Rhine Institute Offers Online Newsletter

The Durhan, North Caolina institute created by J.B. Rhine, the inventor of ESP research with the symbolic “Zener” cards, has initiated an online newsletter, “Consciousness Today.” Operating under the name, “The Rhine Research Center: An Integrated Center for the Study of Consciousness,” their inaugural online newsletter (located at http://rhine.org/Newsletters/Consciousness_Today_Vol1_Issue001.pdf ) offers examples of “spontenous ESP,” a discussion of medical intuition, as well as information about their Journal of Parapsychology.

Sally Feather, the daughter of .J.B. and Louisa Rhine and author of The Gift: The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People, continues in her mother’s footsteps of collecting ESP reports from all over the world. She is currently soliciting stories of PK (mind over matter). She writes,

“Our present study is designed to learn more about the broad general range of possible spontaneous PK experiences. In the current phase of this study, our focus is on those unexplained physical events that seem to occur specifically around the time of crisis, death or near-death. Typical reports in our collection include the falling or breaking of objects, unusual noises, unexplained behavior of animals, or the malfunctioning of electronic equipment that occur around the time of a crisis, near-death, or death of a family member or loved one.

“If you have noted this type of unexplained physical event, we would very much appreciate hearing about your experiences by email or postal mail. All reports are confidential. Please send your experiences to Sally@Rhine.org or by postal mail to Sally Rhine Feather, Ph.D. Rhine Research Center 2741 Campus Walk Avenue, Building 500 Durham, NC 27705.”

Weblink: http://rhine.org/EmailNewsletters/Newsletter_Vol1_Issue1.html

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25-28 June 2008, Boulder, Colorado

Presentation Title: "Quantum Mechanics, Remote Viewing, and Time: Wheeler's Delayed-Choice Experiment in a Macro Environment"

Abstract: Physicists have long debated the nature of physical reality. Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment has been a focal point of this debate since it demonstrates that observation can influence the behavior of quantum phenomena backward in time. That is, prior to the time at which a decision is made regarding whether or not to observe a quantum phenomenon, the phenomenon's behavior is influenced such that it is in correspondence with the decision. Remote-viewing experiments have been conducted at The Farsight Institute that parallel Wheeler’s delayed-choice setup. In these experiments, remote-viewing sessions were conducted in 13 repeated public demonstrations of remote viewing using full scientific controls over a period of six months. Targets were chosen by a respected outside tasker (a university professor who had no access of any kind to the remote-viewing data) one to two weeks after the remote-viewing sessions were conducted and the results made publicly available in encrypted format. Passwords to de-encrypt the remote-viewing data were made available online to the public only after the tasker announced the target for each experiment. Thus, the decision as to what target was to be used for each of the remote-viewing experiments was made significantly after the times at which the remote-viewing sessions were conducted. While precognition is a frequently studied aspect of psi phenomena, this repeated set of public experiments allowed for the collection of a sizable body of data for each individual target using lengthy and structured data-collection procedures under generally optimal viewing and experimental conditions. This allows for a thorough objective and statistical comparison of target and remote-viewing data sets. The results of this set of experiments offer strong support that a quantum mechanism is mediating the remote-viewing experience, since no classical mechanism is known to be capable of replicating the phenomenon. This essay offers a mathematical explanation for this process that is based on quantum potential, thereby asserting a formal linkage between the precognitive remote-viewing experience and Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment.

Weblink: http://www.courtneybrown.com/PublicSpeaking/SSE_2008_Presentation_Topic.html

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Mind Reading Headset Developed

Soon to be released on the market is a headset that has EEG monitoring electrodes that can read your brain’s activities so that you can play PC games with your thoughts. Developed by the company Emotiv, the headset comes with a program to calibrate the way your thoughts register as EEG patterns. Once calibrated, the headset can then read your mind as you think how you wish to respond to the game you are playing on your computer.

