Magnets and Morality

Here's the opening few paragraphs of an amazing article published at MSNBC on March 29th. The article, written by Eric Bland, is entitled "Study: Magnets Can Alter Morality":

Magnets can alter a person's sense of morality, according to a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists from MIT, Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it more difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes. The research could have big implications for not only neuroscientists, but also for judges and juries.

"It's one thing to 'know' that we'll find morality in the brain," said Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. "It's another to 'knock out' that brain area and change people's moral judgments."

Please read the whole article, this study reaches some surprising conclusions.

As regular readers of this blog know, I love to propose new ideas for how my approach to visualizing the dimensions might reflect back upon the reality we see around us. But every now and then I come across new ideas like the one above which take these ideas in new directions I simply hadn't foreseen but still seem to have a logical connection.

Let's step back for a minute.

In my book, I talked about how some people seem to be able to entrain the thoughts and feelings of others, a sign of a good salesman, an effective politician, or a charismatic leader. Are some persons more likely to be transmitters of strong vibrations which allow them to entrain the thoughts and feelings of those around them, while some others are more likely to become followers because they are more attuned to receiving rather than transmitting?

In Information Equals Reality, we talked about how easy it can be to change your energy, and I described a very simple visualization tool for increasing your alertness that a number of people have told me they found surprisingly effective. In Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, we looked at a study which demonstrated that people who cross their arms are more likely to continue to try to solve a difficult problem: more evidence of the strong connections between the mental and the physical. But these connections go surprisingly deep! In entries like Placebos Becoming More Effective?, Placebos and Nocebos, The Placebo Effect, Changing Your Genes, and Changing Your Genes Part 2, we've explored various studies that indicate that not only can changes in attitude and lifestyle change your health (the most obvious result), but this can also change which genes are expressed, and even influence which genes are passed on to your offspring!

In an entry called Magnets and Souls, I quoted Rupert Sheldrake from David Jay Brown's wonderful book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse. Here's part of what Rupert had to say:

Interestingly, up until the seventeenth century, everyone thought that magnets had souls. The magnet was believed to have a soul, which was how it attracted and repelled other magnets at a distance. In fact, what's happened in science is the old idea of souls has been replaced by fields. The magnetic soul became the magnetic field.

So here we are now with a new scientific study that indicates magnetic pulses applied to a specific position within the brain can disrupt a person's sense of morality: the test subjects appear to be more likely to look at outcomes rather than the moral reasons a person might pursue one path of action over another. Morality seems like one of those high-level functions that should be distributed throughout the mind, but this study appears to reveal that it resides at the junction between the temporal and parietal lobes. I find that to be amazing!

How much concern should we all have about this discovery that a magnetic field can disrupt moral judgment? How big of a worry should this be for those of us in particular who live in big cities where we are continually bathed in increasingly high levels of electromagnetic energy? Definitely, this is a concern worthy of further scientific study.

Last week, in Fourth Spatial Dimension 101, I suggested that our extra-dimensional selves would be an ornate web of interacting patterns, something much more complex than the "long undulating snake" that we start off with in the original animation. Visualizing the energy field that represents a person's physical presence, and their consciousness, and how that might interact with a magnetic field, adds yet another layer of complexity that it appears we now need to consider if we're looking at the whole picture.

Next week we're going to get a little more metaphysical again as we continue this exploration of vibrations and energy: the entry is called "Vibrations".

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Augmented Reality - Faceball

The Forest

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeILNHXU9zo


This comic is from xkcd.com, a lovely bunch of thought provoking comics are found there. A direct link to this particular one is at http://xkcd.com/721/ . Thank you to my facebook friend Jeffry Sommer for forwarding this one on to me!

Most of the daily emails, facebook messages, and tweets I get surrounding this project are from fans, wanting to discuss the ramifications of all this or just wanting to thank me for opening their minds to new possibilities. In addition, every few weeks I get interesting comments from the occasional teacher. For instance, three weeks ago I heard from Mitchell Daar, a Middle School Math Teacher at Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School in Chicago. Mitch had this to say:

"...your video has been an excellent catalyst for real, poignant, outside the box conversations in my classroom... the conversations that your movie sparked were some of the best I have ever experienced as a teacher."

Then, at the end of March a visitor to the tenth dimension forum, calling themselves "Redmirian", posted a very nice analogy for visualizing the enfolded nature of spatial dimensions, with each new dimension affording a new degree of freedom that was unavailable from the one before. I emailed Redmirian asking for permission to quote the analogy in this blog and possibly produce an animation of it some day. I received this message back and discovered that "Redmirian" was the handle for yet another teacher, this one from England:

"Thanks for the email and the comments about my analogy.

I would be flattered if you used it in a blog entry and I am quite happy for you to quote it and discuss it and included references to me.

