Is Reality an Illusion?

Is reality an illusion? This is not just a philosophical question. Here's a link to an article about a new scientific experiment, and the title says it all: "Fermilab is Building a Holometer to Determine Once and for All Whether Reality is Just an Illusion".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCJLRrFTX3Q

The above video is for Changing Reality, recently put up on youtube but accompanying a blog entry from six months ago. The Big Question is, how much are we each creating the reality we see around us, and by extension how inevitable is it? Can we change our reality by changing our attitude? Epigenetics and the increasingly effective Placebo Effect are some of the signposts I've been using to say that leading edge science supports this idea, but a century of training to the contrary still makes a number of educated people reject such ideas immediately. "The only thing that matters is matter", they say, and "people can't change reality with their thoughts".

In Just Geometry we looked at an idea from The Grand Design: Model Dependent Realism. Some are lamenting that this represents Stephen Hawking giving up on the possibility of there ever being one TOE, one Theory of Everything, because each unique frame of reference changes the rules, so to speak. Model Dependent Realism proposes that the fabric of reality contains many possibilities, and no one theory or formula is going to be able to encompass them all.

So if reality is an illusion and different frames of reference allow the possibility of different rules, are you willing to accept the implications of the following video my facebook friend Frank Samaritano recently sent to me? Or are you going to say the man in this video is a charlatan? Is it really possible for a person to set paper on fire using only the energy from their body? A century of training to the contrary will lead some people to assume that this couldn't possibly be real, but see what you think.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F3ovb2kZ9Q

Next time we'll return to the Three Becomes One concept, with an entry called Threes. Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Love and Gravity

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkq3IIxUEjQ

The universe loves you.

Your body's natural inclination is to want to heal, to want to thrive.

There are forces outside of our reality which are trying to move us towards a better future.

New age ideas? Sure. Today, let's talk about how the force of gravity and Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics could be giving us clues to how the above ideas make sense.

In my book and this blog, we've talked about the fact that physicists tell us gravity is the only force that exerts itself across the extra dimensions.

The only force. Seems like a pretty significant statement, doesn't it?

In Einstein's description of the universe, gravity is pictured as a bending of our 4D spacetime. Objects like stars bend the fabric more than you or I, and objects that are nearer to each other are more influenced by gravitational attraction than objects that are far away from each other.

But as we've discussed in entries like What's Around the Corner, the concept of "far away" takes on a whole different nature when we're talking about extra dimensions: and now that scientists at Oxford are giving support to my idea of the fifth dimension being our probability space (with The 5th Dimensional Camera Project), these ideas are moving closer to the mainstream.

The image to the right, familiar to fans of this project as coming from the original eleven minute animation, is a simple depiction of a person's fifth dimensional probability space. Chance, choice and the actions of others move us along what we think of as our 4D line of time, but we're actually twisting and turning in the dimensions above. At the quantum level, random outcomes are happening continuously, one planck frame after another, and most of those balance each other out to the point of being inconsequential at the macro level. But every time a more significant event occurs, or someone consciously chooses one path over another, all those random quantum outcomes come along for the ride as we branch off into a new 5D path. In Entangled Neurons, we looked at a fascinating new theory which connects to this: for each of us, our memories are created by these fifth-dimensional branches and cusps.

In entries like You Have a Shape and a Trajectory, we've looked at how some outcomes are more likely than others for each of us based upon our current lifepath, or "world line" as some physicists prefer to say. But what happens when we incorporate gravity into this image? If we think of the parts of our probability space that are more likely to happen, then we can start to see how the fifth dimension would be much like the general relativity image (above) of the sun - there would be a central mass of the most probable past and futures, and the fifth-dimensional fabric of reality would be warped somewhat by the gravity of those more likely versions of our universe which, as Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation tells us, are not mere theoretical constructs, but just as real as the reality you and I are currently observing.

So let's look at our three "New Age"-y statements within the context of the above ideas.

The Universe Loves You
Ultimately (as Einstein and a number of the other great minds of the twentieth century have said), the distinction between past, present, and future is meaningless. This means that our universe's basic physical laws and locked-in fine structure constant have already created a set of versions of the universe that are each part of its wavefunction of all possible outcomes. From our spacetime perspective, this means that the version of our universe that lasts the longest already exists, while the version of the universe where some science experiment goes wrong tomorrow and destroys all matter is a much tinier part of that fabric. Which version exerts more gravity? Why, the one that has greater mass within the fifth dimension. The low probability science-gone-wrong scenario may exist, but it's not the one with the greater mass because it soon ceases to be part of our 5D spacetime tree, so to speak. In that sense, the universe that lasts the longest is the one that is drawing us forward just through the weight of its existence within Everett's Many Worlds.

Your body's natural inclination is to want to heal, to want to thrive.
Likewise, the version of you or I that dies tomorrow in a car accident must exist, but exerts very little influence compared to the versions that continue. With this project, we've talked a lot about addiction and negative loops, and how so many self-help systems work because they rely only upon a person's willingness to embrace the better version of themselves that already exists. Are you doing things to yourself that you know are keeping you from getting to the healthiest, happiest version of you? Then stop! It really is that simple, you just have to say to yourself "now is the time that I make the change" and the rest can follow. Meditation, positive visualization techniques, drinking more water, eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, getting more exercise - changes like these allow you to tap into the better version of you that already exists, and the science of epigenetics confirms that these changes are real right down to the way our DNA is expressed, and what DNA patterns we pass on to our offspring.