But you have to have good concentration. A person reviewing the headset was doing well playing a wargame, and was in the process of moving a strategic object by thought alone. Then he got excited and the headset registered that emotion instead and the strategic object was dropped. You gotta have single pointed attention to use this gadget!

Source: A few weeks ago, I visited a start-up company that promised a neat trick: It would read my mind. [Ed's. note: OK, but that's a pretty light read!]

The firm, Emotiv, is developing a brain-wave detecting video game headset. Think of it as phrenology for modern times, and for fun: The device resembles a standard audio headset, but it's fitted with an octopus of medical-grade EEG arms that sit against your dome.

The arms pick up electrical waves sloshing against your cranium, and from the data the headset divines your thoughts and your emotions. It can sense your facial expressions -- it knows when you're smiling, blinking, wincing -- and, even better, if you think "lift," "pull," "rotate left" or a number of other standard game commands, the directives materialize on the screen.

Tan Le, the company's president, told me that the firm had spent much R&D time perfecting a way to bring mind-reading tech to the masses.

In recent years clinical researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to get live shots of what our brains look like as we're thinking things. fMRI, which uses a room-size scanner to see inside your head, isn't practical for home use, so Emotiv relies, instead, on much older technology, electroencephalography, which focuses on the electrical impulses given off by your brain.

The trouble is, EEG isn't especially precise: Different people may think the same things but produce completely different EEG signatures, Le says. In order to understand your thoughts, then, Emotiv's headset must learn your EEG patterns, in much the way voice-recognition software has to learn how you pronounce vowels and consonants.

When you put the headset on for the first time, Emotiv's software takes you through a number of routines to determine what your mind looks like when you think, say, "lift." Then, the next time you think "lift," your brain will (hopefully) produce a similar EEG wave, and the system will know what you want.

When it hits store shelves by the end of the year, Emotiv's $299 headset -- for PC games only, at least at first -- will include one game that incorporates many of these pattern-learning routines. At Emotiv's office here in San Francisco, I played a version of this intro game. In it, you play a martial-arts warrior in training. Your warrior-master guides you through techniques that help you translate your thoughts into on-screen actions.

Thinking my way through a video game was terrific fun. The warrior-master asked me to clear my mind, and then to imagine myself levitating a boulder a few feet off the ground. I concentrated, my brain working as hard as it's ever worked. [Ed's. note: You're making this too easy...]

The boulder began to levitate, but as soon as it did, my excitement that the thing was working broke my concentration, and the boulder tumbled.

I tried again, and this time the game responded within a second -- the boulder floated off the ground. As I pushed through the warrior landscape, I was asked to move more and bigger hurdles -- a mountain, a bridge I had to get across -- and by the third or fourth time, the objects seemed almost to be lifting themselves. I didn't even have to think about thinking: Simply seeing the object, comprehending that it needed to be lifted, sent it flying up. There was something very nearly magical to it.

Your mileage may vary, of course. You've no doubt wondered whether some of your colleagues produce any brainwaves at all -- if you haven't, there's a chance you're the colleague others wonder about -- and it's unclear whether such folks would find much use for Emotiv's device.

The system will work with ordinary PC games, but you'll probably find it most fun with games designed specifically for brain control. There aren't many of these yet, obviously, but Le says that developers have expressed much interest in creating such diversions.

Weblink: http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/06/20/emotiv/

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DNA found in meteorites

Native American creation stories often suggest that their origin was from the stars. Now there is evidence suggesting that, indeed, life on earth came from outer space. Scientists examing a meteor that fell in Australia in 1969 contains the essential ingredients for DNA and RNA.

Publishing in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers at the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London noted that examination of the carbon in the meteorite confirmed that the DNA material was not the result of contamination by landing on earth. They also acknowledged that their findings suggest that our DNA may have come from outer space, but they cannot exclude the possibility that earthly DNA may have originated from material already on our planet. However, the discovery does strongly suggest that the building blocks for life are available elsewhere in the universe.

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Life's raw material can come from space

DNA, RNA found in meteorite did not come from earthly contamination

We may all be aliens, it seems.

