I guess this can be thought of as what the components of your thoughts look like as they move around in your head.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-video-traffic-brain-cell.html

The research itself can be found here:

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(12)00157-X

To get a better grasp of what's going down on a molecular level, there's an explanation of the kind of mechanism about 3 minutes 2 seconds in on this video:



For comparasion, in plants, the same function. It's pretty much the same across most cells with a cytoskeleton, as far as I understand. Easily one of the most beautiful things I've come to appreciate.

"We exist in a bizzare combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval buereacracy, and god-like technology." — Edward O. Wilson, 2008 (author of On Human Nature)

I like how the person who told me the quote told me from memory that it was 'Bureaucracy' rather than 'Beliefs', as he recalled it from falsified memory. I think of this mistake actually as a more accurate evolution of the idea 'epigenetically' (epimimetically?) evolved from the environment change towards the age of what comes when the world is filled with digital natives. I looked up the quote to see who it was from in order to find this discrepancy out, as a case in point. I'm guessing the average user base of this site has been using the internet for about as long (~10 years or so, again on guessed average? I've been online since 1997, and I've been around for about 22 years) — Can you relate? Will us who understand that we may well have an imperative to work upon bringing bureaucracy and emotion up to speed with technology allow the others who don't get it yet to understand in time, before things become much more awful for most?

We've got a lot of technologies which need upgrading which aren't keeping in pace with the development of information technology. I personally feel the main mostly technological ones are the monetary, judicial and governmental systems (Although I might have more clearly in mind at some point in the future). I think that a big part of the problems with these systems is that they are still driven by emotional and bureaucratic engines.

“There are no political solutions, only technological ones; the rest is propaganda.” — Jacques Ellul

It's time to accelerate to process of moving away from everything that does nothing optimal for the freedom to understand this world. The institutions of supposed education which teach most children to be aversive to learning, that which creates an environment of suffocation of knowledge all for the gains of people who did NOTHING to come up with much of the knowledge itself, is about to be outmoded. It's on due time that we are starting on the strength towards obsolescing it with something much brighter, that teaches people to love knowing more, that encourages critical thinking, against absolutism and towards a higher multiplicity of perspectives weighed out thoughtfully, and a hyperspatial flight into the FREEDOM TO UNDERSTAND CLEARLY. We have so much potential with our technology to invent a future where we can go much further with the constant process of justly unveiling truth, to inspire mindfulness which ceases the clouding of judgement, and to carry us out of the plague of ignorance that is destroying the lives of so many beings on this planet. The entelechy of these things is just beginning to show its luminosity, and it involves the efforts of all of us to make it even brighter.

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most
have previously only been made available at high prices through
paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

(If the torrent isn't working for you try here: http://www.btghost.com/link2/89818739/  )

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110721/11122615195/aaron-swartz-indictment-leading-people-to-upload-jstor-research-to-file-sharing-sites.shtml

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/09/guerilla-oa.html

http://www.cd3wd.com/cd3wd/index.htm

Enjoy!

On the heels of the last voyage of the Atlantis...



(source unknown, would like to verify this thing if anyone knows more about it)

 http://tauday.com/ 

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth’s atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. —Marshall McLuhan

(For those who didn't hear yet, Microsoft bought Skype...)

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20110153809.PGNR.&OS=DN/20110153809RS=DN/20110153809

Alternatives:

http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

http://www.jabber.org

http://www.gnutelephony.org/index.php/GNU_Telephony

http://zfoneproject.com/

http://www.freeswitch.org/node/105

 http://guardianproject.info/ 

Watching this a few times has gotten me thinking... Would we have issues with persecutory delusions in the first place if we didn't choose to deal with each other through superficial persecution most of the time when we don't like what someone else is doing? Would what's going on in the above video happen in a world where more constructive, proactive processes of trying to change how other people act were in place?

Not to say that there's a definite causation link between people being awful to each other and internal mental conditions that I know of, but when it comes to the mentally ill, most people tend to be awful to them. It's easy enough to pull off treating them like shit, as mentally ill people can be pretty awful to deal with, but all human interactions are a loop, and it's easy to fall into a sort of solipsist trap where people forget that some people have a harder time dealing with controlling their own thoughts. There is the difference between those who expect themselves to adapt to the world, and those who expect the world to adapt to them. When you're messed up in the head, you have trouble realizing the benefit and way of absolute personal responsibility for one's own wellbeing, but when you put it in the perspective of social workings, there's self-ascribed 'healthy' people who do directly messed up in the head things (Abuse, coercion, taking advantage of) to people who are messed up in the head. Then there's 'healthy' people doing loosely socially acceptable things where they don't tangibly understand the extended psychic effects of those things such as persecution and other such oversights, which people seem to act as if it's a consequence of natural proceses. Aldous Huxley once said that "I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself." I think that everyone should take it upon themselves to really reflect on the fact that their actions flow into feelings, which drive more actions, throughout every other human being on earth.



