The power of the mind

It's all in your head. No, really: How mental imagery training aids perceptual learning

This is Elisa Tartagalia from EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, with her experiment proving that learning through mental imagery is possible. Credit: Alain Herzog/EPFL

Practice makes perfect. But imaginary practice? Elisa Tartaglia of the Laboratory of Psychophysics at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and her team show that perceptual learning—learning by repeated exposure to a stimulus—can occur by mental imagery as much as by the real thing. The results, published in Current Biology, suggest that thinking about something repeatedly could be as good as doing it. Read more.

'Mind's eye' influences visual perception.

A graphic depiction of the sequence of events in the experiment from top left to bottom right. First, a person looks at a blank screen and imagines a green pattern. Next, she puts on the red-green glasses and looks at a screen with two superimposed patterns: green and red. The green pattern is visible to one eye, and the red image is visible to the other eye. The longer she has spent imagining the green pattern, the more likely she will see the green pattern, demonstrating that what people imagine can influence what they see later in time. Credit: Joel Pearson

Letting your imagination run away with you can influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery—what we see with the "mind's eye"—directly impacts our visual perception. Read more

Placebo Effect - A Cure in the Mind

Belief is a powerful medicine, even if the treatment is a sham. New research shows placebos can also benefit patients who do not have faith in them. By Maj-Britt Niem, February 2009 Scientific American - MIND

In recent decades, reports have confirmed the efficacy of various sham treatments in nearly all areas of medicine. Placebos have helped alleviate pain, depression, anxiety, Parkinson's disease, inflammatory disorders, and cancer.

Placebo effects can arise from a conscious belief in a drug and subconscious associations between recovery and the experience of being treated—from the pinch of a shot to a doctor's white coat. Such subliminal conditioning can control bodily processes of which we are unaware, such as immune responses and the release of hormones.

Researchers have decoded some of the biologies of placebo responses, demonstrating that they stem from active processes in the brain. Read more

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why. By Steve Silberman - August 24, 2009

Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, allowing cheaper generics to flood the market. The company had yet to introduce a new product in three years, and its stock price plummeted.

In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck's research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company's reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged. At the same time, competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. "To remain dominant in the future," he told Forbes, "we need to dominate the central nervous system."

His plan hinged on the success of an experimental antidepressant codenamed MK-869. Still, in clinical trials, it looked like every pharma executive's dream: a new kind of medication that exploited brain chemistry in innovative ways to promote feelings of well-being. The drug tested brilliantly early on, with minimal side effects, and Merck touted its game-changing potential at a meeting of 300 securities analysts.

Behind the scenes, however, MK-869 was starting to unravel. True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or another inert substance given to groups of volunteers in clinical trials to gauge how much more effective the real drug is by comparison. The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people's health—the so-called placebo effect—has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology.

Ultimately, Merck's foray into the antidepressant market failed. In subsequent tests, MK-869 turned out to be no more effective than a placebo. In the jargon of the industry, the trials crossed the futility boundary.

MK-869 wasn't the only highly anticipated medical breakthrough to be undone by the placebo effect in recent years. From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against a placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

History of the Placebo Effect

The roots of the placebo problem can be traced to a lie told by an Army nurse during World War II as Allied forces stormed the beaches of southern Italy. The nurse was assisting an anesthetist, Henry Beecher, who was tending to US troops under heavy German bombardment. When the morphine supply ran low, the nurse assured a wounded soldier that he was getting a shot of a potent painkiller, though her syringe contained only salt water. Amazingly, the bogus injection relieved the soldier's agony and prevented the onset of shock.

Returning to his post at Harvard after the war, Beecher became one of the nation's leading medical reformers. Inspired by the nurse's healing act of deception, he launched a crusade to promote a method of testing new medicines to find out whether they were truly effective. At the time, vetting drugs was sloppy: Pharmaceutical companies would simply dose volunteers with an experimental agent until the side effects swamped the presumed benefits. Beecher proposed that if test subjects could be compared to a group that received a placebo, health officials would finally have an impartial way to determine whether the medicine was responsible for improving a patient.

In a 1955 paper titled "The Powerful Placebo," published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Beecher described how the placebo effect had undermined the results of more than a dozen trials by causing improvement mistakenly attributed to the drugs being tested. He demonstrated that trial volunteers who got actual medication were also subject to placebo effects; taking a pill was somehow therapeutic, boosting the curative power of the medicine. Only by subtracting the improvement in a placebo control group could the actual value of the drug be calculated. The article caused a sensation. By 1962, reeling from news of birth defects caused by a drug called thalidomide, Congress amended the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, requiring trials to include enhanced safety testing and placebo control groups. 