Some of the building blocks of life on Earth came from space, according to a new study of molecules in meteorite fragments.

The study confirmed that some of the raw material for DNA and RNA found in a meteorite did not contaminate the rock after it landed on Earth, but actually originated in space.

The materials in question are the molecules uracil and xanthine, which are precursors to the compounds that make up DNA and RNA, and are known as nucleobases.

"We believe early life may have adopted nucleobases from meteoritic fragments for use in genetic coding which enabled them to pass on their successful features to subsequent generations," said the study's lead author, Zita Martins, a researcher in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London.

Martins and her colleagues detailed their findings in the June 15 issue of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The team discovered the molecules in rock fragments of the Murchison meteorite, which crashed in Australia in 1969. The scientists analyzed the genetic building blocks and found that they contain a heavy form of carbon which could only have been formed in space. Materials formed on Earth are made of a lighter type of carbon.

The two molecules in this study are only a few of the organic molecules that have been detected in the famous Murchison meteorite, said David Deamer, a chemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"There are about 70 different amino acids in the Murchison meteorite," Deamer told SPACE.com. "About six or so are the same kinds of amino acids associated with life on Earth."

Uracil is one of the four base molecules of RNA, so is vital for life.

Just because the molecules found on this meteorite and others came from space, doesn't mean the same compounds weren't also independently synthesized on Earth, Deamer pointed out. Scientists are unsure how many of the building blocks of life on Earth originated on this planet, and how many came from beyond.

"We don't know the answer yet," he said. "Most people would say that both contributed to the organic compounds available on Earth, but we don't know with certainty how much of one compared to the other."

Many space rocks similar to the Murchison meteorite rained down on Earth between 3.8 and 4.5 billion years ago, when primitive life was forming. The heavy bombardment would have dropped large amounts of meteorite material to the surface on planets such as Earth and Mars.

Martins and her colleagues say their discovery may help shed light on how life first evolved in our solar system.

"Because meteorites represent leftover materials from the formation of the solar system, the key components for life — including nucleobases — could be widespread in the cosmos," said co-author Mark Sephton, a professor of Earth science and engineering at Imperial College London. "As more and more of life's raw materials are discovered in objects from space, the possibility of life springing forth wherever the right chemistry is present becomes more likely."

Weblink: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25148774/&GT1=43001

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Research on Meditation Shows More Benefits

Meditation has entered the mainstream and studies on the benefits of daily meditation continue to be published. Here are a few samples.

Meditation improves the ability to pay attention. Researchers at the University of Oregon found that after five days of meditation practice, students scored better on a computerized attention task that required them to ignore distracting information. Students who received only relaxation instructions did not show this improvement.

Meditation makes attention more efficient. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin had students looking at a computer screen which would flash two numbers in quick succession. Because of the brain’s limited powers, most students were able to see only the first of the two numbers. After three months of meditation training, the students were able to see both numbers reliably, whereas a control group showed no such improvement.

Meditation increases pain tolerance. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that advanced meditators showed reduced brain response to having their fingers placed in hot water. Students then trained in meditation evidenced a similar reduction compared to their response at the beginning of training.

Meditation can ameliorate the effects of congestive heart disease. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania gave meditation training to adults who had been admitted to the hospital for heart failure. Compared to how they functioned at the start of training, three months later these patients performed significantly better on the six minute walk test, and showed alleviation of depression, fewer readmission to the hospital, and an improved quality of life.

websource:

Scientists study links between brain, meditation

by Joe Rojas-Burke, The Oregonian

Meditation matters. Brain scientists are using the age-old practice to understand stress and pain reduction, attention spans, even compassion.

To unravel the workings of the brain, neuroscientist Michael Posner and colleagues at the University of Oregon have turned to an ancient discipline: meditation.

A recent experiment tested college students' ability to focus their attention and filter out distractions. Half the students received training in mindfulness meditation while the other half received relaxation training.

