BRAIN - Mind - CONSCIENCE 1
Writing by bwerner on Tuesday, 15 of April , 2008 at 12:39 pm
Here the first of 3 articles regarding 
BRAIN, Mind and CONSCIENCE like promised.
Test: The brain of the right (hemisphere) against that one on the left…
Do this joke: try with your mind to make rotate the woman below to the opposite side.
Do you see the dancer turn clockwise or counter-clockwise?
If clockwise, then you use the right side of the brain most, and vice versa.
Most of us will see turn the dancer counter-clock wise although you could try to focus and change direction; see if you can do so.
FUNCTIONS OF THE LEFT BRAIN
Use of logic
Grasp the particular
Organizing facts
Words and language
Past and present
Mathematics and science
Power of understanding
Knowing
Recognize
Perception order / model
Knowledge of object and names
Foundations of reality
Forms and strategies
Practice
Sure
THE RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTION
Use of the “feel”
Vision of the whole, totality, overview
Imagination
Symbols and images
Present and Future
Philosophy and religion
grasp the meaning of things
Beliefs
Appreciate
Spatial perception
Knowledge of the functions of objects
Fantasy
Possibility of the present
Impetuous
venture
Power of the Mind: Placebo effect
Power of the Mind: Placebo effect
Source: book “Anatomy of Hope” written by Jerome Groopman.
The author, medical oncologist member of the National Academy of Science, teaches at Harvard Medical School and directs the Department of Experimental Medicine, of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. In his book – which I advice to all to read for the themes that it faces and the direct experience in the question – he describes many of the patients with whom he had to do during his brilliant career, including himself.
Suffering for twenty years of a herniated lumbar disk, he resolved the problem at the Baptist Hospital in Boston, attended by many personalities including the Kennedy’s and major American athletes. Here begins his journey toward healing and a fascinating horizon: the mind.
What follows treats some experiments of which he first became aware addressing this topic. It would be nice if you could contribute with your thoughts and your experience.
As we age, degenerative changes occur in our joints as a result of usury linked to everyday life, linked to physical exercise and work. One of the joints most often affected is the knee, which results in degenerative changes like arthritis. The main symptoms are pain and limited mobility of the knee, which often makes impossible activities such as running, jumping and, in most serious cases, walking. When the anti-inflammatory therapy fails to mitigate the pain of the knee is recommended surgery. The operation is carried out with arthroscopy, a technique in which the surgeon can see the areas of cartilage degeneration, remove it (a procedure called ‘debridement’), and proceed to ‘wash’ it, to eliminate, with special fluids, the inflammatory substances accumulated in the structure. Each year, more than 650 thousand arthroscopies are performed on degenerated knees, only in the United States, at a cost of about 5000 dollars for intervention.
In July 2002, the “New England Journal of Medicine” has published a pioneering study that showed the effect of placebo on pain in muscle-skeletal diseases. Researchers of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston have measured strictly reducing pain and improving functionality as after an arthroscopy for osteoarthritis of the knee as after a placebo intervention.
One hundred eighty patients were randomly assigned to debridement, to the washing arthroscopy or to a simulated surgery. The patients from the placebo group were taken to the operating room; their knees become treated with disinfectant and surrounded by sterile drapes. The surgeon asked all the tools used in a real intervention and manipulated the knee as during a true arthroscopy.
In reality were practiced only small incisions in the skin around the knee, without the introduction of arthroscopy. A saline solution was then used to simulate the noise of the washing. Patients in the placebo group were retained in the operating room for the same time as the patients undergoing the true procedure; they also passed the first night after the intervention in hospital and were assisted by nurses unaware of the simulation. All three groups of washing, debridement and placebo received the same postoperative care, which included assistance in the movement, a gradual exercise program and analgesic therapy. As a result, they were kept under control for two years, which included monitoring the level of pain, the functional changes related to the speed at which they walked and the distance they could go, and other activities that involved the articulation of the knee.
As expected, the patients undergone the arthroscopy had a decrease in pain on the knee and a functional improvement. In addition, the placebo group received an equal benefit.
The evening, in which the article was published, I looked the newscast. The program showed an Afro American aged man that for the first time in years played basketball with his nephew: he was part of the placebo group.
