“Wired magazine’s own “Senior Maverick” talks with Ken Wilber about some of the ideas behind Kevin’s blog The Technium, which explores the various ways humanity defines and redefines itself through the interface of science, technology, culture, and consciousness. Kevin also shares some of his own thoughts about the role of spirituality in the 21st century, going into considerable depth around his own spiritual awakening several decades ago.”

(via Integral Life. h/t: Integral Praxis)

(The Technium Blog)

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The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete. Some scientists predict the end of lying as we know it.

Now, well before any consensus on the technology’s readiness, India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question.

Full Story: New York Times

(via Disinfo)

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Soldiers barking orders at each other is so 20th Century. That’s why the U.S. Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to begin developing “thought helmets” that would harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops. Ultimately, the Army hopes the project will “lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone.”

If this sounds insane, it would have been as recently as a few years ago. But improvements in computing power and a better understanding of how the brain works have scientists busy hunting for the distinctive neural fingerprints that flash through a brain when a person is talking to himself. The Army’s initial goal is to capture those brain waves with incredibly sophisticated software that then translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. “It’d be radio without a microphone, ” says Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist overseeing the program. “Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.”

Full Story: Time

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People who startle easily in response to threatening images or loud sounds seem to have a biological predisposition to adopt conservative political positions on many hot-button social issues, according to unusual new research being published today.

The finding — certain to stir debate in the middle of a presidential campaign — suggests that people who are particularly sensitive to signals of visual and auditory threats also tend to adopt a more defensive stance on political issues, from immigration and gun control to defense spending and patriotism. People who are less sensitive to potential threats, by contrast, seem predisposed to adopt more liberal positions on those issues.

(Thanks Bill!)

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When scientists learned that PCP, also known as angel dust, can cause every single symptom of schizophrenia, they wondered if chemicals that have the opposite effect could fight mental disorders. That insight led to them to discover a new class of antipsychotic medications.

To understand how the recreational drug plays tricks on the mind, neuroscientists gave it to lab rats. Those researchers could counteract the strange behavior of their furry assistants by stimulating brain proteins called glutamate receptors. Big drug companies, including Eli Lilly, took note of that discovery and started searching for molecules that can push the same psychological buttons in humans.

In the Sept. 15 issue of Chemical and Engineering News, Carmen Drahl told that story, along with the tales of three other experimental medications that could turn the tide against schizophrenia. Each compound operates in a completely different way, and all of them have been tested on human volunteers.

Full Story: Wired

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Experienced Zen meditators can clear their minds of distractions more quickly than novices, according to a new brain imaging study.

After being interrupted by a word-recognition task, experienced meditators’ brains returned faster to their pre-interruption condition, researchers at Emory University School of Medicine found.
Giuseppe Pagnoni, PhD, Emory assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and co-workers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine changes in blood flow in the brain when people meditating were interrupted by stimuli designed to mimic the appearance of spontaneous thoughts.

The study compared 12 people from the Atlanta area with more than three years of daily practice in Zen meditation with 12 others who had never practiced meditation.

Full Story: Science Daily

(via OVO)

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An excellent interview with Rick Strassman in which he talks about his new book, and reflects on his DMT research and experiences with Zen Buddhism with more hindsight than he did in his book DMT: the Spirit Molecule:

It’s a multi-authored book, non-fiction. It’s pretty much the brain-child of the second author, whose name is Slavic Wojtowicz, who is an oncology researcher for a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, and who also happens to be a big science fiction buff and illustrator. He read my book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and felt that there was a lot of overlap between the material we presented there and the kinds of things that people read and write about in science fiction. He felt it would be a fun and helpful thing to educate people in the science-fiction community about some of these overlaps and areas of similar interests.

He asked me if I’d like to collaborate with him, and I agreed. I asked another colleague of mine, Louis Eduardo Luna, who is a South American anthropologist who divides his time between Brazil and Helsinki and has been working with Ayahuasca for a few decades now. He has probably got one of the more balanced and sophisticated overviews of how to look at and apply the states and plant wisdom information that is associated with Ayahuasca. And so Louis Eduardo agreed to collaborate, and then Louis had a friend in Budapest Hungary named Ede Frecska, who is a Hungarian psychiatrist and has written a lot on new science views on shamanism - having to do with quantum mechanics and non-local theories of information transfer and storage - and so Louis Eduardo asked Ede if he’d like to collaborate. So that’s how the four of us came together to collaborate on writing the book.