Placebo and Pharma Industry's Response

Ten years and billions of R&D dollars after William Potter first sounded the alarm about the placebo effect, his message finally got through. In the spring, Potter, now a VP at Merck, helped rev up a massive data-gathering effort called the Placebo Response Drug Trials Survey.

Under the auspices of the FNIH¹, Potter and his colleagues are acquiring decades of trial data—including blood and DNA samples—to determine which variables are responsible for the apparent rise in the placebo effect. Merck, Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, Johnson & Johnson, and other major firms are funding the study, and the process of scrubbing volunteers' names and additional personal information from the database is about to begin.

In typically secretive industry fashion, the project is being kept under wraps. FNIH staffers are willing to talk about it only anonymously, concerned about offending the companies paying for it.

For Potter, who used to ride along with his father on house calls in Indiana, the significance of the survey goes beyond Big Pharma's finally admitting it has a placebo problem. Read more...  

Placebo and Alternative Medicines (Natural Cures) By Associated Press November 10, 2009

People looking for natural cures will be happy to know there is one. Two words explain how it works: "I believe." It's the placebo effect — the ability of a dummy pill or a faked treatment to make people feel better just because they expect that it will. It's the Mind's ability to alter physical symptoms, such as pain, anxiety, and fatigue.

The placebo effect looms large in alternative medicine, which has many therapies and herbal remedies based on beliefs versus science. The problems they seek to relieve, such as pain, are often subjective.

"It has a pejorative implication — that it's not real, that it has no medicinal value," said Dr. Robert Ader, a psychologist at the University of Rochester in New York who has researched the phenomenon.

But placebos can have natural and beneficial effects, he said.

"Much of the results of certain alternative procedures are largely placebo effects unless you believe there are people who exert magical powers so they can hold their hands over your body and cure you of disease," Ader said. "Make you feel better? That's entirely possible, especially if you believe it."

Scientists say the placebo effect accounts for about a third of the benefits of any treatment — even carefully tested medicines. This dates to a landmark report in 1955 called The Powerful Placebo. Viewed as groundbreaking, the analysis of dozens of studies by H.K. Beecher found that 32 percent of patients responded to a placebo. Read more

Other related articles

1. Scientific American - A Cure in the Mind
2. Times of India - Practicing in the Mind can make you perfect
3. The mind's eye influences visual perception.
4. Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne - Its all in your head
5. Wired Magazine - Placebos are getting more effective. Drug makers are desperate to know why.
6. MSNBC - Placebo effect behind many natural cures
7. New Scientist - Placebo effect caught in the act in Spinal Nerves
8. Wikipedia - Placebo

Self, the Origin - Identity - Part 2

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 - Read the Part 1 first.

The Story of the 'Self' - Who am I?

Why do we all look different? What happens if we all look alike? Will the concept of you and me be there? To elaborate on that concept - how do you explain the concept of color to a person born blind? The answer is you cannot. So, if we all start to look the same, the identity of 'self' will not be created, which is required to understand nature to even enjoy the beauty of nature.

The state of Being

Being in a state of connectedness with something immeasurable – almost paradoxically, it is essentially you, yet it is beyond or more significant than you. The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation from yourself and the world around you.

Being is deep within you, but you can't grasp it with your logical mind. The rational mind is full of thoughts and restlessness. When the mind is free of thoughts, you are in the present – In the Now.

Rene Descartes made his famous statement, Cogito Ergo Sum – I think, therefore I am. The fundamental error in this philosophy is equating thinking with Being. I feel the Descartes statement needs to be redefined as follows.

 'I think, therefore, I created my Self'

Thinking creates the Self, which traps us in our mind's prison. This makes us believe that we are nothing but our 'Self,' which is in our mind.

Our Emotions

Emotions are our mind's reflection on our body. Anger results from a hostile thought, which (our actions) can be linked to our past or future (threatening your existence). If you stay in the present (In the Now) state and do not think about the past or future, then this hostile thought will never result in Anger.