After five days, meditators outpaced nonmeditators on the attention test, and they became significantly better at handling stress. Saliva samples revealed lower levels of the hormone cortisol when the meditators were subjected to an anxiety-inducing math quiz.

"This is the first time I've ever been involved in anything like meditation," says Posner, who conducted the experiment with Yi-Yuan Tang, a visiting scholar. But he sees promise in using the ancient mind-training practice to understand how the brain regulates awareness and attention, an area of neuroscience he helped pioneer.

Meditation is making a big comeback among brain scientists after its first heyday in the 1970s. Advances in brain imaging and monitoring have made it possible to see inside the brain and explore the biological forces creating and driving conscious thoughts.

"Now we are in a position to ask questions about people's experience and measure brain activity in close to real time," says Clifford Saron, a scientist at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California at Davis. And with growing numbers of people turning to meditation for stress relief, Saron says, there's a pressing need to figure out how the many forms of mental practice actually work.

Already, studies reveal the brain may be far more flexible and capable of reorganization than long assumed. Evidence suggests that even the capacities for happiness and compassion may be trainable skills that meditation can improve, says Antoine Lutz, a scientist at the Waisman Lab for Brain Imaging & Behavior at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Sharpening attention

Meditation may sharpen the ability to focus by training the brain to apply limited processing power more efficiently.

In a recent study by Lutz's group, volunteers had to identify two numbers flashed on a computer screen amid a stream of letters. Because of limits of the brain's attention system, people often fail to see the second number if it's flashed a fraction of a second after the first. After three months of meditation training, volunteers were able to name the second number significantly more often. EEG recordings of brain activity showed that those subjects devoted less effort to finding the first target, thus freeing more brainpower to focus on finding the second.

At UO, Posner and Tang plan to use a kind of MRI that can detect changes in blood flow to explore how meditation changes brain activity during tests of attention. They expect to find that it improves communication links between separate brain regions that must act together.

"We think the network will improve," Posner says. "The different brain areas will operate together more efficiently."

Cultivating compassion

Specific brain regions become active when a person responds to another's pain.

Lutz's group compared activity between Tibetan monks and a control group of beginning meditators who practiced so-called "loving kindness" meditation -- progressively directing wishes of well-being and freedom from suffering to loved ones, adversaries, strangers and all beings.

While the volunteers meditated, researchers played emotional sounds, such as a woman crying in distress, and neutral sounds. On brain scans, regions used to empathize and process emotions were significantly more active in the experienced meditators in response to the emotional sounds, but no different in response to neutral sounds.

Lutz and co-author Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin, who reported the study in March, speculate that teaching such meditation to children could help prevent bullying, aggression and violence.

Power over pain

Feats of pain endurance are among the most striking displays of the power of meditation.

To explore the phenomenon, researchers at San Francisco State University used a system called qEEG to map electrical activity in the brain of a yoga master while he had his tongue pierced. The researchers found that the pattern of brain activity suggests that the meditating yogi entered a state similar to that produced by pain-numbing drugs.

Brain adaptations to pain may persist during times between meditation practice. Researchers at the University of California at Irvine and Maharishi University of Management in Iowa used MRI scanning to measure brain activity in practitioners of Transcendental Meditation while their fingers were dunked in hot water.

Long-term meditators showed a 40 percent to 50 percent reduction in brain activity in response to pain compared with a control group of non-meditators. After meditation training and five months of practice, people in the control group also showed a 40 percent to 50 percent decrease in brain activity during the painful hot water stimulus. Meditation did not change the volunteers' rating of pain intensity, suggesting that its effect was in reducing anxiety and distress, researchers concluded.

A few studies suggest that meditation can change how the brain responds to advancing age. Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta compared 13 older adults who regularly practiced Zen meditation with non-meditators of similar age. Among the latter, shrinking brain size and declining performance on attention tests correlated with age: The older the subject, the smaller the brain volume and the worse the performance. Among meditators, advancing age did not correlate with brain shrinkage or declining attention skills.

