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

Polls Archive 48 - Amazing Psychic Readings

"Have you ever had your fortune told, or a psychic reading done, where you were surprised to hear information about yourself the person doing the reading couldn't possibly have known?" Poll ended September 19 2009. 36.6% said yes, while 63.4% said no.

In "Norway's Reverse Deja Vu", we talked about a phenomenon from that country's beliefs called the "Vardauger", which is also spelled "Vardøger". Click here if you'd like to read an excerpt from the vardauger article in wikipedia. This mystical concept is akin to deja vu, except that it is more external than internal - witnesses to the Vardauger phenemenon report seeing, hearing, or feeling evidence of the arrival of a person before that person actually physically gets there. In that same blog and some other previous ones, we've talked about the work of biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, whose ideas about morphic resonance would seem to tie into such a phenomenon nicely. Here's an interesting Google Tech Talks presentation delivered by Dr. Sheldrake on very related topics:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnA8GUtXpXY

As for the poll question,we can see that just over one third of the respondents to our poll reported having had some kind of a mystifying insight being provided to them by a psychic. Does that seem high or low to you? I think the discussion of such experiences is absolutely equivalent to discussions we've had about ghosts or auras - it doesn't matter how scientific or rational you believe your worldview to be, if you've ever had such an experience yourself it must have caused you to at least wonder a bit. And on the other hand, if you've never had such an experience then it will always be much easier for you to say that others' reports are either imaginary or the result of skillful manipulation from a charlatan.

Have you ever had an experience with a psychic, or with a supernatural phenomenon such as a ghost, or a premonition, and so on, that made you less in doubt about such possibilities? Please feel free to post your experiences as a comment to this blog entry.

Here's some of the other blogs where we've looked at related topics:
Can Memories Be Transplanted?
The Musician
Going to the Light
Auras Ghosts and Pareidolia
Magnets and Souls
Do You Believe in Ghosts?
Are Animals and Kids More Fifth-Dimensional?

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light

Norway's "Reverse Deja Vu"

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pddxV_3RZbw


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGAmV4V4By4

A youtube user from Norway calling themselves BlueSkyFish sent me some interesting information about a phenomenon that is part of that country's folklore: the "Vardauger", which is also spelled "Vardøger". Here's an excerpt from the vardauger article in wikipedia:

Stories typically include instances that are nearly déjà vu in substance, but in reverse, where a spirit with the subject's footsteps, voice, scent, or appearance and overall demeanor precedes them in a location or activity, resulting in witnesses believing they've seen or heard the actual person, before the person physically arrives.

How's your Norwegian? There's a much more extensive entry about this subject in Norway's version of wikipedia.

Last entry, we looked at Roger Ebert's take on quantum mechanics, and what the ramifications are if all possible versions of our universe already exist simultaneously within a timeless underlying fabric. Just prior to that, in Just Six Things: The I Ching we looked at an ancient Chinese system as a possible way of tracking our trajectories, seeing where we are right now in the multiverse and what possible parallel universes from Everett's Many Worlds might be approaching... and this was an extension of the preceding blogs to that one, The Map and the Territory and What's South of the South Pole?.

The vardauger seems like an easy concept to tie into all this - if some people are more sensitive to the possibilities coming towards us from our fifth dimensional probability space, then a foreshadowing of an approaching person's form might be one of the ways this sensitivity could express itself. In entries like Are Animals and Kids More Fifth-Dimensional? and Magnets and Souls, we've talked about the work of biochemist Rupert Sheldrake and his book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Could these animals be sensing a vardauger of their owners, a reverse deja vu of their impending arrival? Interesting thought.

Here's a Google Tech Talks presentation featuring Rupert Sheldrake, as he makes an almost two hour long presentation on "The Extended Mind - New Experimental Evidence".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnA8GUtXpXY

BlueSkyFish had some other interesting information for us as well: she tells us that interest in psychic phenomena has become much more mainstream within the last few years in Norway.
Click here to read a BBC new story about Norway's Princess Martha Louise, fourth in line to the throne, who says she has psychic powers and can teach people to communicate with angels. Or click here to read a story from earlier this year about Norway's health minister, Bjarne Håkon Hansen, who has gotten a lot of media attention for promoting a psychic healer who calls him Snåsakallen (the "snåsa man"), stating that the snåsa man healed the health minister's baby son from colic over the phone. According to this same article, many Norwegian politicans share minister Hansen's belief in alternative medicine, among them half of the members of the committee of Health and Care Services. And finally, here's an article from late last year about Saera Khan, one of Norway’s members of parliament, who ran up huge phone bills calling clairvoyants, not just for personal advice, but also for advice on political matters.

I find it very interesting that my book has sold well in the Scandinavian countries, which include Denmark, Sweden, and Norway: perhaps BlueSkyFish is pointing us to one of the reasons for why this could be? I 've wondered before what our world would be like if other industrial and political leaders of the world were to openly embrace a more metaphysical perspective: in my blog entry News From the Future (the video for which we saw at the start of this entry), I showed a possible future when major corporations will change their approach, when it becomes apparent that there are patterns which exist outside of our observed reality which connect what we each think of as our unique "soul" to a larger whole.

In entries like Creativity and the Quantum Universe, Our Non-Local Universe, and Where Are You? we've looked at other ways of thinking about how our reality is inter-connected in ways that are "outside" of our 4D spacetime, and with my project I continue to suggest that these "spooky" ideas (as Einstein referred to them) make much more sense when we realize that our "now" is not in the fourth dimension, but the fifth.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: An Expanding 4D Sphere

Polls Archive 39 - Can memories be transplanted?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTdGVci6Ebo

Poll Question 39 - "Is it possible that a person who has received a heart transplant could take on bits of the memories or behaviors of the donor?" Poll ended May 12 2009. 43% agreed that this could be "Possible", while the rest said "Impossible".

Back in Poll 33, we asked whether this way of visualizing reality could allow for the possibility of meeting another version of yourself, living another life, right here in the present. The question we're looking at here is somewhat related to that concept, but does require us to make another major conceptual leap if we're going to accept this additional supposition.

Check out the following set of videos, which is from a program shown on the Discovery Health channel a few years ago. This is from a documentary series called Mindshock, and the episode is called "Transplanting Memories?".

Part 1:
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sudmW97FZA0

Part 2:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky6eEiVbgMg

Part 3:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei6FmA6-N14

Part 4:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY5SiWHDInQ

As we can see from the poll results, the idea that a heart transplant patient might take on memories or behaviors from the donor is pretty "out there", and more people disagreed than agreed with this as a conjecture. Would the poll results have been somewhat different if every person answering the poll were obliged to watch at least part of the above documentary? Perhaps. Certainly, for many of us this is a new idea: and to be clear, this "transplanting memories" concept is not a conclusion I arrived at in my book or have promoted with my project up to now. The idea does seem to be connected to Rupert Sheldrake's ideas about morphic resonance, though, and Sheldrake's work has received some attention in my book and in this blog. Here are some of the past blogs where I've talked about related ideas:

Are Animals and Kids More Fifth-Dimensional?
Souls as Interlocking Patterns
Underlying Patterns
Magnets and Souls

"Transplanting Memories" is not without its detractors - like many of the other ideas we've explored here in this blog, there are skeptics who automatically ridicule the above documentary, and that extends to any suggestions that there could be unseen connections linking our reality together. Setting those knee-jerk reactions aside, though, requires us to think about the possible consequences of this - if some imprint of a certain organ's previous owner remains, does that mean a heart from a murderer or a suicidal person could dramatically alter the behavior of the recipient? The mind boggles at the implications.

In blog entries like Auras, Ghosts and Pareidolia, Do You Believe in Ghosts?, Ever Seen an Aura?, and Going to the Light, I've looked at some of the possible ways that a person's unique patterns might continue on after death. For me, the idea that a transplanted heart from a murderer could cause the recipient to become one too seems too far-fetched. It seems more possible to me that some parts of the donor's awareness might continue to focus on the timeline of the recipient and exert some minor influences , but I'm reminded of what hypnotists say - no person in a hypnotic state can be induced to do something that goes against the basic morals of that person. I think the same could be true of the subtle influences seen in these situations: the patient might find themselves becoming interested in a new food or willing to listen to a kind of music that previously held no interest for them, and there are transplant recipients interviewed in the above documentary who experienced just such effects. But like the hypnotized subject, these people are not going to take on any new characteristics that they wouldn't already have been willing to accept regardless of where they came from.

Although the source of these new influences might seem troubling, when you stop and think about it this is not particularly different from the process of growth, discovery and taking on new patterns that each of us goes through within our lives each and every day. As I say in my song Change and Renewal:

Every minute of every day
I keep changing, I keep changing
Nothing ever stays the same
All replacing, rearranging
Every cell that’s in me now
Was not the same when I was born
In an endless constant flow
Renewing when they’re old and worn

Am I the same person I was twenty years ago? No! And neither are you. We learn, we change, we grow. But there are threads that connect us each to our previous selves, and the unique journey each of us is on is what makes this all so interesting.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: News From the Future

Magnets and Souls

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p21KA8JL9qU



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


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


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKxKVpHZe5Q

Rupert Sheldrake had some more to say in David Jay Brown's book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse that I thought was useful to add to the ideas we've looked at in entries like Being More Fifth Dimensional, Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, and Are Animals and Kids More Fifth Dimensional?:

The reason animals are called animals is because the word "animal" comes from the Latin word, anima, meaning "soul". So, what the soul did, according to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas--who were the main authorities for the medieval view--was to act first as the form of the body, to shape the developing organism as it grew. In animals the soul also underlaid the instincts, the movements, and the organization of the sensations and behavior. In human beings the soul also included the intellect, the rational mind, the conscious mind.

So the human soul had three levels, or layers. One was the conscious mind, second to the animal soul, which was largely unconscious, and we shared with animals. And thirdly there was the vegetative soul, or the nutritive soul, which shaped our bodies and gave rise to the form of our bodies, helped maintain them in health and in healing from injury and disease... 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.

I've used "corn starch monster" videos before (which is what we're looking at in the three short youtube clips that start this entry) to demonstrate how a simple action like a low frequency vibration can impart something to a corn starch and water mixture that reminds us of life, and how the reverse is also true: most of us have seen the astonishing difference between a living creature and what that same creature appears as when the spark of life has departed. Some of us have also seen what's it like when a person's soul has left their dying body before the body is dead: even when the physical body continues to struggle on with that most basic desire to continue, it can be clear to us that the "vibration"that made that person who they were is no longer there. Would it really be such a stretch for us to think that a magnet had "died" if one day it ceased to attract and repel other magnets?

From the most primitive beginnings of life on the planet, to human beings and beyond, all life shares the same trait - a desire to continue, an interest in "what happens next". Do corn starch monsters and magnets desire to continue? That's like asking whether my car desires to move forward after I step on the gas pedal. Animation (movement), is not the same as anima (life, soul): so, while things that are alive move, things that move are not necessarily alive. Still, it's interesting to think about a time not very many centuries ago when it was believed that magnets had souls, and to apply that idea to what I've been talking about here: how something as simple as a meme-based vibration pattern across dimensions could be what imparts, using constructive interference with physical reality, the anima to living things.

All of this also strongly relates to the current bestseller I've just finished reading, My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. After a left hemisphere stroke removed Dr. Taylor's ability to plan and think linearly, she spent time thinking only with her right brain, where she reports that she felt an intimate connection to the one-ness that we all share within the universe. I recommend this book highly because it touches upon so many of the things I have talked about with this project - how "souls" can be thought of as coming from different energy/vibration/meme patterns, interlocking together to create what we each of us thinks of as a unique "me", and how some people create energy which other people are drawn to and inspired by, while other people seem to suck the energy out of a room. The corn starch videos, I think, are good starting points for discussion - thinking about how different patterns and waves really could be interacting to create what we know of as life and consciousness. Books like Steven Strogatz's Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life add more pieces to the puzzle as we think about how different waveforms can entrain one another, and ultimately this is all part of the path towards seeing how everything fits together to create our reality.

We'll close this entry with a video for one of the 26 songs that are part of this project. This one is about the soul, the mysterious spark of life that each of us carries within, and it's called "Burn the Candle Brightly".


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

Enjoy the journey, one planck length at a time.

Rob Bryanton

Related entries:
Spirituality, Connections, and the Tenth Dimension
Boredom and Consciousness Part Two
Vibrations and Energy
Waveforms in the Ten Dimensions
Music and the Dance of Creativity

Next: The Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, June Report

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 12

Poll question 12 - ended April 18 08. "Our universe is not random, our universe is probabilistic, which means that only certain outcomes are available at a certain moment, and those possible outcomes are based upon patterns that exist within the underlying structures of timelessness."
75% agreed, while the rest disagreed, with this statement.