There are forces outside of our reality which are trying to move us towards a better future.
There are information patterns within the multiverse landscape of extra dimensions that have selected our unique universe from out of the omniverse of all possible universes. In God 2.0, we looked at the work of Stuart Kauffman, founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, who has written a book called "Reinventing the Sacred" which finds ways to blend these ideas of science and spirituality together. Even well-known debunker Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic Magazine, is willing to accept this "God 2.0" concept as a definition of what created our universe!

Does a force that moves you towards the best possible version of you, that forgives your mistakes and embraces your potential sound like a description of love? Does a selection pattern that has already created a version of the universe and a version of you that grows and thrives sound like the description of a benevolent "God 2.0"? If you see this as a possibility, then you are on your way to accepting that love and extra-dimensional gravity are two ways of describing the same thing.

In blog entries like Holograms and Quanta, Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, and Gravity and Free Will, we've looked at an interesting new theory saying that gravitons (a theoretical particle which has never been observed) don't exist, and that the unique value for the strength of gravity we're experiencing here arises as a natural outcome of our position within the multiverse landscape. With today's entry, we could translate this to say that the amount of love in our universe is also something that just is, and that moving to other parts of the multiverse landscape would move you to other universes where the amount of love was lesser or greater than what we find ourselves to have in our own universe.

Can there be too much gravity? Absolutely. A universe with too much gravity would collapse back in on itself, and interesting structures couldn't be formed. Can there be too much love? Perhaps the same logic applies. Our universe has enough love to want the universe to thrive and continue, but not so much love that it removes our freedom and suffocates us.

Gravity and Love
In Gravity and Entrainment, we talked about how another New Age idea, the Law of Attraction, can also be tied into these discussions. The idea of equating love with gravity came up during my interview with Kerrace Alexander, which we posted a video for a few weeks ago. I've reposted the video again here, this time with it set to start playing from the moment where the topic came up in our interview.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2EnsWLMAr8#t=039m20s

If gravity and love are two ways of describing the same thing, then love is the only force that exerts itself across the extra dimensions. Does that thought put a smile on your face? It does for me.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS Happy fourth anniversary! On July 3rd 2006 this project suddenly became popular on the internet. The animation that started it all has been viewed millions of times on video sites like youtube and revver, and the tenth dimension website has now seen six million unique visitors and over 80 million hits. I am grateful to all the fans of this project from around the world who continue to be drawn to this exploration of the nature of reality. Next time we're going to talk about one of those fans.

Next: Rift

Placebos Becoming More Effective?

Since Imagining the Tenth Dimension began, I've talked a lot about the idea that there are patterns and shapes, fractal structures and waveforms, outside of our spacetime that contribute to the reality we are currently observing. Here's how I described it in Logic vs. Intuition:

"...our world is now starting to move away from scientific materialism (the idea that what we observe around us is all there is to reality, and that everything about our reality is logical and predictable if only we collect enough data). Instead, we're starting to move towards a more holistic paradigm. That's true as we see the growing acceptance that our universe is only one of many, that roughly 96% of our own universe is completely invisible and undetectable, that the way our genes are expressed and even which genes are passed on to our offspring is strongly connected to our attitude and lifestyle, and that our holographic universe comes from the fifth dimension, connected together outside of fourth-dimensional space-time in ways that boggle the mind".

I've also been marveling in the almost four years since this project started at the shifting sands of public opinion, as more and more people find ways to connect my way of visualizing reality to their own schools of thought. In recent blogs like You are the Point and An Expanding 4D Sphere, we arrived back at the conclusion that we are each at the center of a universe which is now continually accelerating its expansion, and in entries like Jumping Jesus and The Stream we've talked about how an acceleration is happening in our meme space just as much as it is in our physical space. There was a great editorial about this acceleration in The New York Times a few days ago, which includes this quote from Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project:

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology. College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

When you're within a system where everything is changing and accelerating, it can be hard to tell what's really happening. The child who is immersed in today's rapid-fire world of instant communication and multi-touch screen displays will grow up seeing that as the expected norm. On the other hand, a person who gradually loses their perception of color or some part of their hearing could go for a long time before they realize that their perception has changed, because the slowly modified version of their senses becomes their expected norm. Here's the tricky part: if the way we are perceiving the world is changing, and the world is changing in the same way, would there be any way for us to tell? We might each go for a long time believing that nothing has changed at all! What we need, then, is some way to gain an objective viewpoint that is outside of our own perception.

My old friend John recently sent me a link to the following article from a few months back in Wired Magazine (thank John, I can't believe I missed this!). The name of the article is "Placebos and Getting More Effective. Drugmakers are Desperate to Know Why". This article, written by Steve Silberman, really is worth reading in its entirety, and I invite you to do so. It begins with a story about pharmaceutical giant Merck, which in 2002 was falling behind its rivals in sales, and planned to regain their status with a new antidepressant codenamed MK-869:

The drug tested brilliantly early on, with minimal side effects, and Merck touted its game-changing potential at a meeting of 300 securities analysts.

Behind the scenes, however, MK-869 was starting to unravel. True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or another inert substance given to groups of volunteers in clinical trials to gauge how much more effective the real drug is by comparison. The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people's health—the so-called placebo effect—has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology.

MK-869 wasn't the only highly anticipated medical breakthrough to be undone in recent years by the placebo effect. From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

Okay, you might be thinking, maybe the reason these new drugs aren't working so well in tests is because we've hit some kind of limit in what can be done with pharmaceuticals? Here's where things get really interesting: some older drugs that were previously proven effective and used for successful treatment are also now faring less well when compared to placebos! The article continues:

Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

What do you think? Does the information that the placebo effect is now twice as strong as it was roughly twenty-five years ago not sound like a strong indication that something fundamental about our world (or our interface with the world!) is changing? I would say that as people have become more connected to each other, we are now seeing a new force come into play: more and more of us are gradually waking up to the possibilities. The hard determinists who say we each have no control over our future are being overtaken, and a child born today will assume that people have always had a substantial amount of control over their health and their future: certainly, much more than people raised in the twentieth century were taught to believe was possible. The Wired article has many more fascinating tangents, then concludes with this powerful paragraph:

Ironically, Big Pharma's attempt to dominate the central nervous system has ended up revealing how powerful the brain really is. The placebo response doesn't care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapist, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better. That's potent medicine.