Full Story: Reality Sandwich

See also: DMT and Extraterrestrial Communication at Brainsturbator.

And, of course, come to Esozone to hear Dennis McKenna talk about the role of entheogens in society, and Brainsturbator’s Thirtyseven talk about the end of reality.

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“Last month, I travelled to Bristol to meet 37-year-old Heather Perry, one of a very small number of people to have voluntarily undergone trepanation for non-medical reasons. As we ate a pub lunch, I asked Heather about her experience. Below is a transcript of our conversation.

M: How did you first hear about trepanation, and why did you decide to have it done?

HP: The first time I heard about trepanation was when I was a kiddie. I was really into Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and I remembered that Lennon had mentioned that he wanted it done. He had spoken to Bart Huges about it, and Bart had said that he didn’t think Lennon’s cranial sutures had healed anyway, because he was such a creative person. At the time, I just thought “Wow! That’s a bit freaky” and didn’t think much more about it. Then later on, I did a lot of acid, which kind of mashed my head up a bit. I remember getting these pressure or tension headaches, and thinking that John Lennon said he was going to do it to relieve the pressure. By the mid-nineties, I started to realize that it wasn’t dangerous, and decided that I was going to it if I could find somebody to give me a hand. But that proved to be quite difficult, so then I let it drop for a while. One of my initial reasons for wanting to have it done was for more mental energy and clarity. I had been working in Cheltenham, and got made redundant. I bought a computer, got online, and eventually got in touch with Pete Halvorson in the States, who had trepanned himself in the early 1970s. I was going over for a wedding anyway, so we arranged to meet so he could help me with it.”

(via Neurophilosophy)

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FLicKeR iS a new Dream MachHine documentary directed by Nik Sheehan, who is apparently much beloved of rAndOM CapITaL LetTerS. We begin with Sheehan carting a new and beautifully engineered Dream Machine around and testing it out on rock stars, DJs, and old cronies of Gysin, who died in 1986. For the most part, hearing their reactions to the device is no more interesting than hearing about people’s pot trips, but because Sheehan picked some perceptive—if not always particularly germane—trippers, the talking heads give good talk. Sitting in a comfortable New York loft with his eyes closed (which is the best way to let the Dream Machine’s pulsing frequency bring on the alpha waves and audio-visual stimuli that can trigger trance), Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo, not only describes beautiful clouds of color but points out the device’s connection to early cinematic devices.

Unfortunately, this is the only time this vital vein of flicker tech is even mentioned in the film. The brain science behind the effect gets a bit more time, but in general this is a very average documentary that blows more chances for excellence and depth than it exploits. The written voice-over material is terribly banal, with potted histories of the Beats and Hassan i Sabbah (illustrated with cheesy CG that brings back 1992 rave graphics), and a legion of unfortunate phrases. For example, Gysin is described as a “serious dabbler in the occult” (a serious dabbler?) and his machine as a “portal into the space-time continuum.” I mean, aren’t we already stuck inside the space-time continuum? Didn’t these guys want to find a way out?

Full Story: Techgnosis

Trailer:

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Parents, more reason to be afraid:

Websites are targeting your children with so-called digital drugs. These are audio files designed to induce drug-like effects.

All your child needs is a music player and headphones. […]

There are different slang terms for digital drugs. They’re often called “idozers” or “idosers.” All rely on the concept of binaural beats. […]

Other sites offer therapeutic binaural beats. They help you relax or meditate. Some allegedly help you overcome addiction or anxiety. Others purport to help you lose weight or eliminate gray hair.

However, most sites are more sinister. They sell audio files (”doses”) that supposedly mimic the effects of alcohol and marijuana.

But it doesn’t end there. You’ll find doses that purportedly mimic the effects of LSD, crack, heroin and other hard drugs. There are also doses of a sexual nature. I even found ones that supposedly simulate heaven and hell.

Full Story: USA Today

(Thanks Telarus!)

I can’t wait til this hits Fox News

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“Imitation of nature is bad engineering,” he answered patiently. “For centuries inventors tried to fly by emulating birds, and they killed themselves uselessly. If you want to make something that flies, flapping your wings is not the way to do it. You bolt a 400-horsepower engine to a barn door, that’s how you fly. You can look at birds forever and never discover this secret. You see, Mother Nature has never developed the Boeing 707. Why not? Because Nature didn’t need anything that would fly that fast and that high. How would such an animal feed itself?”

“What does that have to do with artificial intelligence?”

“Simply that it tries to approximate man. If you take man’s brain as a model and test of intelligence, you’re making the same mistake as the old inventors flapping their wings. You don’t realize that Mother Nature has never needed an intelligent animal and accordingly, she has never bothered to develop one!”

Full Story: Skilluminati

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Ketchum was referring to his work at Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, in the 1960s, when America’s national security strategists were high on the prospect of developing a nonlethal incapacitating agent, a so-called humane weapon, that could knock people out without necessarily killing anyone. Top military officers hyped the notion of “war without death,” conjuring visions of aircraft swooping over enemy territory releasing clouds of “madness gas” that would disorient the bad guys and dissolve their will to resist, while U.S. soldiers moved in and took over.

Ketchum was into weapons of mass elation, not weapons of mass destruction. He oversaw a secret research program that tested an array of mind-bending drugs on American GIs, including an exceptionally potent form of synthetic marijuana. (Most of these drugs had no medical names, just numbers supplied by the Army.) “Paradoxical as it may seem,” Ketchum asserted, “one can use chemical weapons to spare lives, rather than extinguish them.”

Full Story: Alternet

(Thanks Bill!)

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Big WOW! Who whould have thought that any government would ever release statements like these: “the effects produced by its consumption are equivalent to entering the secrets of the spiritual world…” and, “knowledge of ayahuasca states is required for all members of Amazonian societies at some point in their lives, and is essential for assuming the role of privileged individuals…”

Full Story: Dose Nation

(Thanks Danny Chaoflux)

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Intergral Praxis has an interesting post up with videos from Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UCSD, who discusses consciousness, qualia, and self. An interview with David Chalmers discussing his theory of consciousness, the hard problem, and the explanatory gap, and part two of a BBC documentary called “The Century of Self”. This part is called ‘Engineering Consent’, and tells the tale of how power elites used psychoanalytic theories to try and control human populations in an age of mass democracy and global capitalism.

(via Integral Praxis)

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Lucid dreams used to be a topic within psychical research and parapsychology. Perhaps their incomprehensibility made them good candidates for being thought paranormal. More recently, however, they have begun to appear in psychology journals and have dropped out of parapsychology—a good example of how the field of parapsychology shrinks when any of its subject matter is actually explained.

Lucidity has also become something of a New Age fad. There are machines and gadgets you can buy and special clubs you can join to learn how to induce lucid dreams. But this commercialization should not let us lose sight of the very real fascination of lucid dreaming. It forces us to ask questions about the nature of consciousness, deliberate control over our actions, and the nature of imaginary worlds.

Full Story: Susan Blackmore

(via Bruce Eisner)

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Update: Part 2 now available

Technoccult TV talks with Antero Alli about paratheater, his films, the 8 circuit model of consciousness, and his plans for the future.

Antero Alli is a paratheater director, filmmaker, astrologer, and the world’s leading expert on the 8 circuit model of consciousness. For more information about his work, or to purchase his DVDs, visit ParaTheatrical ReSearch and Vertical Pool Productions.

And of course, you can see him give a presentation on the 8 circuit model this October at Esozone in Portland.

Special thanks to: Chris Cloke, Bill Whitcomb, and Trevor Blake.

(Watch for more episodes of Technoccult TV, inlcluding part 2 of this interview plus interviews with Paul Laffoley, Nemo, The Red King, and many more)

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Scientists reported Tuesday that when they surveyed volunteers 14 months after they took the drug, most said they were still feeling and behaving better because of the experience.

Two-thirds of them also said the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they’d ever had.

The drug, psilocybin, is found in so-called “magic mushrooms.” It’s illegal, but it has been used in religious ceremonies for centuries.

The study involved 36 men and women during an eight-hour lab visit. It’s one of the few such studies of a hallucinogen in the past 40 years, since research was largely shut down after widespread recreational abuse of such drugs in the 1960s.

The project made headlines in 2006 when researchers published their report on how the volunteers felt just two months after taking the drug. The new study followed them up a year after that.

Experts emphasize that people should not try psilocybin on their own because it could be harmful. Even in the controlled setting of the laboratory, nearly a third of participants felt significant fear under the effects of the drug. Without proper supervision, someone could be harmed, researchers said.

Full Story: Wired

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A new study by Princeton University researchers shows for the first time that bacteria don’t just react to changes in their surroundings — they anticipate and prepare for them. The findings, reported in the June 6 issue of Science, challenge the prevailing notion that only organisms with complex nervous systems have this ability.
“What we have found is the first evidence that bacteria can use sensed cues from their environment to infer future events,” said Saeed Tavazoie, an associate professor of molecular biology, who conducted the study along with graduate student Ilias Tagkopoulos and postdoctoral researcher Yir-Chung Liu.

Full Story: Physorg

(via Kurzweil)

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We’ve mentioned before purported benefits of the N-Back Task on fluid intelligence:

In this case, subjects trained on a complex version of the so-called “n-back task” — a difficult visual/auditory memory test — improved their scores on a set of IQ questions drawn from a German intelligence measure called the Bochumer Matrizen-Test. (The Bochumer Matrizen-Test is a harder version of the well-known Ravens Progressive Matrices).

Initially, the test subjects scored an average of 10 questions correctly on the IQ test.

But after the group trained on the n-back task for 25 minutes a day for 19 days, they averaged 14.7 correct answers, an increase of more than 40 percent. (A control group that was not trained showed only a very slight performance increase.)

Buschkuehl’s team postulates that the n-back task improves working memory — how many pieces of information subjects can keep in their head — as well as the ability to control the brain’s attention. Fluid intelligence tests require those types of thinking, and the training improved performance in these underlying skills.

Grinding points out two applications you can use to practice n-Back Tasks on your own:

Web based N-Back test (requires Microsoft Silverlight)

hback (for Linux)

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This series of conversations is on the topic called the 8 Circuit Brain model. It is something that Timothy Leary first brought into the western consciousness, and later Robert Anton Wilson in his book Prometheus Rising gave it a more wide spread appeal. It was further developed by Antero in his book “Angel Tech”

This conversation covers the following topics:

History and introduction to the 8-circuit brain model
Absorb, Integrate, Transmit: Intelligence Increase
Embracing humility, flaws & paradox on the human journey
Circuit 1: Bio-Survival intelligence
Circuit 2: Emotional-Territorial intelligence
Direct experience
Meeting the needs of the second circuit

Listen to or download interview

(via Dedroidify)

To learn more about the 8 circuit model from Antero himself, be at Esozone

And don’t forget, you can see Antero’s new film Invisible Forest:

Thursday June 5, 9pm: DIVA Center, Eugene OR $5.
Friday June 6, 9:30pm: Hollywood Theatre, Portland OR $6.50
Sunday June 15, 2pm: NW Film Forum, Seattle WA. $8.
Wed. June 18, 8:30pm: Pickford Cinema, Bellingham WA $7.50
Friday June 27, 7pm: Shiny Object, West Sacramento. $5.

Here’s Erik Davis’s review of Invisible Forest:

Like a lot of heads, I first encountered the Finish wizard Antero Alli through his playful, prophetic, and handy books. If you are looking for a real-deal reality programming manual with just the right amount of Discordian spice, you can hardly do better than his classic debut, AngelTech. […] I’ve seen most of Alli’s movies, and they keep getting better. The Invisible Forest, Alli’s latest, is the strongest yet,

Full Story: Techngnosis

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There’s a new psychedelic blog called “Psychedelic Research”. It’s author is Matthew Baggott who is a graduate student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley and a research associate at California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute.

His reasons for starting the blog:

“This is a blog to track research and events relating to the scientific study of hallucinogens and consciousness. I hope that documenting my readings here will be interesting or even helpful to others. My writing goals with this blog are relatively modest: I primarily aim to provide abstracts from papers, linking to them whenever possible, with occasional brief comments about what interests me.

Most hallucinogen research still takes place with a pharmacology context. But increasingly, people are using research tools from other domains, such as neuroscience. As a result, I think our understanding of hallucinogens and human consciousness may both be improved. Although science has yet to fully realize this promise, there are many studies that contain gems of insight. Hopefully this blog can help reveal these gems.”