The findings match those of a 2005 study at Harvard Medical School, which found that brain regions involved in focusing attention and processing sense information were thicker in meditators than age-matched non-meditators.

Coming up next

These studies highlight the weaknesses common in research on meditation, says Dr. Barry Oken, a professor of neurology and behavioral neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University. Often, he says, it's impossible to rule out the effects of other variables, such as differences in language, culture and other factors between meditators and control groups.

"Long-term Buddhist meditators -- they are intrinsically different from people you can compare them to," Oken says.

To nail down the effects, researchers must track brain activity changes over time. Researchers are just beginning to explore how different types of meditation compare and which might work best for training specific mental and emotional skills.

Oken is leading a long-term study of the effects of meditation training on people subject to the stress of caring for loved ones with Alzheimer's disease. Researchers hope to show that meditation can lower stress, as rated by caregivers and revealed in levels of stress hormones. The study also tracks changes over time in brain activity.

The results so far meet the expectations of Kyogen Carlson, an ordained Zen Buddhist teacher in Portland. But Carlson isn't concerned with whether science proves the health benefits of meditation or improved mental performance from its practice.

"I see that as an interesting side effect," says Carlson, abbot of the Dharma Rain Zen Center in Portland. Meditation, he says, "is part of a path to authenticity and being who we are supposed to be."

weblink: http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2008/06/scientists_study_links_between.html

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Transcendental Meditation Can Help

In this high-tech age of modern medicine, could it be possible to treat the leading cause of death in the U.S. through the power of meditation? According to a first-of-its-kind randomized study conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Division of Geriatric Medicine, a widely practiced, stress-reducing meditation technique can significantly reduce the severity of congestive heart failure. The study appears in the Winter 2007 issue of Ethnicity & Disease.

"The results of this study indicate that transcendental meditation can be effective in improving the functional capacity and quality of life of congestive heart failure patients" said Ravishankar Jayadevappa, PhD, lead author and Research Assistant Professor in Penn's Division of Geriatric Medicine. "These results also suggest long-term improvements in survival in these individuals."

Jayadevappa and fellow researchers from the Penn evaluated 23 African American men and women, average age 64, who were recently hospitalized with New York Heart Association class II or III congestive heart failure. Participants were randomized to either the Transcendental Meditation ® (TM) technique or health education in addition to standard medical treatment.

Researchers measured changes in heart function with a six-minute walk test, and measures for quality of life, depression, and re-hospitalizations. Changes in outcomes from baseline to three and six months after treatment were analyzed.

According to Jayadevappa, the TM group significantly improved on the six-minute walk test after both three and six months of TM practice compared to the control group. The TM group also showed improvement in quality of life measurements, depression, and had fewer re-hospitalizations.

This present finding is consistent with previous research demonstrating that TM reduces factors that contribute to the cause or progression of heart failure, such a high blood pressure, stress, metabolic syndrome, left ventricular hypertrophy (enlargement of the heart) and severity of atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). Further validation of the outcomes of this study is planned via a large, multi-center trial with long-term follow-up.

According to the study authors, TM most likely improves heart failure by reducing sympathetic nervous system activation associated with stress that is known to contribute to the failing heart.

This study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health-National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, in a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania with the Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharisi University of Management.

Weblink: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070312160937.htm

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Website Offers Parapsychological News

The mind-energy.net (mind-energy.net) website offers up to date news concerning research and other events related to the investigation of ESP and related topics. Their mission is to create public interest in various aspects of parapsychology and its uses, mainly related to healing mind and body, consciousness and extra-sensory perception (ESP). They cover trends, research publications, books and other information on the web and in the real world related to parapsychology. They provide links to sites (and reviews) that publish lessons for basic steps in training one's psychic capabilities. They also cover various blogs and sites related to parapsychology.