When you experience pure love or happiness, you actually experience stillness in your mind – you are in Now. Being in Now is negating the Self. Pure love must negate the Self; otherwise, its infatuation is wrapped under the cover of love. Meeting of like minds will eventually result in negating the Self. O Henry's short story Gift of the Magi exemplifies pure love.

"Buddha says that the pain or suffering arises through desire or craving. To free from pain, we need to cut off our desires."

Different forms of fear, like anxiety, stress, tension, worry, etc., are the effect of spending too much time in the future. Other forms of non-forgiveness, like bitterness, grievances, regret, guilt, resentment, etc., are the outcome of living in the past. This is much worse than living in the future because as you grow up, chances of your past increase if you start living in your past.

So, if you see – only the emotion of pure Love results in being in the present – In the Now. The rest of the feelings push you down in the past and carry considerable baggage as you move forward or continuously in the uncertain future, worrying about things that never happened. The key is understanding the essence of pure love – the negation of Self – which means you are ready to sacrifice your 'self' in pursuing the happiness of the other 'self.'

It's interesting to look at some references from religious texts: check for the Bible – Mathew 22:36-40 Christ's message of "Love thy neighbor." Experts (religious) say that's what all the religions say. If that's the case, then why can't a man from an 'A' religion or caste can't get married to a woman from a 'B' religion or caste according to any religious laws. So, all these are exclusive clubs meant to build and strengthen their own clubs – a collection of 'self' evolving into a bigger self rather than negating the Self – achieving the exact opposite of what all religions preach.

Mankind's greatest delight was "Kindness," the Roman philosopher/emperor Marcus Aurelius declared. Philosophers and thinkers echoed his views down the centuries. In the age of the flat world, free market, and the selfish gene, kindness/compassion is seen as a weakness. We fight in the name of religion/caste, color, country, language, etc., doing precisely the opposite of Love Thy Neighbor.

The Mind

Does the mind control you, or do you control your mind? The obvious answer is, 'Of course I control my mind!' The delusion is if we believe I am nothing but my mind – precisely what Descartes said, 'I think, therefore I am.' Can you switch off your mind if you feel you control your mind? Switch off means – Zero thoughts. It will be difficult, and you will probably say no, we can't. Here is an exercise by Eckhart Tolle – Close your eyes and think about the following thought that will come to your mind. You know what it is if it takes Time for your next thought. You have experienced the present – Now.

Consciousness and Thinking are synonymous. Consciousness is a vast ocean, and the process of Thinking is a small island. Thinking gives us the capability to learn, analyze, and decide. Thought cannot exist without consciousness. Enlightenment is a state where you rise above the idea into the broader realm of consciousness.

The Mind and Time
The mind is in love with 'Time'. Without the concept of Time, the thought can't survive. Thoughts shuttle between the past and the future. The happiness resulting from thinking of the past or the future is an illusion. In oscillating between the past and the future, the mind denies the present – 'Now.' Time stands still when you encounter pure love. Your mind is in the state of 'Now.'

What's Time? Time is nature's way of preventing all from happening at once!

Experience requires analysis of multiple 'Nows' (at least two Nows). This creates the impression of 'Time' moving forward. 

References

1.  Power of Now By Eckhart Tolle
2. End of Time By Julian Barbour
3. Quantum Enigma By Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner
4. On Kindness By Adam Philips and Barbara Taylor
5. The 21^st Century Brain (Explaining, mending and manipulating the mind) By Steven Rose
6. Rene Descartes – Wikipedia
7. Issac Newton – Wikipedia
8. http://www.allaboutgod.com/love-thy-neighbor.htm 
9.  http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2009/01/love-thy-neighbour.html  

Self, the Origin - Part 1

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3
The Self, the conscious mind (or the soul from a spiritual outlook) - How did we get this? What are the fundamental prerequisites for the birth of 'self'? Before I get deep into that, let me share some of the questions that bothered me since high school.

1.     Why is our vision tuned to the electromagnetic wave's light spectrum (and not radio waves, x-rays, or infrared)?

2.     Why do we reason?

3.     Why do we (humans) all look different (except the identical twins)?

4.     Why do we have just 5 senses and not 3 or 7?

5.     Why do we have our own identity? Why cannot I see/know what others think?

Vision


There are many species where vision is tuned into a different electromagnetic wave spectrum. For example, Bats (dolphins, whales) cannot see how we see our environment. It uses ultrasound signals (Echo Location) to see the objects before it and flies away if it finds one in its path. So, think about it: if we had a vision where we got tuned into ultra-sound or X-rays. You can imagine how we can see things. Imagine seeing your friends as a skeleton (How do you differentiate them?) or a dark object (ultra-sound). The following image shows the electromagnetic wave and its different wavelengths in it.