Indeed! In Do Animals Have Souls, I described the old way of thinking this way: "the only thing that matters is matter, and consciousness has no part in the universe we are observing". Why was that viewpoint promoted so aggressively for so many years?

Do you remember the article I published in the North American version of Urban Garden Magazine last year, called "Why the Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea"?. In it, I suggested that it seemed very strange that scientists like Einstein embraced the idea that our reality is defined at the fifth dimension almost a century ago, and yet most of the general public are not familiar with this concept. Could there have been reasons why certain factions would rather we not know just how much power we all really have, and could this be connected to the knowledge that we are navigating within a fifth-dimensional probability space rather than a linear fourth-dimensional "line of time"?

Coming Soon
I'm pleased to tell you that the next issue of Urban Garden magazine will have another article I've written, this one also connects the fifth dimension to the some of the ideas we're talking about in this entry, and in other past entries such as Placebos and Nocebos and Now vs. the Future. The article will be called "Placebos and Nocebos".

Ever hear of the Global Consciousness Experiment? It was a study run by Princeton University which looked for correlations on people's ability to predict what random number would be generated, and discovered that these abilities rose slightly on days when events captured the attention of larger parts of the world population, such as September 11 2001. It also showed that this ability to predict a random number was slowly rising over the course of the study, from 1998 to 2002. More evidence that our awareness and our interface with reality is changing?

In entries like The Long Undulating Snake, What's Around the Corner and Consciousness in Frames Per Second we've looked at other ways of fitting these ideas into my approach to visualizing the dimensions that our reality springs from. There is a beautiful and complex interaction between the observer and the observed happening here, and we can see evidence of that interplay in many surprising ways. We're going to continue this discussion with an upcoming entry called Monkeys Love Metallica.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

P.S. - I should also mention that New Scientist magazine published an article a few months ago called "Placebo Effect Caught in the Act" in which it described how scientists were actually able to track how the brain responded differently to pain when a patient was told a painkiller had been administered but it was really a placebo: more evidence of the amount of power our minds have over the reality we're observing.

Next: Dark Flow

The Long Undulating Snake

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKNJmrdA0Fg

(an amusing shot from the parody of Imagining the Tenth Dimension created by
CollegeHumor.com that we looked at last time, in "Ice Age in 4D")

One of the more well-known phrases from my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation is that when each of us thinks of ourselves as a shape in the fourth spatial dimension, we're more like a long undulating snake, a shape with a beginning, a middle and an end. I've talked before about futurist and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling who refers to this kind of fourth-dimensional information-set as a spime, and that's really the same concept.

In Suffering in the Multiverse, we took an extreme look at all of the universes that could be out there - not just in the parallel universes that result from chance and choice as per the proof published in 2007 by a team of scientists at Oxford under the direction of physicist David Deutsch, equating the quantum wave function with the different versions of our universe that result from chance and choice... but also in the multiverse landscape of all the 10 to the power of 500 potential universes that scientists like Brian Greene (who we just quoted in Does the Multiverse Really Exist?) are now beginning to say are just as real as the universe we find ourselves to be living within.

Then, in The Biocentric Universe Part 2, we looked at an amazing theory that shows how life creates time and the universe, and not the other way around. Does that sound crazy? Not when we think of ourselves from within the fifth dimension rather than the fourth.

Let's look at that "long undulating snake" visualization of ourselves within the fourth dimension. When you die, there will be one version of that shape which will represent the life you experienced from conception to death. But right now you are some place within that 4D shape, and there are many branches that lie before you. Those branches come from the fifth dimension, the dimension that Kaluza proved to Einstein is where our universe is defined, the dimension which the Holographic Universe theory says our universe is just a shadow of, the dimension where my project insists the "spooky" non-local nature of quantum mechanics makes sense when we realize that our 4D "line of time" is not continuous, because it's actually being created one planck frame at a time as our universe twists, turns and folds within our fifth dimensional probability space.

So, here you are at this very instant, someplace within that 4D shape. You can imagine that you have one long "tail" stretching from "now" back to conception, and then a "ray" of possible futures in the fifth dimension, making your shape more like a dandelion gone to seed than a "snake".

But it turns out that that's only half the story. As we've explored in blogs like The Past is an Illusion and Time in Either Direction, there are also an equally complex number of ways that you could have gotten to the "now" you're in at this instant, so in the fifth dimension you are really more like the very centre of the head of that dandelion gone to seed, forgetting about the stalk - there are branching, probabilistic versions of you that extend out into the past just as much as into the future.

Some people call this idea mind-blowing, I prefer to call it liberating. By understanding just how much freedom we each have at any particular "now" to navigate out of traps and negative loops, and visualizing the best-possible-versions of ourselves that already exist within the fifth dimension, we can head towards those goals. Think of the scientific evidence concerning the effectiveness of placebos and nocebos, and the burgeoning science of epigenetics (which shows that changes in attitude and lifestyle can change which genes are switched on or off): when you add those ideas in you can see just how intimately we are each involved in choosing one set of branches over another as we travel through our lives. This is not just about entering one parallel universe or another depending on whether I slept in an extra ten minutes this morning or not: this is about being fully engaged with the beautiful possibilities we have before us.

