Mid-afternoon. You had a late lunch at
Cracker Barrel and are now at Kroger's on Tylersville; Carol is buying fruits
for the salad she is making for tomorrow's picnic at Sharon Woods in
Westerville. You think fourteen or so people are showing up, family mostly, as
a welcome for the visit for Sharon and Cory and their two kids. Main course: a
twenty-piece bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Afterwards Kim and Paul and the
boys are taking you and Carol to where the model of 3 Pillar house they are
going to build is under construction east of Westerville. Then, from there you
are coming home. It'll be a busy day. - Amorella
1446
hours. Mostly fun, I hope.
This morning you were in and out of bed
until noon (after taking a prescribed pain pill) with your left knee acting up
from the near forty-nine degree overnight (with the windows open; which the
cats loved), and also other joints added to the chorus, particularly in the
fingers. Carol got on the heating pad that you did not want to use but later
admitted that it did help, particularly with the fingers joints on both hands.
You hate to admit that when it comes to what's good for you Carol is most often
correct. - Amorella.
You keep thinking about David yesterday and
that while the girls were talking away you and he looked into each other's eyes
and broke into broad smiles (David rarely breaks into a smile). The connection,
of course was how quiet you two were and how chatty the women. Dave's smile
meant a lot to you, made your day, that's the fact; it was that kind of
spontaneous connection between two old friends first, cousins second. -
Amorella
1458 hours. The first memory of playing with Dave Short was when we
were five and we both had sleds sliding down the hill as Westerville's Alum
Creek Park just west of the Otterbein College campus. We lived on West Park
Street and David and his older sister Charlene's family lived beyond the
railroad tracks on East Park. I don't think my sister Cathy was born yet. Anyway,
David and I slid down the hill (to the left of the hillside of wood benches) on
separate sleds and he hit the park's stone structure base of an audio dome/theatre
used mostly for musicians and skits as part of park entertainment. He got
knocked out and had to have several stitches as I remember it. Otherwise we had
a good time that winter day.
Later. Carol is on the phone with Alta and you decided to check your new headphones only to find Jadah had
chewed through one of the wires.
1715 hours. It was my fault I shouldn't have left them out on the
stool because she goes there to sit. This is the downside, the upside is that
earlier I was rooting through the travel bag I had used to go to Kim and Paul's
and discovered a hundred and eighty dollars I had squirreled away in one of the
pockets who knows when.
If you buy new headphones you will still be
up eighty dollars you didn't know you had, boy, and Tim King said he was pretty
sure he could find someone to take your home gym for free and if so, you will
have saved the hundred dollars it was going to take you to have College Hunks
Haul Junk to take the gym to Goodwill.
- Amorella
You win some, and you lose some. I guess I'll more than break-even.
You come into the world naked and you go out
pretty much the same; breaking even sounds pretty good in the whole run of
things. - Amorella
That's what Socrates was thinking when he asked his friend to pay his debt for
him. He was a first rate philosopher, that's what I think, as were many of his
students.
How do you rate yourself as a philosopher,
boy? - Amorella
** **
philosopher - noun
when I was young, I failed to
appreciate what an insightful philosopher my father was:
thinker,
theorist, theorizer, theoretician, metaphysicist,
metaphysician; scholar, intellectual,
sage, wise man.
From Oxford-American software
** **
I
don't know.
Do you think any philosopher would
want to be rated thusly; first rate, second rate, third rate, etc.? - Amorella
No, I don't.
After a supper of cold cereal and a banana with peanut butter on it,
you both watched the second episode of "Broadchurch" on BBC after
seeing the first episode a couple of days ago, then last Sunday's
"Crossing Lines". - Amorella
Doug sent me a not on this a day or so ago and some scientists are
already giving another explanation for what was found, but I think it is
interesting anyway. One never knows these things until death, so far, but one
day we living will know even more on the subject of post death consciousness
given advances in the machinery to observe such phenomena.
** **
Possible
Hints of Consciousness After Death Found in Rats
BY BRANDON KEIM08.12.133:30 PM
For a brief time after their
hearts stop beating, electrical activity that some scientists have linked to
consciousness in humans continues in the brains of rats — a finding that could
shed light on reports of near-death experiences in humans, and opens new
possibilities for studying consciousness.
“People have just assumed that,
after the heart stops, when the brain has very little oxygen or glucose, then
the brain should not function,” said neurophysiologist Jimo Borjigin of the
University of Michigan, leader of an experiment described August 12 in Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences. Higher brain function may require less
oxygen and energy than many scientists had thought, Borjigin said.
Borjigin’s team implanted
electrodes on the surface of the brains of nine rats, then injected the animals
with potassium chloride, causing their hearts to stop beating and blood to stop
flowing. This is the clinical definition of death.
At this point, or shortly
after, neurological activity is supposed to cease. Yet for up to 30 seconds,
the researchers’ electrodes detected patterns of synchronized, high-frequency
activity known as gamma waves. In humans, some scientists have suggested that
gamma waves could play a role in the interplay of perception, awareness, and
intent known as consciousness.
In earlier rat research, Borjigin
observed a sudden release of neurotransmitters at the moment of death. If what
they’ve seen in rats has human analogues, said Borjigin, the combination of
neurochemical surge and continued electrical activity could be involved in
near-death experiences, in which people report continuing perceptions for
minutes after their hearts have stopped.