.

As per the above picture, our vision is tuned somewhere between a wavelength of 10^-6 to 10^{-7 (m)}, while remotes of TV, DVD players, etc., are turned into 10^-6 to 10^-3, and some of the bats are tuned into ultraviolet spectrum 10^-7 to 10^-8 (m). Your favorite FM station is adjusted to wavelength 10 to 10² (m). So, the question remains: why did our vision tune into this spectrum? Let us look at the second question (Why do we reason?) in the series and see if we can connect all these to our ultimate question, the origin of the ‘Self.’

Rational World – Is it really rational?

The thought of a rational world is connected with the fact that it is ordered. The Earth goes around the Sun, The Moon goes around Earth, and there is an order to all these. Events do not happen randomly; they are related in some way. This connection gives birth to the notion of cause and effect. An example. The window breaks because a cricket ball (a British game) strikes a cricket ball, and the ball is hit by a batsman, and he hits it because a bowler bowls it, and so on.

Closely related to causality is the idea of determinism. Determinism implies that the state of the world at one moment suffices to fix its form at a later stage. Determinism was a crucial element in the Newtonian Laws of Mechanics proposed in the 17^th century. Example. Positions and Velocities of planets can be determined at any point in our solar system using Newton’s Laws. Newton’s law doesn’t contain time as a direction. So, we can predict future eclipses and retrofit their occurrences in the past. So, if the world is strictly deterministic, all the events are built in a matrix of cause and effect. All religion focuses on cause and effect as a fundamental principle to determine good and bad. Let us move into the 20^th century and see what happened to the Newtonian deterministic world. On a side note, thinking about destiny is interesting when you think about causality. In fact, destiny can be defined as the reverse causality where the cause is predated by an effect. Destiny in connection with fate can be discussed later once we get some hold of the origin of the ‘Self.’

The matrix of cause and effect (as a fundamental principle) got into trouble with the discovery of Quantum Mechanics in the 1920s. We found the absence of a deterministic world in the subatomic world. In the atomic world, indeterminism is built into its fabric. Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is an expression of this indeterminism. Numerous tests of quantum mechanics have proved/confirmed that uncertainty is inherent in quantum systems (at the subatomic level). So, does this mean that the universe is irrational after all?

Not at all.

The effects of quantum mechanics are not noticeable at the macroscopic scale. This means in the observable universe, nature tends to follow deterministic laws. Now, what is the observable universe? Who decides what can be observable? Who is observing whom? That’s another set of questions we need to think about.

The observable universe

The observable universe is the 3+1 dimensional (3 spatial – length, breadth, and height) universe we live in, and adding time as the 4^th dimension makes our observable universe complete. However, according to String theory, there are 10+1 dimensions (10 spatial and 1 time) in the universe (that’s the mathematical prediction of string theory and not what we experience as the 3+1 dimensional universe). So, is the current observable 3+1-dimensional universe only for the human species? We may not be able to answer an interesting question soon. Think about a 2+1 dimensional world where you have 2 spatial dimensions (length and breadth and NO height) along with a one-time dimension. The planet in the 2+1D world (time 3^rd Dimension) will be a flatland (Flatland: A Romance of many dimensions 1884 fiction by Edwin Abbot), and the species in that land will be like circles, squares, rectangles, etc.

Consider how these species react when encountering someone from our world (3+1D). Let us take the example from the flatland perspective: if a put a hole in a flat piece of paper (the 2+1 D world of the flatland people) using a pencil, the people in the flatland will see a small circle in their land becoming bigger and bigger then it stops. Now, if we take someone out of that 2D land and bring him to our 3D world and show him exactly what happened, how will he go back and explain to his fellow beings about another dimension. They are going to call him crazy. The following images show the different spatial dimensions.

A 3D projection of a four-dimensional hypercube performing a simple rotation about a plane that bisects the figure from front-left to back-right and top to bottom. Created by Jason Hise with Maya and Macromedia Fireworks.