By understanding that the past is just as complex a structure as the future, we can start to visualize how such amazing theories as Lanza and Berman's Biocentric Universe make more sense - but all of this doesn't really start to gel until we start to imagine this "dandelion gone to seed" imagery from an even higher extra dimension, where all of those possible branches exist as a single point.

Then, finally, we've reached the purest expression of the concept that Einstein was thinking about when he said there is ultimately no distinction, no separation, between past, present and future.

But what about the law of the conservation of energy? How can there be all of these different versions of our universe without running out of energy? That law still stands: there is a certain total amount of energy within a particular version of each dimension, and that's one of the things that physicists use to calculate the amount of dark matter and dark energy that is affecting our particular universe. But each additional dimension multiplies the possibilities for the way that energy can be expressed. There are not nearly as many possible expressions of energy for our imaginary 2D flatlander as there are for us in the third dimension, for instance. And I really love the concept of digital physics because it tells us that ultimately, our reality is not based upon energy, but information. As MIT professor and quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd says in his mind-expanding book "Programming the Universe":

"The conventional history of the universe pays great attention to energy: How much is there? Where is it? What is it doing? By contrast, in the story of the universe told in this book, the primary actor in the physical history of the universe is information. Ultimately, information and energy play complimentary roles in the universe: Energy makes physical systems do things. Information tells them what to do."

Information equals reality. And that long undulating snake imagery is really just another way of trying to get people to think about reality as information, because that is a liberating approach with far-reaching implications.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Flexi-Laws of Physics

Edit: The above blog entry was published in 2009. Here's a great entry published by physicist Sean Carroll in 2010 that gives a good explanation of how the laws of conservation of energy only apply locally. As our spacetime expands, so does the amount of available energy: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/

Polls Archive 40 - Now vs. the Future

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khTlSGfZWiU

Poll 40: "People who focus on the "now" rather than their possible future paths are more likely to be moody, indecisive, and envious." Poll ended May 26 2009. 45% agreed while the majority disagreed.

A number of visitors to the blog had some trouble accepting this supposition, which relates to a specific entry I published last month called "The Time Paradox". In it, I talked about a book of the same name by Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University. In a promotional video for his book he tells us that tests given to children showed a clear link years later to which of them were more successful and well-adjusted as they entered adulthood: four-year-olds were offered the choice of a marshmallow right now, or two marshmallows if they were willing to wait for twenty minutes. Those children who jumped at the single marshmallow rather than thinking about the greater future reward coming if they would wait, to use Dr. Zimbardo's words, grew into young adults who were more likely to be "moody, indecisive, and envious". Those who did wait went on as adolescents to score an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and to be much more likely to be rated by independent examiners as "competent" or "attentive", while those who were not able to delay gratification were more likely to be described as "sulky" or "irritable".

As I mentioned in my previous blog about the Time Paradox, the difficulty some people have in accepting these results may be connected to the current popularity of Ekhart Tolle's writing: The Power of Now, he tells us, is better than the ego-based striving for tomorrow and fretting about the past. Sometimes, though, living in the Now is living in a trap of endlessly repeating negative patterns, and that is not the way to make your life better. Who would disagree that "attitude affects outcome"? What psychiatrist would disagree that healing can't really start until it comes from within? What entrepeneur would disagree that "the eye of the tiger" is how you get to the future version of yourself that you hold as your heart's desire? What athlete would disagree with the power of positive visualization techniques? What health care provider has not seen people who lose their interest in tomorrow, their will to carry on, and death follows?

All of these are related to the processes of engaging not just in the "now", but in the branching future paths that exist as potential for each of us. In The Placebo Effect I talked about the surprising results of medical studies showing how difficult it can be to test new drugs when patients given placebos will also do better because of their assumption that they are being given some new treatment. In Changing Your Genes Part 2 I talked about the amazing new science of epigenetics, which proves that people can actually change their own gene expression through changes in lifestyle and attitude. And in Creativity and the Quantum Universe, I talked about how this "engaging in the future paths" concept has been proved to be basic to our universe and to the basic structures of all living things.

And where are all these future paths that hold this amazing promise, these powerful tools that people around the world are using to moving beyond a "now" that is not to their liking and to a possible "then" that exists within their set of all possible future states? According to my way of visualizing, this is all within the fifth dimension, within a probability space that connects to Everett's Many Worlds and the hidden patterns of the universe, and which each of us are navigating within one planck after another right at this very "now".

Welcome to a better future you. And enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: A compilation of Polls 31 to 40

The Biocentric Universe

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4S9hAkGbyY


(Edit - I talk about this more a couple of months later in The Biocentric Universe Part 2)

above image is from the Discover article "The Biocentric Universe", credited to NASA/ESA/A. Schaller (for STScI)

Two blogs ago, we talked about "Evolution's Fast Lane". Last blog we discussed "Does the Multiverse Really Exist?". This time let's tie those ideas together.

My friend Chuck Salyers has been encouraging me to learn more about Dr. Bruce Lipton, so I'm now waiting for my order to arrive from Amazon: an audio book called Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future and How to Get There From Here. Bruce Lipton's body of work, including his popular book The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles seems to be saying many of the same things I have about our role as quantum observers, the new science of epigenetics, and understanding that we have much more control over our reality than we've been led to believe: which is not to say that I can use my free will to make my skin dark and not have to worry about sunburns, but it is to say that there is not just one inevitable path that each of us and the entire universe are moving upon.

Here's what Dr. Lipton's website says about his work:

The new sciences quantum physics and epigenetics are revolutionizing our understanding of the link between mind and matter, challenging established scientific theories and prompting a complete re-evaluation of life as we have known it.

One of the shining lights to emerge from these new sciences is cellular biologist and best selling author, Bruce Lipton PhD, whose book, The Biology of Belief, was awarded 2006’s Best Science Book of the Year.

Lipton maintains that pivotal to this shift in thinking within the scientific community has been groundbreaking insight into the function of genes.

But wait, you might be thinking, isn't epigenetics only about how an individual can better manage the genetic hand of cards they've been dealt? What does that have to do with evolution? Here's the answer, found in an article published last week in Science News, which talks about the concept of epigenetic inheritance. Not only can modifying your lifestyle change how your own genes are expressed, this can also change what genes you pass on to your offspring!

Where does all this lead us? There was an article published in Discover Magazine this month that takes the question of "how much control do we have over our reality" to a fantastic conclusion: here's a link to the article called "The Biocentric Universe Theory: How Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos." Let me quote from the article, which was written by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman:

Biocentrism holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. This is an explanation for and extension of the participatory anthropic principle described by the physicist John Wheeler, a disciple of Einstein’s who coined the terms wormhole and black hole.

Even the most fundamental elements of physical reality, space and time, strongly support a biocentric basis for the cosmos.

According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, note that all of their working models, from Isaac Newton’s laws through quantum mechanics, do not actually describe the nature of time. The real point is that no actual entity of time is needed, nor does it play a role in any of their equations. When they speak of time, they inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time.

I've talked about similar ideas with my project, with entries like The Flipbook Universe, The Past is an Illusion, Google and the Group Mind, and The Big Bang and the Big Pie: if we are to accept the idea of "reverse fine-tuning" of past conditions (and many quantum physicists do), this requires us to adopt a timeless perspective, which means that as we visualize the multiverse we are "outside" of space-time, in a place where "the distinction between past, present and future is meaningless" (one of Einstein's often-quoted phrases). Biocentrism takes these ideas to an extreme, but if physicists like Seth Lloyd and Anton Zeilinger are correct when they say that Information Equals Reality, then what are we really talking about here? Each of us is navigating through a data set that already exists, as we just discussed in "Does the Multiverse Really Exist?". In entries like Your Fifth-Dimensional Self and in my book, I've talked about how this means there is already a "best possible you" that exists within the multiverse, and recognizing how you are already connected to that version of you is a way to help yourself get there. This will also be the subject of my next entry, "Now vs. the Future".

One of my most popular videos over at YouTube shows another way of visualizing the data that we're moving through, one planck length at a time as we select from our fifth dimensional probability space. As Brian Greene says in the New Scientist article we discussed last time, How to Map the Multiverse, ultimately what we are talking about is like a landscape of different universes that are all just as real as the one we find ourselves to be in. Here's that YouTube video, it's called "Imagining the Omniverse".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6D3CgF8_qk

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top Ten Blogs, May '09 Report

Evolution's Fast Lane

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE0D-ZPcMhI

Here's a link to an article published on the National Geographic website a couple of days ago about the "Missing Link" fossil discovery - Darwinius masillae, a 47 million year old lemur-like skeleton with primate-like characteristics. The term "missing link" is often mistakenly used to describe some kind of half-man/half-monkey, as if humans had evolved from apes. This fossil shows a much clearer indication of what a "missing link" really is: apes evolved from a creature like this one, and humans evolved from this same creature: this would be the common ancestor that we both share.

(picture from National Geographic: a shared ancestor of both monkeys and humans)

With my last blog entry, "The Stream", and with the previous entry to that, we talked about the rising paradigm of web 3.0, where not only will data be coming at us faster and faster, but the web itself will start to wake up, connecting and filtering that deluge of information in ways that allow us to use it all more effectively. No question, these are exciting times, and I've talked about the feeling of rapidly accelerating change that appears to be moving us all to a new mode of existence from a number of perspectives: some of those past blogs include Google and the Group Mind, The Past is an Illusion, and Randomness and the Missing 96%.

Here's a link to an article from Science Daily that was published well over a year ago (isn't that just a bit strange? In this "hurry up" world of instantly updated communication, I now feel tempted to apologize to you because this link is not to something that is fresh and new!). This article talks about the work of a team of anthropologists studying the human genome who say they have evidence that during the past 5,000 years human beings have been evolving 100 times faster than at any other time in the history of the human race! This flies in direct contrast to the common wisdom, that we as a species have not changed much at all in the last hundred thousand years.

What has caused us to change so much? There are many factors listed in the article, but all of them can be connected to how the way we live now is substantially different from our ancestors one hundred or two hundred generations ago. The tiny incremental changes over tens of millions of years that moved us from Darwinius masillae to homo sapiens are now, according to this study, moving at a much faster pace since the first versions of modern civilization began to rise.

Disease factors, diet, competition, all of those natural selection processes operate differently when humans are grouped together in larger and larger numbers. But I think we should also not overlook the mental factors that have changed as the rise of civilization has gradually modified the way we interact with each other, and the ways we think about ourselves. I would say this is easily connected to the science of epigenetics, which shows that not just changes in diet or lifestyle, but changes in mental attitude can actually change the way genes are expressed: I've talked about this in entries like Changing Your Genes, Changing Your Genes Part 2, You Have a Shape and a Trajectory, and The Musician.

The fact that humans are changing so much ties very nicely to the general theme of accelerated change that we see in our increasingly expanding universe, in our genome, and in our technology. Are we on the verge of some kind of tipping point? More and more people seem to think that is exactly where we're headed.

To finish, here's the video for Google and the Group Mind:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbblBvi65Ok

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

P.S. Speaking of rapidly accelerating technology, here's an announcement about a new DVD technology that uses five-dimensional encoding to store the equivalent of 2000 movies on a single disk! Thanks to my buddy John for forwarding me this link.

Next: Does the Multiverse Really Exist?

The Musician

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXYuhCsWq0E

In entries like Magnets and Souls and Positive Vibes, we've talked about the Steven Strogatz book Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. Dr. Strogatz talks about entrainment as being one of the underlying factors that can create order even within seemingly random systems. In entries like Unlikely Events and Timelessness and Randomness and the Missing 96%, we talked about other ways of seeing how order can be found in patterns that may appear to be chaotic, and in Dreaming of Electric Sheep and Imagining the Omniverse we talked about how seeing those patterns may have more to do with the filters or selection patterns being used to observe these complex systems that exist simultaneously within timelessness... because Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation tells us that the patterns themselves continue to exist whether we're aware of them or not.

That's all quite lofty sounding. But in very simple terms, what we're talking about are the kinds of things that connect us together with each other. Seeing those connections is one of the most basic functions of the human mind - as I've said in entries like Auras, Ghosts and Pareidolia, and Do You Believe in Ghosts, our brains are all about finding the patterns with the noise. Once we find those patterns, we tend to lock in on them and a feedback loop can make those patterns appear stronger and stronger to our pattern-recognizing minds.

This takes us to our last entry, The Comedian, where we talked about how charismatic individuals can enthrall a live audience, and "take them on a ride". How can this happen? It's a form of entrainment, similar to the ones discussed by Steven Strogatz. To use a more emotional word, we can call that entrainment "empathy".

Empathy is usually thought of as a one-way street - an empathetic individual tends to be more sensitive to the emotions of others. But the effect is even stronger when it works both ways: an individual performer who understands, through their own empathy, what affects the hearts and minds of others, can then use that awareness to make their performance that much more emotionally engaging for others, and the more empathetic the audience the stronger the feedback loop. When that loop is in place, both the performer and the audience become transmitters and receivers, both tuned into that channel we call empathy.

The topic of this entry is "The Musician". So. Rather than re-hash the old sayings about the power of music to touch people's hearts, which is the most obvious connection to empathy and what we've been talking about here, I'd like to quote from an article written by Hazel Muir which appeared in the March 5th edition of New Scientist magazine:

Musicians are fine-tuned to others' emotions

Musical training might help autistic children to interpret other people's emotions. A study has revealed brain changes involved in playing a musical instrument that seem to enhance your ability to pick up subtle emotional cues in conversation.

"It seems that playing music can help you do all kinds of things better," says Nina Kraus from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "Musical experience sharpens your hearing not just for music, but for other sounds too."

Earlier studies suggested that musicians are especially good at identifying emotions expressed in speech, such as anger or sadness. But it wasn't clear what kind of brain activity makes the difference.

Trained brain

To find out, Kraus and her colleagues recruited 30 musicians and non-musicians, aged 19 to 35. Entertained by watching a subtitled nature film, they repeatedly heard a baby crying through earphones (hear an example). Using scalp electrodes, the team measured the electrical response to the sounds in each volunteer's brainstem, which links the auditory nerve to the cerebral cortex.

In the musicians, the response to complex parts of the sound, in which the frequency rapidly changes, was especially high. But the musicians had lower responses than non-musicians to simpler sections of the baby's sound.

"It's as though the musicians are saving their neural resources for the complex portions, which the non-musicians didn't respond to particularly well," Kraus told New Scientist.

Both more years of musical experience and learning to play an instrument at a young age increased a musician's response to the complex sounds. That suggests music practice makes the difference, rather than simply having a natural talent for music in the first place.

Therapeutic tool?

"It used to be we thought sensory systems were pretty passive – they took the sound and just passed the information to the cerebral cortex where all the hard work and thinking was done," says Kraus. "But now we're understanding that as we use our sensory systems in an active way, this feeds back and shapes the sensory system all the way down through the brainstem to the ear."

The results suggest musical training might be useful for kids with dyslexia, some of whom have trouble processing sounds.

Often, these children have trouble processing the complex sounds for which musicians develop an especially good ear. Autistic children might also benefit, if improving their responses to complex sounds helps them interpret emotional speech.

It may also be possible that measurements of brainstem responses to sound could help diagnose autism and language disorders in an objective and reliable way.

For me, the idea that learning music can rewire the brain and repair potential problems relates nicely to the newly growing science of epigenetics, which we looked at in entries like Changing Your Genes 2, The Placebo Effect, and You Have a Shape and a Trajectory: isn't it amazing that scientific studies have now proved that changes in lifestyle and attitude can switch good genes on and bad genes off? One of the important themes from my project is that there are a lot of things about our bodies and our lives we have been traditionally taught cannot be altered, because they are a part of the "hand we've been dealt" and there's no way to change them. New ideas like these show us that things are much less locked in than we've been led to believe. Since I'm a musician myself, I have to admit to some personal bias here - but I think the study talked about in this article shows some exciting implications for understanding the power of music to help re-organize the brain and improve its all-important pattern-matching skill-set. The more we can see how Everything Fits Together, the better we are able to function within the world.

In the long run, though, I believe discussions of empathy still have to come down to understanding what makes us all be individuals with unique points of view, and at the same time what draws us all together: like a performer and an audience, we're transmitters and receivers of the patterns of information that we are all navigating through and traveling within. We're going to talk about that more next time in an entry called "Where Are You?"

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

PS - Here's a song that ties into all this as well - about how our constant process of taking on new patterns as we move through our lives, and how the traditional viewpoint that we are powerless to overcome the "hands we've been dealt" by our physical bodies and our circumstances denies us knowledge of how much control we have (not an unlimited amount of control, but certainly much more than many of us have been led to believe). The song is called "Change and Renewal".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blVNWkbPlII

Next - Where Are You?