Mental suffering is one of those things that people got a really weak grasp on, considering the degree of metacognition required. It's also hard to truly empathize with people whose states of mind are ones that you instinctively don't want to empathize (As in feel/relate in synchrony) with. Going back to how people seem to act as if their way of acting towards other people is just an unavoidable condition of our way of socializing, I think it's worth it bringing up any other condition you could think of that many people thought was unavoidable that we've cured, or perhaps even think of some condition where they thought they knew the cure but were doing the stupidest, wrongest shit to try and cure it (Think putting holes in peoples heads to cure insanity as the above picture illustrates). I think that most people suffer from not being able to change their thoughts and behaviour, and that some people are more obviated in that regard than others. What's the difference between someone locked in thought patterns like, say, the above video, and someone who (likely more socially acceptably) gets away with spouting off a lot of persecution and judgement themselves?

The difference I'm trying to highlight here is the difference between people's ability to choose a better world. Chances are that if you aren't suffering from anxiety-related, mind-clouding disorders that you're more able to help the world become a better place, one which provokes less feelings of suffering. There's another difference, and that's the fact that 'sane' people are locked into mutual patterns of action which sort of maintain homeostasis within individuals relative to their environmental conditions. People are the environmental conditions, and favorable social workings are something that I see most of the world's population completely missing out on a lot of the time. It's easy to conceive of consciousness as a local-to-the-mind phenomenon, but when you really think about it, it's also a distributed one. If you have the capacity to, you should choose to distribute pleasant consciousness and filter out expression of vexation to the best of your ability. Feels good when you get the hang of it, and hopefully it sparks the fire of good feelings in those who have major trouble with attaining them.

I'll end this with a snippet of an interview of Dr. Gabor Mate I found while in the process of writing this post, who seems to have a good lot more insight and experience with this matter than I do:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the people you treat.
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, the hardcore drug addicts that I treat, but according to all studies in the States, as well, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. And the commonality is childhood abuse. In other words, these people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development, they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again.
And that’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.
AMY GOODMAN: What does the title of your book mean, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts?
DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, it’s a Buddhist phrase. In the Buddhists’ psychology, there are a number of realms that human beings cycle through, all of us. One is the human realm, which is our ordinary selves. The hell realm is that of unbearable rage, fear, you know, these emotions that are difficult to handle. The animal realm is our instincts and our id and our passions.
Now, the hungry ghost realm, the creatures in it are depicted as people with large empty bellies, small mouths and scrawny thin necks. They can never get enough satisfaction. They can never fill their bellies. They’re always hungry, always empty, always seeking it from the outside. That speaks to a part of us that I have and everybody in our society has, where we want satisfaction from the outside, where we’re empty, where we want to be soothed by something in the short term, but we can never feel that or fulfill that insatiety from the outside. The addicts are in that realm all the time. Most of us are in that realm some of the time. And my point really is, is that there’s no clear distinction between the identified addict and the rest of us. There’s just a continuum in which we all may be found. They’re on it, because they’ve suffered a lot more than most of us.

A remarkable paper just out in Nature has revealed images of the brain's structure and function in unprecedented detail: Network anatomy and in vivo physiology of visual cortical neurons.

Read more here at Neuroskeptic

The videos:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v471/n7337/abs/nature09802.html#supplementary-information

The research itself:

 http://reid.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Bock-Lee-etal-Reid-2011-Nature.pdf 

I started taking these nootropics back in February - One was citicoline, the other aniracetam. For those who are unfamiliar with nootropics, they're generally defined as drugs & supplements that you can take which are supposed to improve your memory, attention, and other cognitive functions. They are used as a current treatment and experimentally for cognitive dysfunction, primarily alzheimers and other forms of senility in the case of what I'm discussing here. Nootropics are also taken by people without any particular head issues for cognitive enhancement, such as myself.