After looking at all these different dimensions, we can ask again why we are in the 3+1 dimensional world. 3 spatial dimensions are the minimum requirement for the consciousness to reach the level where it can see the universe and try to enjoy the beauty of nature and unravel the mysteries one by one. Imagine if the time dimension is not there. Then, the concept of past, present, and future is gone, and events will unfold randomly. So, for rational thinking or to understand the mysteries of nature, consciousness requires the time factor and the 3 spatial dimensions. Without time, the change will become constant. You can measure the difference only if you can compare it (change) in two time frames. As we live in ‘now,’ we do not see the change as it happens.

Let us recap some of the critical points.

1.  Why is our vision (mind) tuned to the light spectrum in the electromagnetic wave? That is the best frequency to see and understand the 3+1 (3 spatial, 1 time) dimensional world.
   
2. Three (spatial) dimensional space with time as the fourth dimension will be the essential fabric requirement for the brain to develop the concept of ‘self,’ resulting in the ‘self’ trying to understand the universe and how the Self got created in the first place!
   
3. Time is a critical dimension (along with the 3 spatial dimensions) for the birth of ‘self.’ Without the concept of past, present, and future, learning and comparing things in this 3+1 space is difficult.

Apart from the above three points, something more is required for the concept of Self to be projected by our mind. A forward direction of time becomes critical for the evolution of consciousness to assemble the necessary events together in a logical order. Before the consciousness (human mind) starts to string things together, it must identify itself first. Let us look at that in the next section (part 2) and address the 3^rd question in the series – why do we (humans) all look different (except the identical twins)? We will see that in the next section.

Read more in Part 2 of the series.


References

Vision

1. Wikipedia – Bats

2. How stuff works – Bats Vision

3. Vision in echo locating Bats

4. The Hindu (newspaper) – Bats scan rainforest with UV vision

Flower-visiting bats need UV vision, as the flowers they visit in the rainforest are characterized by a strong reflection of UV-spectrum light at night.

5. Nature: UV vision: Flower power

Ultraviolet vision in mammals is a rarity, known only in a few rodents and marsupials. So, the discovery of UV vision in an echolocating nectar-feeding bat is surprising. Bats orientate primarily by echolocation, but bats do have eyes and make some use of vision. The phyllostomid flower bat is color-blind but UV-sensitive down to a wavelength of about 310 nm. 

6. National Geographic – How do rodents communicate with UV light?

Many fish, reptiles, birds, and insects can see ultraviolet light. Some even use pigments that reflect it to attract mates and communicate. However, most mammals have lost the ability to see ultraviolet light and lack the cellular machinery necessary to detect it.

7. National Academy of Science – Molecular analysis of the evolutionary significance of UV vision in vertebrates.  

The use of UV vision is associated strongly with UV-dependent behaviors of organisms. When UV light is unavailable or unimportant to organisms, the SWS1 gene can become nonfunctional, as exemplified by coelacanths and dolphins.

Sub Atomic World – Quantum Physics


1. Wikipedia – Quantum Physics

2. Wikipedia – Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

3. Wikipedia – Heisenberg Uncertainty principle

4. Wikipedia – Quantum entanglement

5. Wikipedia – EPR Paradox

6. Wikipedia – Copenhagen Interpretation

7. Quantum Physics – Double Slit Diffraction

Internet videos

1. David Bohm on perception

2. Holographic Universe - Michael Talbot - 1 of 12


Holographic Universe - 2 of 12
 

Holographic Universe - 3 of 12

Holographic Universe - 4 of 12

Holographic Universe - 5 of 12

Holographic Universe - 6 of 12

Holographic Universe - 7 of 12

Holographic Universe - 8 of 12

Holographic Universe - 9 of 12

Holographic Universe - 10 of 12

Holographic Universe - 11 of 12

Holographic Universe - 12 of 12

How our brains see what we cant.

A study on monkeys has shed new light on blindsight, a phenomenon in which patients with damage in the brain's primary visual cortex can tell where an object is, even when they cannot see it.

Professor Tadashi Isa and Dr. Masatoshi Yoshida, who led the study at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan, said that they had uncovered compelling evidence that blindsight occurs because visual information is conveyed bypassing the primary visual cortex.

Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, their findings have been backed by Japan Science and Technology Agency supported. For their research, the researchers recorded eye movements of the monkeys that had damage to one side of the primary visual cortex.

The animals were trained with an eye movement task for two to three months, enabling them to move their eyes to the correct direction where an object was even on the affected side of their visual fields. The researchers said that the animals' brains became able to feel where an object was without 'seeing' it. Read more ...