How to explain such a result? Probably the conviction and waiting – proved, be it during transport in the operating room, be it listening to the surgeon, who asked instruments, be it hearing the noise of the alleged fluid, healthy washing of the knee - had released the powerful endorphins and encephalin documented by Benedetti in his experiments. With the difference, that in this case the experiment was not performed in the laboratory with normal volunteers, but in a clinical trial with subjects suffering from a painful and disabling disease.
The pain was the obstacle that prevented these sacks to practice, strengthening their muscles and their ligaments. Exceeded that handicap, thanks to the effects of the mind, the necessary rehabilitation could proceed. Without hope, nothing would have started.
Hope is a real possibility of improvement. It gives the ability to overcome obstacles that we otherwise could not leave behind, and reach to where healing can take place.
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Conscience is the primary reality - Eugene Wigner, the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Consciousness, the heart of Being!
What is consciousness? Being aware? What constitutes the beating heart of every living being?
What really is “Self” or identity, and where is its seat in the body? What is the subjectivity that is expressed in every man and every animal? Is there a center of consciousness inside me and inside of you?
What does really cogito ergo sum mean: I have conscience, therefore I do exist? What is the nature of the observer that, inside me, perceives the existence as information and meanings? “Who are am”?
What is what I call “me”? Where? What is the “substance” of thought? How can we quantify it?
We invite the reader to stop and answer these questions, searching inside him the first answer!
The problem of consciousness is the fundamental point of every human and philosophical research!
This encyclopedia wants to open a new dimension to scientific knowledge involving the understanding of consciousness, creating a global basis for explorers and researchers in the middle of the journey of the being. Conscience is the last unknown land remained to be discovered on our planet, and probably is it the Promised Land that awaits us.
The decade of conscience.
The completely new emerging science is moving to a new understanding of consciousness.
The international scientific community “Decade of the Brain”, in 1995 declared the nineties the editors of the “The Journal of Consciousness Studies” specifying that that should also be the “Decade of the Mind”. In addition, I think that probably this will be remembered in the history of science as the “Decade of Conscience”, the beginning phase of rapprochement and openness to the “implicated” dimension of existence. The “Science of Consciousness” community, as it calls Melanie Mitchell on “New Scientist” (8 Nov.1997) is by that time a consistent and inescapable reality.
The Nobel Prize in physics Eugene Wigner, in a symposium held a few years ago in New York, said that the awareness is the primary reality. The science is too divided, there are 86 newspapers only in the field of pure physics … The quantum theory did miracles, explaining the properties of microscopic phenomena.
However … it is limited. It does not explain life or the consciousness. In the future, the physic will not only explain the observed phenomena but also the process of observing. We are just at the beginning of understanding the consciousness.
A statement of this force, expressed by a Nobel Prize in physics, shows a revolution underway.
The studied subject of the physics and, the conscience of the scientist in the study, have closed the circle and were reunited. After having denied for centuries the possibility that there is a conscience, now the science reconsiders its position, and begins to penetrate the mysteries of the human psyche through the study of the brain; this is the great challenge of contemporary research.
In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in official interest of science for the elusive phenomenon of consciousness. The Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who discovered DNA and who is internationally known for his empirical rigor said that the conscience is a legitimate field of scientific research. The Nobel Edelmann claims to have comprehended some of the fundamental processes of the awareness phenomenon in neurophysiologic terms. In recent years the scientific meetings on the subject of consciousness has multiplied, the first major congress held in 1994 in Tucson, at the “Health Sciences Center” on the University of Arizona, on the theme “Towards a scientific basis of consciousness” saw about three hundred scientists from all over the world confronted with assumptions and data, united largely on the belief that science will soon understand consciousness and physical matter in a more global and united form, the same Congress 1996 gathered more than eight hundred scientists and philosophers.
In November of 1994 was held in Miami the first symposium on conscience organized by the “Society for Neurosciences”, while in England came out the first issue of the scientific journal “The Journal of Consciousness Studies” where physicists, philosophers and neurophysiologists collaborate.
It is a fact that science and conscience are deeply linked together. The experimental scientific method is born out of pure observation, so the observer, the subject expert, constitutes the high point.