My actual name is Nigel Evans. I am a science teacher (head of chemistry) at an independent co-ed boarding school in Oxfordshire in the UK. The school is Bloxham School.

I have been fascinated by the physical sciences all my life and in particular the ideas of multi-dimensionality. I saw your video on youtube and then visited your website. I found the video truly enlightening as it brought the 10 dimensions to life in a new way. I was discussing it with my wife and children which is how the analogy of forest came about."

Here's the analogy Nigel came up with, see what you think. And once you're done reading this, you can go to his entry at the tenth dimension forum where you'll see that he has proposed some other interesting analogies as well.

The first 3 dimensions are easy for people to understand but then we need some assistance. To imagine the 4th dimension, we think of walking in a forest along a footpath. That could be thought of as being our experience with the footpath being the 4th dimension of duration. We walk along the footpath as we age from the past to the future. We cannot back-track along the path. As we walk along we see there are other paths along the footpath which branch off and we have to make decisions about which route to follow. Once we have passed a junction we cannot go back and choose another path. This is our reality.

The junctions along our path lead to alternative 'parallel' places and so these are in the 5th dimension. We cannot reach these parallel places once we have passed the junction but if we could back-track then we could return to a junction and branch off.
Alternatively, it is possible to leave our foot path and walk through the forest directly to the parallel places. These routes through the forest are in the 6th dimension and allow us to travel directly to the alternative parallel places at the end of the paths which branched off from our path.

So if we can travel in the 4th dimension we can only move along one path in one direction.

If we could travel in the 5th dimension we could back track to a junction and change a decision and head off on another path.

If we could access the 6th dimension then it would be like having a map of the forest which showed us all the paths and where they lead to. This would allow us to move freely through the forest from place to place and get to places which are not directly connected to where we are on our path by using the 6th dimension.

The 7th dimension is our entire forest and through the 7th dimension we connect to other forests via other paths. If we were able to access the 7th dimension we could stand at the edge of our forest and see paths leading to other forests. We follow one path heading for another forest and we are traveling in the 7th dimension. We pass other paths leading off our path which lead to still more forests but we cannot see exactly where they are heading and which forest we are going to. These other paths branching off and leading to the other forests are the 8th dimension.

If we were able to see a much larger map of all the forests and where they were in relation to each other and how to get from one to another directly that would be the 9th dimension. A 9th dimensional being could move to anywhere on the 'map' at will.
The 10th dimension would be all the forests and all the paths all taken as one. I guess a 10th dimensional being would exist in all parts of all the forests simultaneously.

Thank you Nigel for this delightfully simple analogy. And thank you to all the teachers I've heard from in the almost four years since I've launched this project who have enjoyed the "philosophy of physics" discussions with their students that my project has been able to stimulate.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Magnets and Morality

PS - Here's a demo video for that "Miegakure" video game mentioned in the XKCD comic:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhBoY6s-Fhw

Fourth Spatial Dimension 101

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

The above video makes it very clear in its description at youtube that its author believes this has nothing to do with our concept of 4D as spacetime. Nonetheless, it shows multiple visual examples that apply to the "long undulating snake" concept I've talked about with my project from the outset. Am I a 3D shadow of my 4D self? And is that 4D self projected from a 5D hologram that includes many other possible versions of myself? That's the conclusion that seems to align with multiple theories of cosmology, while leaving room for more metaphysical discussions as well.

It's interesting to see how many comments there are on youtube from people suggesting that this video shows a way to understand how ghosts can appear and disappear, or pass through walls, or come from another time and place, another position with the 4D continuum. I suspect that such suggestions do not sit well with the creator of this video, but I of course have discussed similar possibilities from time to time.

But for me, I have to keep returning to this important point. I agree with this video! The fourth dimension is not time. Time is a direction, not a dimension. Saying that "time" is the fourth dimension would be like saying "forward" is the third dimension: both are directions, and both could be thought of as directions in any spatial dimension. "Forward" has its backward, "time" has its anti-time, and when you pair the two opposing directions you are thinking about a full spatial dimension using arbitrary labels.

Is the third dimension made from length, width, and depth? Sure, those labels work together. So do pitch, yaw, and roll. So could east/west, north/south, up/down: as long as you come up with three ways of thinking that are at right angles to each other, you're on the right track. But because these dimensions enfold one another, it's not really relevant to say that "forward" is only a direction in the third dimension: depending upon your frame of reference you could apply "forward/backward" to any spatial dimension, including the fourth. That goes for any spatial manipulation terms you can think of, which is why "branching" and "folding" have their usefulness in these discussions but they're only part of many ways of thinking about all this.