Weblink: mind-energy.net

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Mind over Matter Computerized Tester Developed

Researchers at the “PEAR” lab (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory), which was recently closed, have moved on to create a piece of equipment for folks at home to practice PK (psychokinesis, aka “mind over matter”) skills in the same scientific manner as was successfully accomplished at their university laboratory. The “Psyleron” (www.psyleron.com/) creates genuinely random numbers and tests your ability to mentally affect their production. Programs included with the Psyleron also allows folks at home to participate in at-large experiments in the development of PK ability and its application to business and industry.

websource:

Psyleron is a company and research organization, exploring the connection between consciousness and the physical world. Discoveries made at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies laboratory have shown that human intention and group dynamics can influence the behavior of quantum electronic devices known as random event generators. Psyleron was founded by associates of the PEAR lab, to develop REG products, continue its research, and encourage public involvement.

Psyleron is a research and technology organization dedicated to exploring the connection between consciousness and the physical world, developing practical applications for its findings, and making information about the connection between consciousness and the physical world more readily available to the public. This website will introduce you to the concept of consciousness (our minds), and how our thoughts and feelings can have a literal impact on the physical (material) world. We will also introduce you to the Psyleron REG-1, a device that allows you to observe and quantify the influence of your mind on physical systems. The device has applications for business and research purposes, as well as for individual exploration.

Psyleron is the result of efforts by former research scientists at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory—an interdisciplinary group of physicists, psychologists, engineers, and humanists, that explored the ability of the human mind to interact with the physical world. During its 28-year history, the PEAR lab demonstrated the ability of human volunteers to affect random physical systems, including a quantum electronic device known as a random event generator. They approached the phenomenon scientifically, and tried to understand the anomaly by suggesting updated theories of science and psychology. PEAR documented their considerable experimental evidence and theoretical work in dozens of papers in academic journals (see The PEAR Lab), before retiring in February 2007.

The significance of these findings is enormous. Scientifically, they imply that consciousness may not be adequately reduced or explained by prevailing physical theories, that the observer interacts with what it observes, and that subjectivity is implicit in the establishment of reality. For technology, the interaction between mind and material process may result in unprecedented new innovations: devices that respond to our thoughts and group dynamics, and that can couple the mind directly to computers. For individuals, a deep personal meaningfulness can be had by seeing first-hand how our thoughts and emotions literally affect the world. There is a great potential for self-exploration and improvement, as we learn about truly healthy and effective states of mind.

We invite you to explore our website, and become part of the Psyleron community. If you are interested in exploring the connection between consciousness and the material world, want to integrate REG technology into your business, or just want to explore the power of your own mind, Psyleron makes several packages available to suit your needs. We maintain the Psyleron Community, where REG-1 users can share anecdotes, collaborate on experiments, upload data, and download new features for their products. We hope to involve the public as much as possible, and facilitate many new discoveries in this promising and meaningful new field.

The Psyleron REG-1 exploration kit was designed for the purpose of allowing individuals and researchers to quickly and inexpensively conduct their own experiments in direct mind-matter interaction. The package includes a USB-based true random event generator and software, documentation, and analysis tools for the purpose of exploring the mind-matter connection. Some versions of the package also include a software development kit for creating custom applications. All packages make it possible to conduct basic PEAR experiments out of the box.

Weblink: http://www.psyleron.com/

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Americans 16^th Happiest Nation

Although Americans are concerned about the direction of their country, for the most part they are happy, although not the happiest in the world.

There are fifteen other nations whose citizens are happier than the Americans, according to the World Values Survey, which is the work of a global network of social scientists who perform periodic surveys addressing a number of issues. To conduct this survey, investigators simply asked folks how happy they were, and how satisfied they were with their lives as a whole. The most happy nation, according to their report published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, is Denmark, followed by Puerto Rico and Colombia.

The survey indicated that Americans derive a lot of their happiness from the freedom they feel in how they conduct their lives. All of the lowest ranking nations struggle with legacies of authoritarian rule and widespread poverty. Economic prosperity improves national happiness only up to a certain extent, and then it is political freedom and social tolerance that improves happiness.

Websource: