses of the technology suggest themselves. At the siege of Waco,
David Koresh of the Branch Davidians reported hearing voices in his head. He was
crazy, we are told. But without the key pieces to the puzzle how do we know?
Moreno states
that he has spoken for years with people who claim to have been targeted by this
or similar technologies which put voices into their heads or use them
unknowingly to test beam, particle and electromagnetic weapons. I have spoken to
such people, too.
Yes, hearing
voices that are not there is a symptom of illness. But hearing a voice that no
one else hears does not mean, now that we know about HSS, that the voices do not
exist.
Enter
strangeness once again.
Moreno concludes that the
claims of these people are not credible. But Moreno had already reviewed by that
point in the discussion the abuse of medical and psychological testing by
intelligence professionals in the past.
We know about
those earlier experiments only because CIA Director Richard Helm's order in 1973
to destroy all documents related to MKULTRA were carried out-except for
financial documents stored in obscure places. Had they known those boxes
existed, they too would have been destroyed, but because they were overlooked,
researchers could connect some dots, at least, and describe a maze of funding
sources, dummy companies fronting for intelligence agencies, and significant
numbers of respectable medical establishments funded in whole or in part by the
CIA.
The parallax
view.
So here's the
dilemma: Secret experiments were carried out by well- intentioned patriots
working under the cover of security who tortured non-consenting adults, then
covered up the events. There was no transparency or outside accountability for
what they did. The same kinds of people today authorize experiments and weapons
testing, and in the absence of accountability, they too report only to
themselves. The light from inside bends back at the surface and we see only a
black hole.
Had Moreno
spoken to victims of MKULTRA and related projects in the fifties or sixties,
before those documents were discovered, had he heard people subjected to
electroshock therapy or drugs or isolation who told him in horrendous detail
what had been done to them, don't you think he would have made the same
statement? That the sane conventional respectable response by a man of the
establishment would be that they were deluded?
So why are
such claims today unworthy of investigation?
Because to
conduct such investigations in the absence of transparency, accountability, and
meaningful legislative oversight is to subject oneself to ridicule and career
suicide.
/ /An aside
about/ /hypersonic sound John Alexander, the author of "Future War," told me
that a major motivation for developing hypersonic sound was to communicate with
covert agents in dangerous places. Someone about to be taken down can not answer
a cell phone call but can attend to a voice in the head that tells them to "get
out now."
Moreno doesn't
mention that application- not a serious flaw, but an indicator that one depends
on one's sources for this sort of research and many of Moreno's sources are
unnamed. Moreno has confidence in them, as I often do in mine, but without an
objective way to evaluate what they say /How do we know?/
That question
is left on the table when we finish this book. "Mind Wars" surveys much of what
has become public about military applications of brain and mind science and
reviews the historical context. Ethical issues are articulated at length. But in
the end, what we don't know is still much larger than what we do know.
The national
security state, with millions of classified documents and billions of dollars in
black research, freezes the average citizen out of the loop. Like enemies, real
and imagined, we do not "need to know." Classification, of course, covers
mistakes and malfeasance and protects political bases in addition to ensuring
security. So we ought to feel uneasy when we finish this book. "Mind Wars" is
not an antidote to "strangeness. " We can't blame Dr. Moreno, who wants doors to
continue to open, calls to be returned. But our dissonance persists. We don't
know what we don't know, only that those who do know ask us to trust.
Trust, yes,
but verify, as the old Cold Warrior said. If it was good enough for him, it
ought to be good enough for us.
Richard Thieme
speaks and writes about the challenges raised by technology, science, and
globalization in the 21st century. He can be reached at:
rthieme@thiemeworks .com
Works cited:
Mind Wars:
Brain Research and National Defense by Jonathan D. Moreno, Dana Press (The Dana
Foundation: New York and Washington DC) 2006
Oath Betrayed:
Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror by Steven H. Miles, M. D.,
Random House: New York. 2006.
Bluebird:
Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists by Colin A. Ross,
M.D., Manitou Communications: Richardson Texas. 2000.
Future War:
Non-Lethal Weapons in Twenty-First- Century Warfare by John B. Alexander, St.
Martin's Griffin: 2000.
*This review
(edited) was originally published by the National Catholic Reporter.
Global
Research Articles by Richard Thieme
http://www.globalre search.ca/ index.php? context=va& aid=6218
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Organic
Tomatoes are Better
Organic
tomatoes are better than other tomatoes because they contain higher
concentration of the flavonoids that contribute to health. In a study reported
in the
Journal of Agricultural Food
Chemistry, researchers found
almost twice the level of flavonoids in the organic tomatoes. The researchers
speculate that the cause is that tomatoes produce flavonoids as a defensive
response to the lack of nitrogen in the soil. In growing non-organic tomatoes,
the addition of fertilizer would negate the need for tomatoes to produce
flavonoids.
Source:
Organic Tomatoes Better For Heart And Blood Pressure
Organic tomatoes have significantly higher levels of
flavonoids, compared to non-organic tomatoes, according to the results of a
ten-year study carried out by researchers at the University of California. You
can read about this study in a report coming out soon in the
Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry.Flavanoids are a class of
water-soluble pigments that are present in many plants. Scientists have
identified a few thousand different flavonoids. Flavonoids are known to lower
hypertension (high blood pressure), thus lowering heart disease and stroke risk.
Studies have also indicated that flavonoids may protect us to some extent from
cancer and dementia. The researchers believe that it is the quality of the soil
that gives the organic tomatoes their higher flavonoid levels, specifically, the
absence of fertilizers. In this study, the researchers measured the amounts of
quercetin and kaempferol, two flavonoids, in dried tomato samples. They found
that levels of quercetin were 79% higher, and kaempferol 97% higher in the
organic tomatoes, compared to the non-organic ones. When nitrogen levels are not
high enough in the soil, plants produce flavanoids as a defence mechanism. If
inorganic nitrogen, which is present in everyday fertilizers, are applied to the
soil, this over-fertilization may hinder flavonoid production.
weblink:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/76233.php
-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Mixed Feelings: See with your tongue. Navigate with your
skin.
Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). How researchers
can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses — and build a few new
ones. By Sunny Bains
For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an
unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower,
Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide
beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that
make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a
sensor that detected Earth's magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north
would go off. Constantly.
"It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though
on the bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the
peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I finally
understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. He learned to deal with
the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw.
Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception
had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could
always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a
completely new place."
The effects of the "feelSpace belt" — as its inventor,
Osnabrück cognitive scientist Peter König, dubbed the device — became even more
profound over time. König says while he wore it he was "intuitively aware of the
direction of my home or my office. I'd be waiting in line in the cafeteria and
spontaneously think: I live over there." On a visit to Hamburg, about 100 miles
away, he noticed that he was conscious of the direction of his hometown. Wächter
felt the vibration in his dreams, moving around his waist, just like when he was
awake. Direction isn't something humans can detect innately. Some birds can, of
course, and for them it's no less important than taste or smell are for us. In
fact, lots of animals have cool, "extra" senses. Sunfish see polarized light.
Loggerhead turtles feel Earth's magnetic field. Bonnethead sharks detect subtle
changes (less than a nanovolt) in small electrical fields. And other critters
have heightened versions of familiar senses — bats hear frequencies outside our
auditory range, and some insects see ultraviolet light.
We humans get just the five. But why? Can our senses be
modified? Expanded? Given the right prosthetics, could we feel electromagnetic
fields or hear ultrasound? The answers to these questions, according to
researchers at a handful of labs around the world, appear to be yes.
It turns out that the tricky bit isn't the sensing. The
world is full of gadgets that detect things humans cannot. The hard part is
processing the input. Neuroscientists don't know enough about how the brain
interprets data. The science of plugging things directly into the brain —
artificial retinas or cochlear implants — remains primitive.
So here's the solution: Figure out how to change the
sensory data you want — the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared
— into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or
sight. The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone
previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right
plug-ins. Now it's time to build them.
How do we sense the world around us? It seems like a simple
question. Eyes collect photons of certain wavelengths, transduce them into
electrical signals, and send them to the brain. Ears do the same thing with
vibrations in the air — sound waves. Touch receptors pick up pressure, heat,
cold, pain. Smell: chemicals contacting receptors inside the nose. Taste: buds
of cells on the tongue.
There's a reasonably well-accepted sixth sense (or fifth
and a half, at least) called proprioception. A network of nerves, in conjunction
with the inner ear, tells the brain where the body and all its parts are and how
they're oriented. This is how you know when you're upside down, or how you can
tell the car you're riding in is turning, even with your eyes closed.
When computers sense the world, they do it in largely the
same way we do. They have some kind of peripheral sensor, built to pick up
radiation, let's say, or sound, or chemicals. The sensor is connected to a
transducer that can change analog data about the world into electrons, bits, a
digital form that computers can understand — like recording live music onto a
CD. The transducer then pipes the converted data into the computer.
But before all that happens, programmers and engineers make
decisions about what data is important and what isn't. They know the bandwidth
and the data rate the transducer and computer are capable of, and they constrain
the sensor to provide only the most relevant information. The computer can "see"
only what it's been told to look for. The brain, by contrast, has to integrate
all kinds of information from all five and a half senses all the time, and then
generate a complete picture of the world. So it's constantly making decisions
about what to pay attention to, what to generalize or approximate, and what to
ignore. In other words, it's flexible.
In February, for example, a team of German researchers
confirmed that the auditory cortex of macaques can process visual information.
Similarly, our visual cortex can accommodate all sorts of altered data. More
than 50 years ago, Austrian researcher Ivo Kohler gave people goggles that
severely distorted their vision: The lenses turned the world upside down. After
several weeks, subjects adjusted — their vision was still tweaked, but their
brains were processing the images so they'd appear normal. In fact, when people
took the glasses off at the end of the trial, everything seemed to move and
distort in the opposite way.
Later, in the '60s and '70s, Harvard neuro biologists David
Hubel and Torsten Wiesel figured out that visual input at a certain critical age
helps animals develop a functioning visual cortex (the pair shared a 1981 Nobel
Prize for their work). But it wasn't until the late '90s that researchers
realized the adult brain was just as changeable, that it could redeploy neurons
by forming new synapses, remapping itself. That property is called
neuroplasticity.
This is really good news for people building sensory
prosthetics, because it means that the brain can change how it interprets
information from a particular sense, or take information from one sense and
interpret it with another. In other words, you can use whatever sensor you want,
as long as you convert the data it collects into a form the human brain can
absorb.
Paul Bach-y-Rita built his first "tactile display" in the
1960s. Inspired by the plasticity he saw in his father as the older man
recovered from a stroke, Bach-y-Rita wanted to prove that the brain could
assimilate disparate types of information. So he installed a 20-by-20 array of
metal rods in the back of an old dentist chair. The ends of the rods were the
pixels — people sitting in the chairs could identify, with great accuracy,
"pictures" poked into their backs; they could, in effect, see the images with
their sense of touch.
By the 1980s, Bach-y-Rita's team of neuroscientists — now
located at the University of Wisconsin — were working on a much more
sophisticated version of the chair. Bach-y-Rita died last November, but his lab
and the company he cofounded, Wicab, are still using touch to carry new sensory
information. Having long ago abandoned the vaguely Marathon Man like dentist
chair, the team now uses a mouthpiece studded with 144 tiny electrodes. It's
attached by ribbon cable to a pulse generator that induces electric current
against the tongue. (As a sensing organ, the tongue has a lot going for it:
nerves and touch receptors packed close together and bathed in a conducting
liquid, saliva.)
So what kind of information could they pipe in? Mitch
Tyler, one of Bach-y-Rita's closest research colleagues, literally stumbled upon
the answer in 2000, when he got an inner ear infection. If you've had one of
these (or a hangover), you know the feeling: Tyler's world was spinning. His
semicircular canals — where the inner ear senses orientation in space — weren't
working. "It was hell," he says. "I could stay upright only by fixating on
distant objects." Struggling into work one day, he realized that the tongue
display might be able to help.
The team attached an accelerometer to the pulse generator,
which they programmed to produce a tiny square. Stay upright and you feel the
square in the center of your tongue; move to the right or left and the square
moves in that direction, too. In this setup, the accelerometer is the sensor and
the combination of mouthpiece and tongue is the transducer, the doorway into the
brain.
The researchers started testing the device on people with
damaged inner ears. Not only did it restore their balance (presumably by giving
them a data feed that was cleaner than the one coming from their semi circular
canals) but the effects lasted even after they'd removed the mouthpiece —
sometimes for hours or days. The success of that balance therapy, now in
clinical trials, led Wicab researchers to start thinking about other kinds of
data they could pipe to the mouthpiece. During a long brainstorm session, they
wondered whether the tongue could actually augment sight for the visually
impaired. I tried the prototype; in a white-walled office strewn with spare
electronics parts, Wicab neuroscientist Aimee Arnoldussen hung a plastic box the
size of a brick around my neck and gave me the mouthpiece. "Some people hold it
still, and some keep it moving like a lollipop," she said. "It's up to you."
Arnoldussen handed me a pair of blacked-out glasses with a
tiny camera attached to the bridge. The camera was cabled to a laptop that would
relay images to the mouthpiece. The look was pretty geeky, but the folks at the
lab were used to it.
She turned it on. Nothing happened.
"Those buttons on the box?" she said. "They're like the
volume controls for the image. You want to turn it up as high as you're
comfortable."
I cranked up the voltage of the electric shocks to my
tongue. It didn't feel bad, actually — like licking the leads on a really weak
9-volt battery. Arnoldussen handed me a long white foam cylinder and spun my
chair toward a large black rectangle painted on the wall. "Move the foam against
the black to see how it feels," she said. I could see it. Feel it. Whatever — I
could tell where the foam was. With Arnold ussen behind me carrying the laptop,
I walked around the Wicab offices. I managed to avoid most walls and desks,
scanning my head from side to side slowly to give myself a wider field of view,
like radar. Thinking back on it, I don't remember the feeling of the electrodes
on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures:
high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I'd seen them
with my eyes. Tyler's group hasn't done the brain imaging studies to figure out
why this is so — they don't know whether my visual cortex was processing the
information from my tongue or whether some other region was doing the work.
I later tried another version of the technology meant for
divers. It displayed a set of directional glyphs on my tongue intended to tell
them which way to swim. A flashing triangle on the right would mean "turn
right," vertical bars moving right says "float right but keep going straight,"
and so on. At the University of Wisconsin lab, Tyler set me up with the
prototype, a joystick, and a computer screen depicting a rudimentary maze. After
a minute of bumping against the virtual walls, I asked Tyler to hide the maze
window, closed my eyes, and successfully navigated two courses in 15 minutes. It
was like I had something in my head magically telling me which way to go. In the
1970s, the story goes, a Navy flight surgeon named Angus Rupert went skydiving
nude. And on his way down, in (very) free fall, he realized that with his eyes
closed, the only way he could tell he was plummeting toward earth was from the
feel of the wind against his skin (well, that and the flopping). He couldn't
sense gravity at all. The experience gave Rupert the idea for the Tactical
Situational Awareness System, a suitably macho name for a vest loaded with
vibration elements, much like the feelSpace belt. But the TSAS doesn't tell you
which way is north; it tells you which way is down.
In an airplane, the human proprioceptive system gets easily
confused. A 1-g turn could set the plane perpendicular to the ground but still
feel like straight and level flight. On a clear day, visual cues let the pilot's
brain correct for errors. But in the dark, a pilot who misreads the plane's
instruments can end up in a death spiral. Between 1990 and 2004, 11 percent of
US Air Force crashes — and almost a quarter of crashes at night — resulted from
spatial disorientation. TSAS technology might fix that problem. At the
University of Iowa's Operator Performance Laboratory, actually a hangar at a
little airfield in Iowa City, director Tom Schnell showed me the next-generation
garment, the Spatial Orientation Enhancement System. First we set a baseline.
Schnell sat me down in front of OPL's elaborate flight simulator and had me fly
a couple of missions over some virtual mountains, trying to follow a "path" in
the sky. I was awful — I kept oversteering. Eventually, I hit a mountain.
Then he brought out his SOES, a mesh of hard-shell plastic,
elastic, and Velcro that fit over my arms and torso, strung with vibrating
elements called tactile stimulators, or tactors. "The legs aren't working,"
Schnell said, "but they never helped much anyway." Flight became intuitive. When
the plane tilted to the right, my right wrist started to vibrate — then the
elbow, and then the shoulder as the bank sharpened. It was like my arm was
getting deeper and deeper into something. To level off, I just moved the
joystick until the buzzing stopped. I closed my eyes so I could ignore the
screen. Finally, Schnell set the simulator to put the plane into a dive. Even
with my eyes open, he said, the screen wouldn't help me because the visual cues
were poor. But with the vest, I never lost track of the plane's orientation. I
almost stopped noticing the buzzing on my arms and chest; I simply knew where I
was, how I was moving. I pulled the plane out.
When the original feelSpace experiment ended, Wächter, the
sysadmin who started dreaming in north, says he felt lost; like the people
wearing the weird goggles in those Austrian experiments, his brain had remapped
in expectation of the new input. "Sometimes I would even get a phantom buzzing."
He bought himself a GPS unit, which today he glances at obsessively. One woman
was so dizzy and disoriented for her first two post-feelSpace days that her
colleagues wanted to send her home from work. "My living space shrank quickly,"
says König. "The world appeared smaller and more chaotic."
I wore a feelSpace belt for just a day or so, not long
enough to have my brain remapped. In fact, my biggest worry was that as a
dark-complexioned person wearing a wide belt bristling with wires and batteries,
I'd be mistaken for a suicide bomber in charming downtown Osnabrück.
The puzzling reactions of the longtime feelSpace wearers
are characteristic of the problems researchers are bumping into as they play in
the brain's cross-modal spaces. Nobody has done the imaging studies yet; the
areas that integrate the senses are still unmapped. Success is still a long way
off. The current incarnations of sensory prosthetics are bulky and
low-resolution — largely impractical. What the researchers working on this
technology are looking for is something transparent, something that users can
(safely) forget they're wearing. But sensor technology isn't the main problem.
The trick will be to finally understand more about how the brain processes the
information, even while seeing the world with many different kinds of eyes.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp_pr.html
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Soda Pop
Proves Itself Unhealthy
Edgar Cayce
was not in favor of carbonated drinks, or “soda pop.” Unfortunately for those
who like the pause that refreshes, evidence backs up Cayce’s disapproval. A
recent study conducted at Boston University showed that even those who have only
one single can of soda pop daily show adverse health statistics:
· 44% higher risk of developing "metabolic syndrome," a precursor to heart disease and diabetes
· a 31% higher risk of becoming obese
· a 30% higher risk of having a larger waistline
· a 25% higher risk of developing high blood triglycerides or high blood sugar
· a 32% higher risk of having low levels of good cholesterol
· a trend toward an increased risk of high blood pressure.
Source:
Hi All,
A recent four-year study conducted by the Boston University School of
Medicine has shown that drinking as little as one can of soda a
day--either regular or diet--is associated with
a 44% higher risk of developing "metabolic syndrome," a precursor to
heart disease and diabetes,
a 31% higher risk of becoming obese,
a 30% higher risk of having a larger waistline,
a 25% higher risk of developing high blood triglycerides or high blood
sugar,
a 32% higher risk of having low levels of good cholesterol,
and a trend toward an increased risk of high blood pressure.
Here is more evidence that soft drinks are among the worst things you
could possibly drink:
Weblink:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/07/10/how-high-fructose-corn-syrup-damages-your-body.aspx
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Odors Provide
Early Alzheimer’s Test
Evidence
continues to accumulate regarding Cayce’s statement that the sense of smell is
the most powerful and influential of all the senses. According to recent
research conducted at
Columbia
University, it is possible to
detect the early stage of Alzheimer’s by testing a person’s ability to identify
certain key odors: strawberry, smoke, soap, menthol, clove, pineapple,
natural gas, lilac, lemon and leather. In this study, a large group of elderly
adults attempted to identify these odors. Those who had difficulty were
significantly more likely later to develop Alzheimer’s disease. The explanation
provided by the researchers is that the neural pathways related to the sense of
smell is one of the first to be attacked by Alzheimer’s.
Source:
Altered sense of smell could indicate Alzheimer's disease, new test
A new test has found that people who find it hard to
identify the smell of strawberry, smoke, soap, menthol, clove, pineapple,
natural gas, lilac, lemon and leather might be at the onset of Alzheimer's
Disease. The test was devised by Dr Davangere Devanand (New York's Columbia
University) and his team.
Dr. Devanand said it is crucial to be able to diagnose Alzheimer's disease early
on so that the patient can have the best treatment and drugs. Early diagnosis
allows patients and families to organise their lives in a more effective way.
Alzheimer's is incurable and fatal.
During Alzheimer's Disease the patient begins experiencing mild memory loss. The
brain gradually becomes damaged (progressively). The patient, over time, becomes
more and more confused until he/she has to be looked after round-the-clock.
Currently, all that drugs and treatments can do is slow down the progression of
the disease.
It is very hard for medical professionals to identify Alzheimer's in a patient
during the very initial stages of the disease.
In this study, there were 150 people with mild to minimal cognitive impairment
plus 63 healthy individuals. Both groups were monitored at six month intervals.
All of them were elderly.
Those who were not able to identify 10 odors mostly went on to become victims of
Alzheimer's Disease.
Dr. Devanand said that the odor test will help medical professionals diagnose
early Alzheimer's. He said the nerve pathways (in the brain) involved in smell
are affected early on.
Weblink:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/17776.php
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Gut Feelings
Receive Public Scorn
Sometimes its
best not to reveal the identity of the little bird that told you so. When
Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security, revealed that he had a
“gut feeling” that we were in for another terrorist attack in the near future,
the media roasted him for his admission. Clearly, a gut feeling was not
perceived as an appropriate source of intelligence on such important matters.
Better to have said that the patterns in the network of intelligence suggests a
heightened threat. After all, intuition is the intelligence that sees the
patterns that connect.
Source:
For example,
see
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19732730/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Good Things
Come to Those Who Serve
One consistent
message in the Cayce readings, and appearing more often in contemporary
treatments of spirituality is the importance of service to others. Many research
studies have shown the health benefits of doing good deeds. For a full
compendium of research supporting one of Cayce’s most insistent urgings, explore
the new book, Why Good Things Happen to Good People: The Exciting New
Research that Proves the Link Between Doing Good and Living a Longer, Healthier,
Happier Life (Broadway Books), by Stephen Post, a professor of
bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, and others. The book presents all
the evidence showing that qualities like gratitude, celebration, forgiveness and
compassion are not only good for the recipients of your generosity-they're good
for you too, leading to better health and longer life. Service is good medicine!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Power of
Intention Tests Positively
In the
aftermath of the book, The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to
Change Your Life and the World (Free Press) by journalist Lynne McTaggart,
an experiment was performed at the Imperial College in London to test the
purported power of intention. The target was a geranium leaf that was
“intended:” to increase its level of biophoton emissions. The intention was sent
5,300 miles, from London, England, to Dr. Gary Schwartz’s Laboratory for
Advances in Consciousness at the University of Arizona. The intention was sent
by a group of people in London whom Lynne McTaggart was coaching through the
process while they watched their intended target via satellite transmission. The
results indicated that, in comparison to a geranium leaf that was not the
intended target of this experiment but which was resting very close to the
intended target leaf, the geranium leaf that was targeted increased its
biophoton emission to a significant degree. With the aid of special imaging
equipment that was capable of visually recording the biophoton emissions, the
targeted leaf was seen by all to “glow.”
A major
implication of this experiment is the possibility of a group of people using
their numbers to leverage the power of intention to create world wide effects.
Source:
www.theintentionexperiment.com
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Freemasonry
was Sir Isaac Newton’s Secret Weapon
In today’s
debate between science and religion, there seems to be no common ground. That
is, there appears to be none to those unenlightened by history. Sir Issac
Newton, the man most often associated with the creation of science and its
separation from religion, was secretly one of the founders of Freemasonry. The
book Isaac Newton’s Freemasonry: The Alchemy of Science and Mysticism (Inner
Traditions) Alain Bauer, the author, tells the tale of how this famous first
scientist envisioned expressing spirituality through the scientific method. His
science was rooted in the Hermetic tradition, including alchemy and even some
magic. The origins of science was founded on a spiritual impulse to move beyond
the constraints of institutional religion to express more universal spiritual
truths.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Spirituality
Leads Megatrends for Next Decade
Spiritual
principles seeming to be gaining in public prominence and are becoming
principles of leadership and good business. In the book Megatrends 2010: The
Rise of Conscious Capitalism (Hampton Roads Publishers) bestselling author
Patricia Aburdene lists the trends of the coming decade that will affect us all.
The number one trend she identifies, which then influences all the others, is
“The Power of Spirituality: From Personal to Organizational.” Her book spells
out the innumerable ways in which we are inter-connected and how the realization
of that fact is affecting the way people do business. She shows how spiritual
values such as integrity and trust create greater profits. The value of
relationships, in business and in personal life, is emphasized. People express
their faith in the way they behave at work and in the ideals set for the
businesses they create. Capitalism gets a makeover to become a servant of
spiritual principles.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=
Atlantean
Power Broadcast Returning
In Cayce’s
description of Atlantis, power was not something stored in a gas tank, or
supplied by electrical cables. Instead it was broadcast through the air. Modern
scientists have been hard at work attempting the same feat. Apparently, they are
making progress. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have
managed to use a broadcast system to light a sixty watt bulb seven feet away.
They attribute
their success to having switched from using a radio wave approach to using
magnetic resonance as the transmission medium. The light bulb has a magnet
attached which resonates with the magnetic waves broadcast in the system. The
researchers say that the process is powerful enough to keep your laptop computer
fully charged without having to plug in. That is, as long as your computer is in
the same room as the power broadcaster. Improvements are expected.
Source:
|
Farewell, Wires? Power Beamed Through Air |
|
|
|
Publication Date: 4:00
p.m. ET
June
7, 2007 |
|
Author: CHARLES Q. CHOI |
|
Source: LiveScience |
|
Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19098305/ |
|
|
|
Power
cables and even batteries might become a thing of the past using a new
technique that can transmit power wirelessly to cell phones, laptops, MP3
players, household robots and other electronics.
Scientists lit a 60-watt light bulb from a power source 7 feet (2 meters)
away with their new technique, with no physical connection between the
source and the appliance. The researchers have dubbed their concept "WiTricity,"
as in "wireless electricity."
MIT physicist Marin Soljacic began thinking years ago about how to transmit
power wirelessly so his cell phone could recharge without ever being plugged
in. Scientists have pursued wireless power transmission for years - notably,
eccentric genius Nikola Tesla, who devoted much energy toward it roughly a
century ago.
The problem with wireless power transmission is that broadcasting energy in
all directions - say, as radio waves - can be tremendously wasteful, with a
vast majority of power ending up squandered into free space. One could
imagine focusing energy along just one or a few directions - say, using
laser beams - but such approaches can readily prove dangerous and
cumbersome, requiring an uninterrupted line of sight between the source and
device as well as sophisticated tracking systems on the device if it is
mobile. (Scientists have proposed beaming power from orbital solar power
stations to Earth for years.)
Magnetic resonance
Soljacic and his colleagues devised WiTricity based off the notion of
resonance. One well-known example of resonance can be seen when an opera
singer hits the right note to cause a champagne glass to resonate and
shatter. Two objects resonating at the same frequency tend to exchange
energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with objects not resonating at
the same frequency.
Instead of sound, the MIT physicists focused on magnetic fields. Most common
materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so little power
would get wasted on unintended targets. "The fact that magnetic fields
interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety
considerations," said Soljacic's colleague, MIT physicist Andre Kurs.
In their latest work, the scientists designed two copper coils roughly 20
inches (50 centimeters) in diameter that were specially designed to resonate
together. One was attached to the power source, the other to a light bulb.
The practical demonstration of their earlier theoretical work managed to
power the light bulb even when obstacles blocked direct line of sight
between the source and device, findings detailed online Thursday by the
journal Science.
Demand rising
"In the past, there was no great demand for such a system, so people did not
have a strong motivation to look into it," said MIT researcher John
Joannopoulos, who also worked with Soljacic on the project. "Over the past
several years, portable electronic devices, such as laptops, cell phones,
iPods and even household robots, have become widespread, all of which
require batteries that need to be recharged often."
Kurs added their work could reduce dependence on batteries, "which are
bulky, expensive and contain toxic elements."
For laptop-sized coils, the researchers said power levels more than
sufficient to run a laptop can be transferred over room-sized distances
efficiently and in nearly all directions.
"As long as the laptop is in a room equipped with a source of such wireless
power, it would charge automatically, without having to be plugged in," said
MIT researcher Peter Fisher, also part of the research team. "In fact, it
would not even need a battery to operate inside of such a room." One should
be able to adjust the system so that as more receivers are added, the power
transferred to each remains constant.
The experimental setup radiates roughly 5 watts when transmitting 60 watts
over a distance of more than seven feet. "This is equivalent to the power
radiated by a few cell phones," Kurs said. "It is possible to drastically
reduce the power radiated."
The researchers demonstrated roughly 40 percent efficiency in power
transfer. Kurs told LiveScience they are currently working on improving the
efficiency of the power transfer as well as the maximum distance allowed.
"For the moment, we are focusing on power transfers on the order of 100
watts although, in principle, more power could be transferred," he added.
Imperial College London physicist John Pendry, who did not participate in
this study, said, "This really presents the prospect of having truly
portable devices that don't have power cables trailing behind them, which is
very exciting."
When it comes to what the future holds, Soljacic said, "Once, when my son
was about 3 years old, we visited his grandparents' house. They had a
20-year-old phone and my son picked up the handset, asking, 'Dad, why is
this phone attached with a cord to the wall?' That is the mindset of a child
growing up in a wireless world. My best response was, 'It is strange and
awkward, isn’t it?' Hopefully, we will be getting rid of some more wires,
and also batteries, soon." |
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=----=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Eating No
Fruit Creates Respiratory Problems
Eating plenty
of fruits and vegetables is a commonly accepted formula for good health. On the
other side of this equation, the consequences of not eating such healthy food is
becoming more clearly established.
Teenagers who
eat the least fruit, for example, are much more likely to develop respiratory
problems, such as
asthma, wheezing and chronic bronchitis,
according to a study conducted by
the Harvard University School of Medicine. Those teenagers who ate less than two
servings of fruit a week were most likely to already manifest respiratory
problems. The study involved over two thousand teen agers and found this effect
for fruits, but not for vegetables.
Source:
|
Teens Who Skip Fruit, Fish Risk Asthma: Study |
|
|
|
Publication Date: July
09, 2007 |
|
Author: HELEN BRANSWELL |
|
Source: Canadian Press (Canada) |
|
Link: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/234083 |
|
|
|
Teens
who turn up their noses to fruit and fish may be undermining their lung
health, new research released Monday suggests.
The work, based on the study of 2,112 American and Canadian teenagers, found
an association between good lung function and levels of dietary intake of
fruit and fish rich in omega 3 fatty acids.
Teens who ate less of these foods had higher rates of asthma, wheezing and
symptoms of chronic bronchitis such as cough and phlegm, said the
researchers, from the Harvard School of Public Health and Health
Canada.
"The walk-away (message) is that . . . if your diet is generally lacking in
these types of things your risk of having and continuing to have symptoms
associated with chronic bronchitis and asthma are increased," said Mark
Raizenne, director of Health Canada's sustainable development division.
"Even in adolescence if you're starting to have poor nutrition and you're
starting to have some of these poor habits, you will probably start having
the symptoms that are associated with long-term respiratory problems."
"And it starts that early. Don't be surprised in your 20s and 30s if you had
those problems earlier on."
Raizenne was formerly in Health Canada's health effects research section; he
collaborated on this study while he was in that division.
The research team gathered information on diet, smoking, exercise levels and
medications from selected Grade 12 students in 13 U.S. and Canadian
communities. The Canadian teens who took part were from Leamington and
Egbert, Ont., and
Yorktown,
Sask.
They also asked the teens whether they had ever been diagnosed with asthma
or related conditions and conducted lung function testing on them.
Lead author Jane Burns, with Harvard's School of Public Health, said
teenagers who reported eating a quarter or less of a serving of fruit a day
were 36 per cent more likely to report having chronic bronchitis, chronic
cough and phlegm. A quarter of a serving of fruit a day is the equivalent of
about two pieces of fruit a week.
Those who had low intake of omega 3 fatty acid-rich foods were 37 per cent
more likely to have increased levels of these chronic bronchitic symptoms.
Health
Canada's
new Canada Food Guide recommends teenage girls consume seven fruits and
vegetables a day and recommends teenage boys consume eight. But the
researchers found that 86 per cent of the teenagers reported they did not
eat even five servings daily of these important foods.
The study was an observational one, meaning the researchers could only
observe what happened to subjects who followed a certain type of behaviour –
in this case, a type of diet.
Such studies can only point out what's called an association between a
behaviour and an outcome. They cannot prove cause and effect. To do that the
researchers would have had to randomly select some teens to eat high-fruit
diets and others to eat few fruits – a research proposal unlikely to get
ethics board approval.
Teresa To, head of child health evaluative sciences at Toronto's Hospital
for Sick Children, concurred that this study can't prove fruit consumption
boosts lung function. But she said the findings point towards a link.
"It may not be the last thing that we should do but this certainly is a
first step for us to look deeper into the role of dietary intake and
respiratory health," To said, noting she was concerned about the level of
fruit and vegetables the studied teens reported eating.
Burns said the theory that these kinds of foods contribute to good lung
health makes sense from a biological point of view. Other studies, in
adults, have shown lung function and diet are linked, she said. And still
others have shown that increasing intake of vitamin C can raise the levels
of vitamin C in the fluid that protects the respiratory tract.
"Mechanistically, there's definitely a solid role that antioxidants play in
respiratory health," she said from Boston.
Interestingly, this study didn't find vegetable consumption was protective
against asthma and related illnesses. But Burns was quick to suggest other
studies have shown that link. She also suggested the effect of antioxidant
rich vegetables may have been diluted by the fact that the study included a
broad spectrum of vegetables, some of which – like potatoes – are known to
contain much lower levels of these important nutrients.
"It's not that I don't think vegetables matter. It's just that the way we
looked at them, we didn't see an association in this group of teens," Burns
said. |
|
|
|
|
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=