So. Some people think discussions of fourth-dimensional spatial objects like hypercubes have nothing to do with discussions of the fourth dimension as spacetime. In Playing Games in Extra Dimensions, we looked at a lovely iPhone/iPod app called Hipercubo. This game was created by Brazil's Roger Sodré, of Studio Avante. While Roger tells me he is a long-time fan of Imagining the Tenth Dimension, he is also another person who thinks spatial 4D is a separate concept from spacetime 4D. Here's one way of blending these two ideas together.

Try to imagine a 4D hypercube as viewed from the fifth dimension. The shape will be static and unchanging, the hypercube is always a hypercube. Now imagine the shape representing a human being from birth to death as viewed from the fifth dimension. That "long undulating snake" imagery we've used really is a gross oversimplification - the complex web of atoms and molecules, water and energy, choices taken and not taken, and all the potential "worldlines" representing a single person is a vastly more complex shape than a simple hypercube. In both cases, that extra dimensional pattern casts a shadow into the third dimension which moves in specific ways: but a rotating hypercube casts a much more predictable and essentially unchanging shadow than the 3D shadow cast by a living and breathing human being!

Let's close this entry by looking at the following video, which is my second most popular on youtube (after the three versions I've posted of my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation). It discusses the confusions surrounding 4D as four spatial dimensions that have nothing to do with time. It is built around the M-Theory claim that there are 11 dimensions, ten of which are spatial and one of which is "time": it's called "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?".



Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Forest

Polls Archive 60 - Quantum and Macro a Continuum?

Poll 60: "The so-called 'dividing line' between the quantum and the macro realms is completely artificial, it is really all part of the same continuum." Poll ended March 17 2010. 93 % agreed, while the remaining 7 % disagreed.

This, of course, is one of the big ones. We keep reading mainstream science articles which suggest that the quantum world is completely separate from the physical world we see around us, but we also keep reading about scientists who have demonstrated quantum entanglement with larger and larger molecules. Where is the dividing line really, and why does it seem to keep moving more and more into our macro world? One of the commonly used arguments is that quantum effects have nothing to do with our "warm and wet" reality: but in entries like Creativity and the Quantum Universe and Holograms and Quanta, I've talked about (and provided links to) new observations and theories which suggest the natural world is using quantum effects for photosynthesis, migratory navigation, and perhaps even consciousness.

In addition, it does seem that this acceptance of a direct connection from the quantum to the macro world is being advanced more and more in leading theories of cosmology. As someone who has been beating that drum with this project for almost four years now, it's great to see the gradual shift in thinking that is happening.

The other part of this idea that I've been proposing, though, still remains to be embraced by the mainstream - in my book and in entries like The Fifth Dimension is Spooky, I've been insisting that the "strangeness" of quantum effects like entanglement and tunneling makes much more sense when we realize that our "now" is in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth. That additional degree of freedom that the fifth dimension provides, with it being at "right angles" to our spacetime, gives us a way to visualize how the spooky action at a distance that Einstein was so uncomfortable with only seems that way when we believe that our reality is confined to the limits of 4D spacetime.

I've talked before about how Einstein eventually embraced the theory proposed to him in 1919 by Kaluza, which says that the field equations for gravity and light are resolved at the fifth dimension for our 4D spacetime. Fully incorporating the implications of that statement into a reality where we realize that our 4D "now" is being observed one planck frame at a time from the wave function of possible paths which the fifth dimension provides gives, in my opinion, an intuitive way to understand the continuum between the the quantum and macro worlds which this poll question was examining.

And as I've been fond of pointing out, this also gives us a way to understand not just Everett's Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but also why the fifth dimension from our perspective appears to be "curled up at the planck length": it's because of the tiny planck-length frames of the fifth dimension that we are moving within as we observe our 4D spacetime reality.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Fourth Spatial Dimension 101

Polls Archive 59 - Placebos and our Interface with Reality

Poll 59 -"Pharma companies are wrestling with the fact that placebos have grown twice as effective in drug trials over the last few decades. This is evidence that something is changing about our interface with reality." Poll ended March 2 2010. 61.5% agreed, while 38.5% did not.

This poll began not long after an entry called "Placebos Becoming More Effective?"was published here. If you would like to know more about the evidence surrounding this poll question, please go back and read that entry, I'm not going to repeat myself here because I want to talk about some other interesting connections to this idea.

In Poll 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? we returned to a question that relates to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems: how can we know everything about the system we're within, when we can't get outside the system to "see it from the outside", so to speak?

This was one of the central ideas within Song 11 of 26 - The Anthropic Viewpoint, which has this verse:

If there’s other worlds then we’ve just missed ‘em
No way to know what’s outside our system
We’re like goldfish livin in a bowl
What’s beyond it we can never know
All we can do is theorize
Cause we can never… get outside, outside

Here's a video for that song, which has proved to be one of my more popular music videos on my youtube channel:

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA

Would the evidence that placebos are becoming noticeably more effective qualify as evidence that we are collectively shifting our reality in some subtle way? That's the crazy idea that I'm proposing here. But since 61% of the visitors to this blog were willing to go along with this as a possibility, maybe it's not all that crazy after all.