You have a shape and a trajectory

George Harrison, born February 23rd 1943, would have been 66 years old today. Happy birthday, George, wherever/whatever you are right now.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlZAMtmHkKg

I've talked many times now about Douglas Hofstadter's wonderful book "I am a Strange Loop". Coincidentally, both my book and Hofstadter's put forth the same idea: traditionally, it was believed that each human being has one indivisible soul. While there is indeed something unique about each person's individual experience, it's much more accurate to think of a 'soul' as being created by an interlocking system of patterns, shared across time and space.

What are some of the ramifications of thinking of things this way? In entries like The Big Bang and the Big O we've talked about how sexuality provides connections across the history of life on this planet and perhaps even beyond. Music is also very much part of the same discussion, and we've looked at music as patterns that connect us together in entries like Music and the Dance of Creativity, The Geometry of Music, and Disorders of the Mind.

Music and sex are examples of the kinds of patterns that can connect us together. There are other patterns we can look at that show us how each of us is on our own individual journey within our physical bodies, each with our own unique pattern within the whole. In entries like Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory we've looked at how those patterns can be easily affected by adjusting our physicality, and in Changing Your Genes and Changing Your Genes 2 we've looked at the surprising new science of epigenetics, which shows that changes in lifestyle and attitude can cause "bad" genes to be switched off and "good" genes to be switched on.

For about fifteen years, back in the 70's and 80's, I was the music director of the local professional theatre here in my home town of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. I recall a casual conversation I had with a young actress who said she was having trouble identifying with the character she was supposed to be playing. I asked her this question: what kind of music do you think this person would like to listen to? The actress immediately got what I meant: music has a physicality and emotional drive to it that can cause a person to change their body stance, adjust their mental attitude, and this is why certain people like certain kinds of music. If you're trying to "get into somebody else's headspace", so to speak, then imagine yourself liking the same music that they do.

Are you depressed? Put on a song that you associate with happy times and your mood will be elevated. Or, put on a song that resonates with your depression, at least you won't feel all alone. With people walking around with headphones and personal music players all over the place, this might seem very obvious; but physicality, mental attitude, and music are intimately tied together, and people who understand how much music affects them can use music very effectively as a way to enhance their activities throughout the day. This is also why it can be so annoying to be forced to listen to someone else's music if you don't want to: it's like their extra-dimensional "shape" is impinging upon your own.

So. Actors, whether they do this unconsciously or consciously, deal with these shapes and patterns that make each of us unique all the time. Watching an actor "become" someone else is a big part of the magic of that profession. An actor can change their physical stance, their body language, their internal rhythms, even the part of their body or face that their voice is "coming from". In other words, they find a way for what we might think of as their "soul" to adopt a different shape and trajectory, and that is something we as human beings recognize and are fascinated by.

Does this all sound too airy-fairy to you? Here's a link to an article from a few months ago in New Scientist Magazine, it was called "Voice Impersonators Use Brain to 'Become' Characters"

WHEN impersonators mimic an accent, celebrity, or do a voice-over for a cartoon, they may use areas of the brain not normally activated during speech, enabling them to "get under the skin" of their target.

Sophie Scott of University College London and colleagues asked seven people to impersonate 40 celebrity voices and a selection of foreign accents while lying in an fMRI brain scanner. Only regions normally activated during speech lit up.

In contrast, when British voice impressionist Duncan Wisbey did a range of impressions in the scanner, many more brain regions were active. The researchers say that this additional activity may reflect greater skill at impersonation. They presented the findings last week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington DC.

Several of the regions in question are associated with vision and motor control. Scott suspects they light up because Wisbey thinks about what his target looks like and then imposes their features onto his own body to improve the voice.

Interestingly, Wisbey seems to produce the same pattern of brain activity even when the impression doesn't have to involve a specific individual, for example when mimicking accents. "When we asked him to try a Chinese accent, he said he was thinking about a woman who sells herbs near his house," says Scott.

Isn't that interesting? This is something I've seen myself with my son Mark, who has learned to speak English, French, Spanish, and is now learning Serbian. Each language causes people to hold their mouths and place their voices within their "mask" differently - in a sense Mark is becoming a different person as he speaks these languages.

Why are simple visualization techniques so effective in changing people's trajectory, putting them on a better path? Back in "Information Equals Reality" I talked through this as one way for people to move themselves to different trajectories within their fifth-dimensional probability space.

...imagine a warm ball of energy starting at the base of your spine, gradually working its way up your back, making you sit up straighter, creating a radiant glow out through your shoulders and the top of your head that opens your eyes wider and makes you feel more alert. Do you feel it? It really is that simple to change your energy, because it's all just information.

For people trapped in negative loops of self-destructive behavior, the idea that they can change their trajectory and that the way out is "just around the corner" in their own probability space could be what saves their life some day. To close, here's my song about that idea: it's called "Addictive Personality".