The philosophical basis of the experimental method are born out from the thinking based on the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum, “I am aware, therefore I do exist”, or “I do exist as I’m a conscience.”
Conscience is the inner witness, the knower of the information coming to us from the outside world and from our own inner world; we call the body that is the essential point: without it, there would be no subject and therefore we would not exist.
We are the conscience of the world and ourselves. Each mental activity, every sensation, every feeling, every intuition and memory could not exist without a center of conscience, without an “I” that perceives the meaning, which understands its meaning. However, the “science of consciousness”, although in rapid growth, is inside the building of the official Science, still an irrelevant and strongly hampered part.
The science without conscience.
Science is the great power of our era, for better or worse, on the progress in technology and on environmental destruction, it has replaced somehow religion assuming the task of expressing the truth and, the scientific truth is, in fact, universally recognized on this planet divided for a thousand ideologies, powers, cultures and theologies. The experimental method has certainly helped to create the foundations for a vision and a cross culture between peoples and visions of the world, but has stopped by fault of its internal limits and it’s globally lack of understanding the aspects of the most subtle and profound of the living, man, animal or nature or whatever it is.
The conscience is the intimate heart of living.
A science without conscience is a huge hazard, is a heartless power, a force without sensitiveness. Science, which actually means conscience, has investigated the exterior reality but has never investigated the nature of the cognoscente itself, the essential and inwardly dimension of consciousness that animates the scientist like every other living creature. Science forgets that all its findings on the reality of the material world are due to the consciousness of the intelligent mind of scientists and researchers who have guess, understood and known the existence. However, what were the causes of this mental division between matter and consciousness? Let us try to explore the reasons and limits of this reductionist attitude.
The ancient evolutionary vision and its decadence.
Matter derives from mater, the mother. Since ever ancient religions has claimed that the whole of creation, the matter and its development, is the work of God. The ancient forms of spirituality were not in any way hostile to the matter, they does not demonize it as devoid of life and consciousness, on the contrary they supported its absolute sacredness giving to the matter itself, or rather to the physical energy that forms the matrix, the role of Shakhty, the Female Principle, the Great Mother.
The goddess Shakhty was depicted and adored in a cosmic embrace with the god Shiva.
She the matter-energy Creator, He the consciousness that pervades all life. Form and information.
Nevertheless, let do not stop by the names: Shakhty, as Yin, Gaea, Gaia, Ceres or Demeter, the Earth that are all examples of how the matter were still venerated in every civilization. The whole creation was, therefore, an erotic act in which the divinity was implicit, in its dual aspect male and female.
Shiva Nataraj dances and his conscience manifests in every rotational movement itself, in the galaxies as in subatomic particles, reflecting himself in the beauty of the forms that are produced in the perfect logic of the rhythm and cycles. Brahma is not a separate creator, but is inseparable from the creation itself, his conscience is implicit in every living form, of which he becomes the individual soul or consciousness of self, and as such a soul, he manifest in the intelligence and in the growing complexity of forms .
With the decline of the spiritual experience and with the advent of Aryan religions, bearers of One God and male, this reverence for the living matters gradually declined and replaced the concept of God as demiurge: an external architect who creates the entire universe from a separate dimension from that materially. A first possible explanation of the materialist polarization taken by the current science, and the consequent removal of conscience, must be sought, therefore, in this dichotomist model God-Matter, where a transcendent God made of pure spirit contrasts necessarily a scientific vision that considers the reality purely material. The matter is so depreciate, denied its sacredness, considered commodity for exchange.
For many primitive peoples thinking that a man can buy and own a part of the Earth is a sacrilegious thought.
The Earth is sacred dwelling that gives us life and love; it is Divine, and as such, must it remain to all and must be respected beyond all need. The initial unit has been irretrievably lost, and, paradoxically, will it be the same religion to declare the separation of the soul from the living body.
Taken from “holistic Encyclopedia” http://www.globalvillage-it.com/
http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/hangar/6929/cervello.html
http://www.neuroingegneria.com/art/La Quantum Mechanics and Coscienza/178.php
With friendly permission from http://www.mednat.org/
Category: Health, Personal Development, Science
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