Here's some of the other entries where we've talked about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem over the past few years:
The Anthropic Viewpoint
Everything
Just Ten Things
The Universe as a Song
What's Around the Corner

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: We'll look at one more poll question: Polls Archive 60 - Quantum and Macro a Continuum?

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - March Report

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09
. August 09 . September 09 . October 09 . November 09 .
. December 09 . Top 100 Blog Entries of 2009 .
. January 10 . February 10 .

Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days. As always, the number in brackets is the entry's position in the previous month's report.
1. Holograms and Quanta (new)
2. expandAR - Augmented Reality (new)
3. More Slices of Reality (new)
4. Gimme the News (new)
5. Poll 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (new)
6. 3 Books That Could Change Your Life (new)
7. My Computer is My Friend (new)
8. Forty Below (new)
9. Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light (new)
10. Poll 53 - One to the Power of Infinity (new)


And as of March 26th, 2010, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (2)
3. What's Around the Corner? (3)
4. An Expanding 4D Sphere (5)
5. Just Six Things: The I Ching (6)
6. Augmented Reality (4)
7. Mandelbulbs (10)
8. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (9)
9. The Holographic Universe (7)
10. Slices of Reality (8)
11. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (11)
12. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (12)
13. Alien Mathematics (13)
14. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (15)
15. When's a Knot Not a Knot? (16)
16. The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow (17)
17. Urban Garden Magazine (14)
18. Beer and Miracles (20)
19. The Big Bang is an Illusion (19)
20. Poll 46 - Big Bang an Illusion? (21)
21. Modern Shamans (18)
22. Norway's Reverse Deja Vu (25)
23. The Comedian (22)
24. Scott McCloud and the Brothers Winn (23)
25. The Shaman (24)
26. Polls Archive 45 - Conscious Computers? (new)

Which means that this worthy submission is leaving our top 26 of all time list this month:

Our Non-Local Universe (26)

By the way, if you're new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. And as always, here's a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 59 - Placebos and Our Interface with Reality

Polls Archive 58 - Finite But Unbounded?

Poll 58 - "Although our universe may effectively appear to be infinite, it is in reality 'finite but unbounded'." Poll ended February 14th 2010.
83.1% agreed, while 16.9% disagreed.

This connects back to Poll 47, which asked "Are We a 3D Sphere on a 4D Hypersphere?". In that entry I said this:

Extra-dimensional spheres are important to all this because they show how our universe could effectively be infinite, but in reality be finite but unbounded. In other words, with each of the dimensions we've been talking about, there are always certain restrictions to that dimension, and you need to move up to the next dimension to move beyond those restrictions.

I returned to this idea in Life is But a Dream, where I said this:

...our Cosmological Horizon is like we're on a boat in the middle of the ocean, except that this boat is not on a 3D sphere like planet earth, it's a finite but unbounded 4D hypersphere - and that's the beginning of a way to imagine how all these hidden connections can start to make sense.

In The Holographic Universe, I talked about this in more detail:

In our four-dimensional universe, it appears that space-time is essentially flat. If it were truly flat, then parallel lines would never meet and our universe would have no boundaries in any direction. NASA's WMAP project has returned results showing that the universe is flat within a 2% margin of error. What does this mean? It means that for most intents and purposes our universe is truly flat. But in the largest picture of all, I believe that the above two ideas are going to be shown to be equivalent - our universe is very close to flat, but there is still a very slight curvature, and the 13.7 billion year "boundary" that cosmology shows us as being our line of time back to the big bang will still show that we are only witnessing a tiny region of a much larger whole, an idea that is central to this project

In An Expanding 4D Sphere, I quoted from the wikipedia article on The Cosmological Horizon, which supports these ideas:

...it has been said that the observable universe is many orders of magnitude smaller than the greater universe that lies beyond the limits of our perception.

Imagine that the entire cosmological horizon is modeled by a sphere that is the diameter of a quarter (24.26 mm in diameter). If Alan Guth's inflationary model of early era cosmology is correct, the universe that lies beyond this “quarter-sized” horizon would conservatively be a sphere as large as the Earth globe itself.

There is still some controversy within the scientific community as to whether or not our universe is absolutely flat, and whether it's truly infinite. It's important to note that for many applications absolute flatness and truly infinite work as approximations, because the curvature we're talking about is so slight compared to the size of our observed universe. Still, I'm very pleased that 83% of the visitors to this blog were willing to accept the proposal that it's actually finite but unbounded, which implies a slight curvature which is creating the 4D hypersphere of our amazing spacetime universe.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 59 - Placebos and Our Interface with Reality