"Congratulations. You have swamped the probabilities of chance with your mind." - Ghost, by Alan Lightman (2008). (Yes, that Alan Lightman. A most enjoyable read!)
This is going to have to be quick, as yours truly is currently swamped with more mundane things to do.
There seems to be something in the air that makes people want to discuss patterns. I concede that our ultimate understanding of the universe may always include an element that is not understood. Call it 'noise', 'randomness', or whatever else you like.
I just think that it's possible to understand a whole lot more of that 'noise' in terms of a pattern or set of underlying causes. I don't hold this opinion because I can't stand the idea that some things are simply unexplainable; in fact, I tolerate that idea quite well. But, having seen the potential to crack one previously untouchable 'code' (that of the origins of dreams), I can't help but think that it might be possible to crack more of the 'code' of consciousness.
Cracking the code of conscious experience will involve a grand synthesis of many lines of research, including those on rarer types of conscious experience. I also see the multiple-observer question as a necessary line of inquiry for understanding the interplay of consciousness with the observable world. The code of a self-contained consciousness that is isolated from outside influences is (hypothetically) much easier to crack. But the code of a consciousness that is dependent in some way on other observers will likely be much more complicated.
This challenge merits only the following response - Bring it on! ;)
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Journal Club #5
"It is like hearing an echo from a long way off." - said of telepathy.
Venkatasubramanian, et al, Investigating paranormal phenomena: Functional brain imaging of telepathy, International Journal of Yoga, 2008 (here)
I'm all for studies which aim to link hard neurological data to psi activity. To date, there appear to be three other such studies which involve functional brain mapping techniques. Two of the three previous studies examined subjects with telepathic ability, whereas the third dealt with "distant intentionality." Only the study on distant intentionality (healing at a distance) used fMRI.
I'm commenting on this study because it indicates that the telepathic subject/receiver, who performed the telepathy task while being scanned, displayed activation in the parahippocampal gyrus when asked to engage in the task of 'receiving' the telepathically-transmitted image. The parahippocampal gyrus is typically associated with memory encoding and retrieval, which begs the question - why would an area of the brain whose primary function seems to be memory encoding and retrieval be implicated in telepathy?
Granted, the parahippocampal gyrus has been implicated in many things - from panic attacks to the perception of sarcasm. It's not an entirely implausible stretch to relate the need for perceiving social context when identifying sarcasm with the ability to 'detect' what another person is thinking. It can all be related to Theory of Mind. Telepathy just seems to bypass a few of the more conventional information-gathering steps.
So I'm uber-curious to know why the authors of this study think that the parahippocampal gyrus might have a legitimate connection to telepathy. The previous studies using SPECT, EEG, and MRI seem to claim only that a larger activation was seen in the right cerebral hemisphere. The telepathic subject's fMRI data was analyzed by comparing periods of 'activation' with periods of 'rest'. Periods of 'activation' represented active attempts to 'send' an image on the part of the sender/investigator and active attempts to 'receive' on the part of the subject. The images being 'sent' were abstract geometric figures of low complexity, hand-drawn by the investigator.
The control subject also displayed a differential activation in another area of the brain that is associated with Theory of Mind - the left inferior frontal gyrus. So what's going on here? The key to successful telepathy is in the degree of correspondence between the 'received' data and the original target. Emotional content (which implicates the hippocampus more directly) is non-existent in this particular task and in specific target material chosen for the task. (Right about now you should open the article and look and the two sets of 'received' images, if you haven't already done so. I confess that I am hard-pressed to call one drawing the result of telepathy when compared to the other.)
The discussion section of this article talks quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus in processing emotion, though it's hard to tell how this line of thinking corresponds to this particular study. The authors also digress to mentioning sensitivity to magnetic field energies though, again, the reasons for doing so in the context of this study are unclear. (But we're noting the relevant references for later.) The paragraph that links the parahippocampal gyrus with magnetic fields via their common association with schizophrenia and psychosis makes me cringe. The implication is that magnetic fields are the mechanism of telepathy and the parahippocampal gyrus is a 'hot' center for processing those signals, but the leaps in thinking to link these two ideas are extreme.
So what, if any, other plausible explanations exist for the why the parahippocampal gyrus might be implicated in this act of telepathy? (It really is a stretch to think that it has to be implicated in every act of telepathy.) Without a successful replication of this task using similar stimuli, it's impossible to conclude that this parahippocampal activation was not simply an anomaly that has no relevance to the task. All that being said, I mention this study because it brought to mind a theory about telepathy that I think has received far too little attention. Now that I think about, there are actually two theories that can come into play here...
The first theory (and you'll pardon me if I can't properly attribute it to a source) is that telepathy works by activating existing memory traces. That is, I perceived your message to me in terms of ideas, images, events, and emotions that I've already experienced. My challenge is then to correctly 'connect the dots' and decode the messages by correctly interpreting the relative strength of the memory activations. To be completely honest, I like this theory because it jibes with my own experiences and the anecdotal evidence I've collected from others. Remote viewers also discuss the difficultly they encounter in correctly interpreting their perceptions.