(Psychedelic Research. h/t: Drug Monkey)

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Legions of science-fiction authors have imagined a future that includes mind-reading technology. Although the ability to play back memories like a movie remains a distant dream, a new study has taken a provocative step in that direction by decoding neural signals for images.

Neuroscientist Kendrick Kay and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, were able to successfully determine which of a large group of never-before-seen photographs a subject was viewing based purely on functional MRI data. By analyzing fMRI scans of viewers as they looked at thousands of images, Kay’s team created a computer model that uses picture elements such as angles and brightness to predict the neural activity elicited by a novel black-and-white photograph. Then the researchers scanned subjects while showing them new snapshots. Most of the time Kay’s model could single out which image the subject was viewing by matching its prediction of brain activity to the actual activity measured by the fMRI scanner, although very similar pictures tended to baffle the program.

Full Story: Scientific American

(via Tomorrow Museum)

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Originally from High Times

What we were doing was not science - it was magic. We thought we were doing science but we didn’t know anything about science at the time. We set up what we called an experiment, but what we should have really called a ritual. Honestly it was a ritual but we had the idea that if we took a large dose of mushrooms, along with ayahuasca and heard this sound, that we could generate this standing wave form and that we could actually transfer that into the body of a mushroom in a stable way so that it would be outside the body and it would be sustained by it’s own superconducting circuitry, and you would be able to see it and be it at the same time. It would be, in a sense, an artifact from beyond that you generate out of your own head. It would be a super, transbiological artifact, translinguistic matter that would be meaning itself fixed into a biological matrix.

RAK> And do you think it succeeded, the experiment?

DENNIS> (hesitates)… No… (laughs) No, not exactly… What we were trying to do, essentially, if I can harken back to the basis of this in myth and history, I mean the closest analogy to it is the Philosopher’s Stone. We were trying to recreate the Philosopher’s Stone, which in some ways is the ultimate artifact. That thing that exists and is both mind and matter and responds to thought and is you and can do anything you can imagine, literally, anything you can imagine.

Full Story: Undergrowth

Dennis McKenna will be keynoting Esozone: the Other Tomorrow in Portland, OR this October.

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Documentary from Gnostic Media

How deep does the rabbit hole go? Gnostic Media is proud to present the official online edition of The Pharmacratic Inquisition 2007. If you enjoyed “Zeitgeist - The Movie”, you will love this video; the creators of this video are listed as one of the sources for the Zeitgeist Movie. The Pharmacratic Inquisition 2007 is a video version of the book, “Astrotheology & Shamanism” by Jan Irvin & Andrew Rutajit. The painstakingly detailed and heavily footnoted research in the book comes to life in this video and is now available to you for FREE! For further research of the claims made in this video, please read AstroTheology & Shamanism - this book is available to order as a combo with the DVD. Thousands of years ago, in the pre monarchic era, sacred plants and other entheogenic substances where politically correct and highly respected for their ability to bring forth the divine, Yahweh, God, The Great Spirit, etc., by the many cultures who used them. Often the entire tribe or community would partake in the entheogenic rites and rituals. These rites were often used in initiation into adulthood, for healing, to help guide the community in the decision process, and to bring the direct religious experience to anyone seeking it. In the pre literate world, the knowledge of psychedelic sacraments, as well as fertility rites and astronomical knowledge surrounding the sun, stars, and zodiac, known as astrotheology, were anthropomorphized into a character or a deity; consequently, their stories and practices could easily be passed down for generations. Weather changes over millenniums caused environmental changes that altered the available foods and plant sacraments available in the local vicinity. If a tribe lost its shamanic El-der (El - God), all of the tribe’s knowledge of their plant sacraments as well as astronomical knowledge would be lost. The Church’s inquisitions extracted this sacred knowledge from the local Shamans who were then exterminated…It is time to recognize the fact that this Pharmacratic Inquisition is still intact and destroy it.

(via Dedroidify)

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Sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals.

The ingredients of desire may differ for men and women, but researchers have revealed some surprising similarities. For example, visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women, as they do in men.

Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females.

Full Story: Scientific American

(Thanks Bill!)

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