A direct link to the above video is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvsd6IUoH4

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Creativity and the Quantum Universe

Changing Your Genes - part 2

A direct link to this video for Changing Your Genes Part 2 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrYUlbYQuKA

A couple of weeks ago an interesting article appeared in New Scientist magazine that extends a discussion we started in Changing Your Genes. Here's the video blog for that previous entry:


A direct link to this video for Changing Your Genes is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYnmqhm7BIU

That entry was about a new study in which 30 men completely changed their lifestyle, adding plenty of fruits and vegetables, regular exercise, and meditation or other stress management routines. DNA tests were performed on each man before the experiment began, and again 90 days later after the men had adopted their new program. Here's what was found:

...the men had changes in activity in about 500 genes—including 48 that were turned on and 453 genes that were turned off. The activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In that blog entry, we talked about a breaking down of the old way of thinking: it really is possible to change your genes simply by changing your life, and the idea that we are dealt a specific and unchangeable set of cards in the random shuffle of genetic material that happens at conception is not really the case. Now let's take a look at some amazing findings reported by author Emma Young in the July 12th issue of New Scientist magazine. The article is entitled "Strange Inheritance: It's not just your parents' genes but also their experiences that determine your genetic make-up":

...over the past decade it has become increasingly clear that environmental factors, such as diet or stress, can have biological consequences that are transmitted to offspring... the implications for public health could be immense. Some researchers are talking about a paradigm shift in understanding the causes of diseases.
"Epigenetics" deals with how gene activity is regulated within a cell--which genes are switched on or off, which are dimmed and how, and when all this happens.

The article explains that the new science of epigenetics looks at the factors which cause certain genes to be expressed while others remain dormant: a commonly known example of this is the honeybee. All female honeybees in a hive develop from genetically identical larvae, but those that are fed on royal jelly develop into fertile queens, while the rest grow to become sterile worker bees. In other words, what a honeybee eats causes some genes to switch on and others to switch off: and the study with the men quoted in my previous blog would be one example of many of how this can happen in human beings too.

What does all this have to with Imagining the Tenth Dimension? We've spent a lot of time with this project talking about genes, memes, and spimes as being useful devices for thinking about the connections that happen across time and space. In blog entries like "The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea", we've talked about the fact that there are many branches to our reality, and the "old" way of thinking about time as being a single and unchanging line from the big bang to the end of the universe is a sadly limited distortion of what's really happening. Now, with the idea of epigenetics showing us important additional factors in how we can change how our genes are expressed, and how are genes are passed on to our offspring, we have a similar concept: in the same way that our line of time looks very limited when viewed from the fourth-dimensional perspective, our genes also look much more limited than they really are when we don't think about the branching possibilities that are actually defining our reality - not just from this moment forward, but at least in part in the reverse direction as well.

For persons trapped in a negative pattern, it can be very easy to declare that there's no way out. For persons who believe that there is only one line of time or one way of living the life defined by their genes or their upbringing, addiction and depression can be the end of them. My song "Addictive Personality" is about those ideas, and how a worldview that acknowledges that with the many possible "now"s that are coming towards us from the available probability space of Everett's Many Worlds, there can be reason for hope even when things seem their darkest.

A direct link to this video for Addictive Personality is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvsd6IUoH4

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Randomness and the Missing 96 percent

Changing Your Genes

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYnmqhm7BIU

(Update: some of the ideas in this entry are continued in another entry published one month later, Changing Your Genes Part 2)

In Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, we talked about how it is surprisingly easy to modify your potential future paths by making adjustments in physical stance or mental attitude. In Local Realism Bites the Dust, we talked about the groundbreaking experiments being conducted by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger and his team in Vienna, that are now proving that the only thing that is truly real is our observed "now": amazingly, everything else in the future and the past extending out from our constantly moving "now" is a probabilistic cloud. In entries like The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea, The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic, and Being More Fifth Dimensional, we've talked about what a powerful idea this is: if everything before and after "now" is only a probabilistic wave function, then we as observers have much more control over the information that becomes reality than the traditional viewpoint has led us to believe.

Genes, memes, and spimes: these are three powerful ways of visualizing the information that becomes our reality from a more timeless vantage point. As we discussed in entries like John Wheeler and Digital Physics, Boredom and Consciousness, and The Omniverse, physicist John Wheeler introduced us to the idea that not just the future but the past can be changed by observation, an idea that makes much more sense if we can accept the evidence of the Zeilinger experiments.

So, while we're not talking about magic here (my role as an observer can't change the force of gravity or the speed of light, or allow me to walk through walls or bring back the dead, and so on), there really are things about the past that we as quantum observers can change: and this is an idea which contradicts most of what we are taught. Most of us believe, for instance, that our genes are locked in by heredity, and as a randomized mixing of our parent's genetic material that occurred at conception, this is not something we have control over now.

Now click here to read about a new study indicating that we can turn genes on and off simply by altering our lifestyle and our mental attitude. Or read below for a few paragraphs from the article:

WASHINGTON (Reuters Life) - Comprehensive lifestyle changes including a better diet and more exercise can lead not only to a better physique, but also to swift and dramatic changes at the genetic level, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

In a small study, the researchers tracked 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer who decided against conventional medical treatment such as surgery and radiation or hormone therapy.

The men underwent three months of major lifestyle changes, including eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and soy products, moderate exercise such as walking for half an hour a day, and an hour of daily stress management methods such as meditation.

As expected, they lost weight, lowered their blood pressure and saw other health improvements. But the researchers found more profound changes when they compared prostate biopsies taken before and after the lifestyle changes.

After the three months, the men had changes in activity in about 500 genes — including 48 that were turned on and 453 genes that were turned off.

The activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As I've said before, ideas that imply this level of control over our own reality have, up to now, often been ridiculed as quackery, so publication of the above report by the National Academy of Sciences is remarkable. My song "Positive Vibes" talks about similar ideas that the mainstream often ridicule: how much control do we really have over reality? Are we really able to affect changes in ourselves and others purely by sending out positive thoughts into the "ether"? Are we really able to affect our immune systems through positive visualization, or simply through the determined viewpoint of saying "I'm too busy to get sick"? Next blog, we'll talk about the daily parrying that, historically speaking, has indoctrinated us into thinking that such ideas are nonsense.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMWDdOkWkQU

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Daily Parrying