The second theory (again, I beg pardon for lack of attribution) is that instances of ESP such as are purported to have occurred in this task may actually be the result of the mind/brain accessing its own future observations. In other words, the telepathy was not mind-to-mind contact (in this case), but the brain accessing what it will see during the feedback stage of the experiment. The brain accessing future memory traces, if you will.
By implicating memory traces in the 'telepathic' act, via either of the two theories I just described, you have a much more plausible reason to suspect that the parahippocampal gyrus activation is a significant find.
Though I remain, as ever, an appropriately skeptical scientist who awaits the validation of replication with eager anticipation.
Venkatasubramanian, et al, Investigating paranormal phenomena: Functional brain imaging of telepathy, International Journal of Yoga, 2008 (here)
I'm all for studies which aim to link hard neurological data to psi activity. To date, there appear to be three other such studies which involve functional brain mapping techniques. Two of the three previous studies examined subjects with telepathic ability, whereas the third dealt with "distant intentionality." Only the study on distant intentionality (healing at a distance) used fMRI.
I'm commenting on this study because it indicates that the telepathic subject/receiver, who performed the telepathy task while being scanned, displayed activation in the parahippocampal gyrus when asked to engage in the task of 'receiving' the telepathically-transmitted image. The parahippocampal gyrus is typically associated with memory encoding and retrieval, which begs the question - why would an area of the brain whose primary function seems to be memory encoding and retrieval be implicated in telepathy?
Granted, the parahippocampal gyrus has been implicated in many things - from panic attacks to the perception of sarcasm. It's not an entirely implausible stretch to relate the need for perceiving social context when identifying sarcasm with the ability to 'detect' what another person is thinking. It can all be related to Theory of Mind. Telepathy just seems to bypass a few of the more conventional information-gathering steps.
So I'm uber-curious to know why the authors of this study think that the parahippocampal gyrus might have a legitimate connection to telepathy. The previous studies using SPECT, EEG, and MRI seem to claim only that a larger activation was seen in the right cerebral hemisphere. The telepathic subject's fMRI data was analyzed by comparing periods of 'activation' with periods of 'rest'. Periods of 'activation' represented active attempts to 'send' an image on the part of the sender/investigator and active attempts to 'receive' on the part of the subject. The images being 'sent' were abstract geometric figures of low complexity, hand-drawn by the investigator.
The control subject also displayed a differential activation in another area of the brain that is associated with Theory of Mind - the left inferior frontal gyrus. So what's going on here? The key to successful telepathy is in the degree of correspondence between the 'received' data and the original target. Emotional content (which implicates the hippocampus more directly) is non-existent in this particular task and in specific target material chosen for the task. (Right about now you should open the article and look and the two sets of 'received' images, if you haven't already done so. I confess that I am hard-pressed to call one drawing the result of telepathy when compared to the other.)
The discussion section of this article talks quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus in processing emotion, though it's hard to tell how this line of thinking corresponds to this particular study. The authors also digress to mentioning sensitivity to magnetic field energies though, again, the reasons for doing so in the context of this study are unclear. (But we're noting the relevant references for later.) The paragraph that links the parahippocampal gyrus with magnetic fields via their common association with schizophrenia and psychosis makes me cringe. The implication is that magnetic fields are the mechanism of telepathy and the parahippocampal gyrus is a 'hot' center for processing those signals, but the leaps in thinking to link these two ideas are extreme.
So what, if any, other plausible explanations exist for the why the parahippocampal gyrus might be implicated in this act of telepathy? (It really is a stretch to think that it has to be implicated in every act of telepathy.) Without a successful replication of this task using similar stimuli, it's impossible to conclude that this parahippocampal activation was not simply an anomaly that has no relevance to the task. All that being said, I mention this study because it brought to mind a theory about telepathy that I think has received far too little attention. Now that I think about, there are actually two theories that can come into play here...
The first theory (and you'll pardon me if I can't properly attribute it to a source) is that telepathy works by activating existing memory traces. That is, I perceived your message to me in terms of ideas, images, events, and emotions that I've already experienced. My challenge is then to correctly 'connect the dots' and decode the messages by correctly interpreting the relative strength of the memory activations. To be completely honest, I like this theory because it jibes with my own experiences and the anecdotal evidence I've collected from others. Remote viewers also discuss the difficultly they encounter in correctly interpreting their perceptions.
The second theory (again, I beg pardon for lack of attribution) is that instances of ESP such as are purported to have occurred in this task may actually be the result of the mind/brain accessing its own future observations. In other words, the telepathy was not mind-to-mind contact (in this case), but the brain accessing what it will see during the feedback stage of the experiment. The brain accessing future memory traces, if you will.
By implicating memory traces in the 'telepathic' act, via either of the two theories I just described, you have a much more plausible reason to suspect that the parahippocampal gyrus activation is a significant find.
Though I remain, as ever, an appropriately skeptical scientist who awaits the validation of replication with eager anticipation.
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