Citicoline (Otherwise known as CDP-choline) is an intermediate in the endogenous synthesis of something called phosphatidylcholine. Phospahtidylcholine is a molecule which constitutes an important part of the outer membranes of many cells, and it makes up a good 30 percent or so of the grey matter in your brain - There is research indicating that taking citicoline may have some neurotrophic (Brain cell growing) effects (At least in rats, as far as the strictly scientific proof goes). It also has stimulant effects, and they put the stuff in some energy drinks. Citicoline potentiates biosynthesis of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brain, as well as dopamine and norepinepherine, through mechanisms which are recognized as quite safe. They're currently using it both in experiments and in current lines of treatment to help treat stimulant drug addiction, senile cognitive dysfunction, and various forms of brain damage. Check this out to learn much more about citicoline.

Aniracetam is something like a much stronger fat-soluble version of the more commonly known piracetam. It seems to work as a nootropic by modulation of the AMPA glutamate receptor. It's part of the AMPAkines, which are a class of new drugs which are under development which show some decent promise as treatments for a wide range of neurodegenerative conditions from schizophrenia to fetal alcohol syndrome, and also for relieving anxiety in animal tests. Reports indicate that aniracetam is best experienced when taken with a source of choline, which in my case was provided by citicoline, but can also come from other choline sources such as alpha-gpc or lecithin (An extract from either egg yolk or soy which is primarily composed of phosphatidylcholine).

After about a week of taking this combination, I certainly noticed some improved mental focus and energy, which is exactly what I wanted out of trying them out. What I wasn't expecting was the increased richness of sleep and vivid dreams that came out of them. Most nights of that month involved dreams which I could recall much easier, and which were highly salient. I wouldn't call these dreams quite lucid, but they definitely felt on the edge of that point. Although I'm not entirely skilled at lucid dreaming, I have experienced it before. I also fell asleep much easier at night, which was great because I've dealt with some degree of insomnia for most of my life. A month after I have stopped taking these supplements, I've still been experiencing improved sleep quality.

Further research into cholinergics led me to reading about Galantamine, and on the wikipedia page, some comment about how that could be used to facilitate lucid dreaming. Galantamine works as an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. This means that it inhibits an enzyme which breaks down acetylcholine in the brain, which increases levels of that neurotransmitter. While the link has changed over time to some broken stuff a couple of times over the past month or so, I was really intrigued, so I searched up the broken link and found these informal studies on the induction of lucid dreams using pharmacological means:

http://lucidconsciousness.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/Pharmacological-Induction-of-Lucid-Dreams.pdf or view in your browser with google reader

http://dreamslucid.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/substances_that_facilitate_lucid_dreaming_-_a_case_study.pdf or view in your browser with google reader

It seems that citicoline is mentioned as a potential supplement which can aid lucidity when combined with a deep sleep suppressing substance. I'd like to try this at some point in the near future, and I expect to report on whether or not it's successful at some point. I also am interested in the more recent understandings of dreams as important in the formation of memories. My experiences with lucid dreaming and similar states of mind have been amazing. One of these experiences I'll share: Between awake and asleep, I was in a sort of sleep paralysis mode, and I was somehow perceiving what I've only really understood as through other people's perspectives, jumping from perspective to perspective - This accelerated faster and faster until a point where all was light, and all was bliss. I felt more euphoric than I've ever felt before in my life, feeling like I was experiencing everything and everywhere at once all within the confines of my own mind. I woke up from the experience out of total surprise, still feeling extremely euphoric. I count that time as one of the most amazing experiences of my life, and it helped to lead me towards understandings around the lines of this quote:

"If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else." — Joseph Campbell

I would love to see some proper scientific research towards lucid dream induction techniques which may be able to reach a much wider amount of people who wouldn't otherwise bother with the degree of effort required to experience lucid dreaming. I think that the idea of taking some generally harmless supplements which advance not only waking cognition but spiritual development during sleep is something truly wonderful and worth more popular consideration. What I feel is that we're possibly on the cusp of a lucid dreaming explosion if these methods become perfected and more widely known. The cultural precedent is already set, I think a good example are the movies "Inception" and "Limitless"... Perhaps our lives have the potential to become something between the two!

A bit of further reading:

http://dreamstudies.org/galantamine-review-lucid-dreaming-pill/

(disclaimer: Do your own research on the risks of taking these supplements I've mentioned if you are interested in trying them as well, please, as there are some indications with certain health conditions - Citicoline especially if you suffer from major depression or type II diabetes. They're all safe enough to be found on amazon.com but if you search on http://google.com/products  you should be able to find a much better deal, this stuff isn't extremely expensive yet!)