In "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic", we talked about the standard example put forth by theoretical physicists such as Greene and Kaku that there is a small probability that any one of us could now pop out of existence here on earth and reappear on the moon. While the likelihood, these experts tell us, of such an event is so small that it would probably take longer than the life of the universe for this event to come to pass, that must also mean that it could happen right now - like any other lottery, it's just a question of playing the odds.

In the blog entry I'm referring to, I talked about the fifth dimension as "probability space", and the sixth dimension as "state space", and how those ideas relate to the possibility of one of us now appearing on the moon. This poll question was about the same idea: is the universe completely random, allowing one of us to now re-appear on the moon, or is that possibility more properly catalogued to be within the sixth dimension's state space?

There have been articles published in magazines like New Scientist lately indicating that quantum outcomes may not be random at all, and that our reality could actually be the result of "hidden variables" or underlying patterns in the quantum fabric: these are ideas that are central to my way of visualizing reality as well. For some related discussions, go to Rupert Sheldrake's www.sheldrake.org, and read about the fascinating controlled experiments by this best-selling author and biologist on telepathy, prescience, and the collective unconscious (it is at this point that some people will now stop reading this blog entry because a lifetime of training has conditioned them to reject such claims on the foregone conclusion that no scientific evidence for such things exists, but that's a whole other story).

If there are probabilistic outcomes that already exist within the fifth dimension, and we are each merely navigating towards a particular tiny subset of those possible outcomes, then all of the above becomes quite easy to imagine. There is a particular future for each of us one second from now which is more likely than all others to occur, but there are other futures contained within our fifth-dimensional probability space which any one of us could actually end up witnessing. Understanding that this probabilistic process is an effect at both the quantum and macro levels, and that what outcome each of us ends up witnessing must also be intimately tied to the trajectory each of us is on, was one of the ideas explored in my book, and in the recent blog entry "Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory".

Other blog entries that relate to these ideas:
Time in Either Direction
The Flipbook Universe
Time is a Direction
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
Local Realism Bites the Dust

Click here for the blog discussing polls 1 through 10.
Click here for the blog discussing polls 11 through 15.
Next: Poll 13 - There are many ways to get to infinity, but is there more than one infinity?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 11

Poll #11 - "Traditionally, each of us has one indivisible soul. While each person's individual experience is indeed unique, it's much more accurate to think of a 'soul' as being created by an interlocking system of patterns, shared across time and space. "(poll ended April 3 08)

76% said "I agree", while the remainder disagreed.

"I think there is so much more in existence besides matter, energy, and time" - Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis

I've talked in this blog a number of times about Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am A Strange Loop", which was published well after my own book came out. In my book I refer to Hofstadter's previous masterwork "Godel, Escher, Bach", as well as Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind". These ideas relate in similar ways to my current references to Hofstadter's "Strange Loop" concept: there are very good arguments for us to stop thinking of each of us as being a self-contained "soul". The above poll question is my attempt to sum up the viewpoint of experts like Hofstadter and Minsky... a viewpoint that aligns very nicely, in my opinion, with the way of visualizing reality that we're playing with in this project.

"...information is never destroyed. More and more information is constantly being created, and it's not lost, and energy and matter are incontrovertible. So somehow there must be some survival, because one being represents a huge amount of information. So I can imagine that there is survival, but I'm not sure exactly what form it takes." - neuroscientist Candace B. Pert (famed discover of the brain's opiate receptors)

Are you the same person you were twenty years ago, or are there things about your beliefs and viewpoint that have changed? Do you ever marvel at how one person can change the mood of an entire room just by entering? Have you ever had an experience that made you suspect a loved one who had passed on might be trying to get a message to you? Each of these, to varying degrees, are examples of personal experiences many people in the general public have had. Finding that there are ways that we can visualize how our reality is constructed that allow for these hidden connections to occur is what we're trying to do with this project. And despite the dismissive attitudes of some in the scientific mainstream, experts like biologist Rupert Sheldrake (who I refer to briefly in my book), Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis (quoted above), and well-known neuroscientist Candace Pert (also quoted above) tell us there are numerous scientific studies that prove we are connected together across time and space in ways that might be surprising to acknowledge.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

For more about this idea:
Song 25 of 26 - What I Feel For You
Song 6 of 26 - Connections
Your Sixth-Dimensional Self
Song 14 of 26 - I Remember Flying
Song 4 of 26 - The Unseen Eye
FAQ 11 - Is this about memes, creativity, connections?
FAQ 12 - Is this about consciousness and quantum observer?

Click here for the blog discussing polls 1 through 10.
Click here for the blog discussing polls 11 through 15.
Next: Poll 12 - Is our universe random, or is it probabilistic?

Are animals and kids more fifth-dimensional?

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


In blog entries like "Being More Fifth-Dimensional" and "Death?" I've made the suggestion that dogs could be more tuned into the "probability space" of the future than we are because of a more well-developed sense of smell and hearing. This is what makes them great guardians and sentries, and is no doubt a very good reason why humans have liked having dogs around for at least the past ten thousand years. But many of us, I believe, have seen evidence that dogs and other animals are more "tuned in" to what others are thinking, and sometimes to events that might be coming, in ways that are about much more than just having better sniffers than we do.

In my book I spoke briefly about Rupert Sheldrake and his concept of morphic resonance - an idea that is quite easy to integrate into the ideas I've promoted here. If, as quantum physicists say, reality is ultimately just information, then patterns that connect across the fifth dimension and above could easily be part of nonlocality, entanglement, empathy, prescience, and yes, "Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home" (my favorite Sheldrake book). In another book I've talked a lot about lately, David Jay Brown's "Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse",
Sheldrake describes a parrot with remarkable powers:

The parrot N'kisi, belonging to Aimee Morgana in New York... turns out to be one of the most remarkable animals in the world. He's an African gray that now has a vocabulary of more than 950 words, which is a world record, and he speaks in sentences...

So this is a completely astonishing situation of an animal that talks and uses language in a meaningful way--better than chimps or gorillas that have been taught to use language through American Sign Language... most amazing of all is that he picks up what his owner's thinking telepathically and comments on her thoughts and intentions--even on her dreams.

We set up a whole series of controlled tests to see if he really could pick up what she was thinking. In these tests we filmed the parrot continuously in one room, and the owner was in another room--with all the doors closed, on another floor of the house, so there was no sound transmission possible. She looked at a series of photographs that she hadn't seen before, which were in sealed randomized envelopes. In each trial, she was filmed as she opened an envelope and looked at the picture in it for two minutes. She didn't say anything. Then we had an independent transcription of what the parrot said. Three independent people transcribed it, blind, not knowing what was going on. We then saw whether the words the parrot said matched the picture the owner was looking at. In some tests the parrot didn't say anything. But when he did, we could see if the words corresponded--and in an astonishingly significant way they did. In some trails, for example she was looking at a picture of a man on a phone, and the parrot said "What'cha doing on the phone?". In other trials she was looking at pictures of flowers, and the parrot said "Those are flowers. It's a pic of flowers".

The constantly nattering "narrator voice"
In my book and past blogs I've talked about the Julian Jaynes "Bicameral Mind" theory which suggests that the normal mode of operation for human beings up until a few thousand years ago was to not be operating with a "narrator voice" that says "now I am walking", "now I am driving", and so on, and that the older, more integrated mode of operation can actually be advantageous to us when we return to it - it's much harder to hit a ball or play a violin or drive a car if we are thinking about every little action. Complicated activities like these are more easy to perform if we can find a way to just "be". Is it also possible that kids operate in this integrated mode more easily, until constant reminders from the adults around them to "pay attention and stop daydreaming" trains them out of it? That's what I'm proposing.

Julian Jaynes introduced his theories to the world with his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". My song "Automatic" is about this bicameral mind theory, and the conclusion we can draw from the above: being more bicameral is being more integrated, less fractured. Quieting our narrator voice allows us to do more, despite the influence of western culture which has trained us to be suspicious of those moments when they happen. I believe this ties nicely to the quote from Nobel-prize-winner Kary Mullis referred to in my last blog entry: this is about being more tuned into the parts of you that are spread across time, which according to this way of visualizing reality is being more fifth-dimensional.

One "now" after another, one planck length at a time
The amazing "now" that each of us is in from moment to moment is always coming from this probability space of the fifth dimension. This means that the possibilities available to us are always much more diverse than what might seem to be there if we are convinced that we are merely travelling down a straight and limited fourth-dimensional line of time. Does that make the fifth dimension a dangerous idea? Well, even though this doesn't mean that the fifth dimension is some kind of magic, some would say it does.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBJnWADnJr4

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Local Realism Bites the Dust