“By presenting evidence of
highly organized brain activity and neurophysiologic features consistent with
conscious processing at near-death, we now provide a scientific framework to
begin to explain the highly lucid and realer-than-real mental experiences
reported by near-death survivors,” wrote Borjigin’s team.
Of course, it’s impossible to
know what their nine rats experienced. Whether they saw a rodent version of the
light, so to speak, and whether similar neurological mechanisms exist in
humans, remains unknown.
Critical care physician Sam Parnia
of Stony Brook University, who leads the Human Consciousness Project’s AWARE
study, which documents after-death experiences in hospitals across North
America and Europe, stressed the uncertainties.
Parnia said
the study is “very interesting and raises many questions,” but said the
assumption that these patterns exist in humans and might explain near-death
experiences “is extremely presumptive and unsupported by evidence.”
Some people
who’ve been resuscitated after dying have described seeing and hearing events
that occurred tens of minutes after their heart stopped, said Parnia.
Electrical activity in Borjigin’s rats didn’t last longer than 30 seconds. The
types of signals her group recorded also haven’t been detected in human
patients monitored as they died.
According to
Borgijin, that’s likely because the signals are relatively weak, and the
electroencephalograph machines used to detect brain activity in patients aren’t
as sensitive because they take readings from their scalps, not directly from
brain tissue.
In future
studies, it might be possible to revive cardiac-arrested rats and see whether
they recall some stimulus presented after they died, but while brain activity
continued, said Borjigin. It may also be possible to obtain more sensitive
recordings of human patients going into cardiac arrest, then ask what they’ve
seen if they recover.
Yet to Borjigin,
questions the study raises about near-death experiences are less interesting
than questions about the nature of consciousness itself, and whether it
actually requires far less oxygen and energy than previously thought.
If the rats
are truly aware after death, the experiment could offer a methodology for
testing questions about consciousness. Researchers could, for example, give
rats a drug that blocks a particular protein’s activity, then see whether
after-death neurological activity is affected.
That might
ultimately provide insights into the biological mechanisms of consciousness,
which remains difficult to explain in neurological terms. “Techniques like the
ones we used in this study point us in directions to study,” said Borjigin.
“There’s still so much we don’t know.”
Citation: “Surge of
neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain.” By Jimo
Borjigin, UnCheol Leed, Tiecheng Liu, Dinesh Pal, Sean Huff, Daniel Klarr,
Jennifer Sloboda, Jason Hernandez, Michael M. Wang, and George A. Mashour.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 12 August 2013.
Edited from
- wired.dot.com/wiredscience/2013/08/after-death-cosciousness-rats/
** **
I was reading Discover online and find this really interesting
as it has to do with the Dead.
**
**
Fire in the Mind [Blog]
How Many People Ever Lived"
By George Johnson | August 11, 2013 7:58 pm
While I was writing The
Cancer Chronicles, I came to a point, early on, where I wondered how many
people had ever been alive in the world. The best answer I could find came from
a study by an organization called the Population Reference Bureau: 108
billion.
I was stunned by the
magnitude of the number. It is still common to hear that more people are alive
today than have ever lived. Or an even more extreme claim: that 75 percent of
everyone who ever walked the earth is living today. But that is not even close
to being correct. By the Population Reference Bureau’s reckoning, the
proportion of living to dead is only about 6 percent.
The author of the study, Carl
Haub, describes the assumptions that went into his calculations. Modern homo
sapiens is widely believed to have made its appearance around 50,000 B.C.,
so that was year zero for his count.
As more people began to move from a
nomadic existence as hunter-gatherers to a more sedentary life as farmers, the
world population grew at an increasing pace. There is actually a specialty called
paleodemography, and Haub drew on various estimates to come up with a
population of around 5 million in 8,000 B.C.
By 1 A.D. experts estimate that
there were at least 45 million people in the Roman Empire. Extrapolating upward,
Haub put the world population back then at roughly 300 million. Based on
various assumptions about birth rate and the impact of infant mortality,
infanticide, and the Black Death, it took until 1650 for the number to reach
half a billion, surpassing 1 billion only in the 19th century. Today the
population is 7.1 billion and rising, but the total accumulation of people,
living and dead, has reached 108 billion.
Edited from - blogs.discovermagazine.dot.com/fire-in-the-mind
** **
What
intrigues you about both stories is that people are interested more in what
happens after death than whether aliens exist. In fact the inference in the
first story present is that it is more likely that we might survive death than
it is likely we will ever be visited by an alien species with higher
consciousness. Thus, in the storyline of Great Merlyn's Ghost the chance of
meeting alien consciousness will be greater in post death consciousness. At
least this is how it seems to you, so you justify the plausibility (though very
far out) that as Merlyn is presented as one of the Dead, then it is he who 'knows
of the marsupial-humanoid aliens in his dream stories. - Amorella
2214 hours. This is a 'pretty far out rationalization' but it did
strike my mind. Anyway, it is fiction and the rationalization allows me to feel
better about it as at least a delusion of probability so can continue to work
on the project with an added layer of dark humor, which is all I need really,
humor.
One of these days we must actually write
down Brothers 21 and move on to Grandma 21. Tomorrow however will be another
busy day. Such as it is for many people in the world, even the retired, and in
here, even the Dead. Post. - Amorella
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