Coconut-Carrying Octopus

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

This amazing video was linked to an article published today at The Huffington Post, thank you to my friend Pete Chema of Ten Feet Deep for sending it on to me. It immediately reminded me of some of the entries I've posted over the last few months about how humans are not nearly as special as we think, and that what makes us conscious beings is more part of a continuum of different levels and kinds of consciousness. The Huffington Post article is entitled Coconut-Carrying Octopus: First Evidence Of Tool Use In Invertebrate, Researcher 'Gobsmacked'. What's remarkable here is that these creatures are seen gathering coconut shell halves, transporting them to another area, then using the halves to construct a hiding place for themselves - evidence of planning, and an activity that actually leaves the octopus exposed to danger while they are doing it, but gives them an advantage when they are done, which seems to imply a surprising level of forethought.

My video for Alien Life and Sea Dragons showed another amazing sea creature:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_LO-q20c6o

With this Huffington Post article, I particularly like the concluding quote, because it sounds so much like the things I've been saying with my project. Simon Robson, associate professor of tropical biology at James Cook University in Townsville, had this to say after viewing the complex behavior of the coconut-carrying octopus:

"It's another example where we can think about how similar humans are to the rest of the world. We are just a continuum of the entire planet."

I couldn't agree more.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Time and Schizophrenia

Polls Archive 50 - Ancient Yeast and Extra Dimensions

"45-million-year-old brewer's yeast, trapped in amber and dormant, immediately sprang back to life when growing conditions were provided. This proves that life is, at its core, a process that is engaged with our reality 'outside' of spacetime." Poll ended October 18, 2009. 56.3% agreed, while 43.7% did not.

This poll question went up around the same time that my blog entry "Beer and Miracles" was posted, which told the amazing story of these ancient yeast cells. I don't have much to add to this idea here, except to say that it's interesting to me how sometimes my arguments seem to have swayed a lot of people (as I believe we just saw in the previous poll), while in this case close to half of the visitors to this blog still have trouble buying the idea that life might be a process that is very similar in nature to the strange connections of the quantum world.

In both cases, I've been proposing that these processes make more sense when we see that they come from the hidden folds made possible by the fifth dimension, which provides an additional degree of freedom beyond the limits of our 4D space-time.

My video for "O is for Omniverse - K and L" explores these connections between the fifth dimension, quantum physics, and life, if you have 86 seconds give this one a look:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLpVEE0AQ7A

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 51 - Do Animals Have Souls?

Polls Archive 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrMS5vP7gnE

Before we get started today - here's a shout out to Brendon Urie, lead singer of the popular band Panic! At the Disco who has been saying some nice stuff about my project in his twitter feed over the last day or two. Thanks Brendon!

The "Biocentric Universe Theory" says that without life there is no time, no space, no cosmos. Do you agree with this idea? Poll ended July 23 09. 40.9 % agreed while the remainder, 59.1% disagreed.

This blog, of course, relates to an entry I published a few months back in my blog called The Biocentric Universe. There was a followup to that entry called The Biocentric Universe Part 2 which is also part of this discussion.

Coincidentally, I just posted the video blog version of The Biocentric Universe on youtube a few days ago, here's the video:

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

It's interesting to me how some people can't wrap their minds around this concept because they are so mentally trapped in the "cause and effect" reality of the world they see around them. Trying to visualize how life could retroactively "fine tune" the basic physical structures of our universe seems like a chicken and egg scenario - how could life fine-tune the universe if the universe hadn't already had its initial conditions fine-tuned to allow life to come into existence in the first place? It boggles the mind.

In entries like Why Stop at Ten Dimensions? , I've talked about similar "turtles all the way down" loops which don't seem to make sense until you can find a way to divorce yourself from our linear 4D spacetime perspective of cause and effect: if the difference between past, present, and future is meaningless once you get out to the proper viewpoint "outside" of spacetime, then questions like "which came first" no longer have any relevance. In my popular blog entry Creativity and the Quantum Universe, we discussed other new lab experiments which appear to prove that life is a process which operates beyond the limits of our narrow one-planck-length-at-a-time window into the information that becomes our reality.

Interestingly, Why Stop at Ten Dimensions? has became one of my most popularly viewed videos of all time on youtube: let's take a look at that video now:


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

Is there any other proof that life exists outside of spacetime? What if I told you there was evidence that the "spark of life" I'm always talking about can lie dormant for not hundreds, not thousands, not millions, but tens of millions of years and still arise and flourish when conditions are right? Would that convince you that life is a process which, at its core, exists outside of our limited 4D spacetime reality? We'll talk about that more in an upcoming blog.

Here's a couple of my songs about that mysterious, timeless spark which each of us carry within us.

Connections:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25WhT8WZQ4

Burn the Candle Brightly:

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

There's a mind-boggling new theory that has just been proposed by theoretical physicist Lorenzo Moccone, currently at MIT, which may tie into all this as well. We'll look at his theory next time in "The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Other related blogs:
Alien Mathematics
The Long Undulating Snake
The Big Bang is an Illusion
Happy Birthday Paul
Placebos and Nocebos

Alien Mathematics

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49sVWNYyqWk

(The above sidebar text and illustration are from the New Scientist article by Martin Rees discussed below. The caption for this picture reads: An alien's description of the cosmos might teach us a thing or two about the nature of reality)
(Image: Wolcott Henry/National Geographic/Getty)

Last entry, in The Flexi-Laws of Physics, we talked about the amazing possibility that the basic "locked in" physical laws of our universe may have been retroactively adjusted during the initial stages of creation.

Back in July 2006 over at the tenth dimension forum, here's one of the discussions we got into within its very first month: our universe exists within spacetime, and space is not the same as spacetime. If we have a 3D space without time, then we can define a set of co-ordinates within that space with values for x,y, and z: but without the direction of either "time" or "anti-time" these co-ordinates can't be changed, they're locked in. These co-ordinates could then all be referenced within a planck-scale "frame" of spacetime, which we can think of as a "point" within the 4th dimension. If we move to some other different 4D point, then all three values for x,y, and z can be changed. Taking that idea to the seventh dimension, we can see that if our universe is "locked in" by a single 7D point, then there must be an unchanging set of values for u,v,w,x,y and z, which would be six arbitrary letters assigned to the six degrees of freedom afforded by the six spatial dimensions below. Which leads to the question that was discussed at the tenth dimension forum, are there six aspects of our universe that remain unchanged throughout its existence? At the time, I suggested to forum regular Daniel McQueen that there seemed to be an interesting tie-in there with astrophysicist and cosmologist Martin Rees, whose book I had read a couple of years before.

Do those six numbers really connect to the first six dimensions as I've visualized them? Is it possible to consider a wavefunction of all possible outcomes for our universe and have them all be constrained by six values, six unchanging "positions" within sixth dimensional space? That's a tricky possibility to wrap your head around. On the other hand, the idea from string theory that our universe is "locked in" at the seventh dimension by a D7 brane does seem to be a more likely connection.

Earlier this year, Sir Martin Rees published an article in New Scientist called Mathematics: The only true universal language. Let's look at the opening paragraphs of this article:

IF WE ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star, we would expect some problems communicating with them. As we are many light years away, our signals would take many years to reach them, so there would be no scope for snappy repartee. There could be an IQ gap and the aliens might be built from quite different chemistry.

Yet there would be much common ground too. They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.

Mathematics has been the language of science for thousands of years, and it is remarkably successful. In a famous essay, the great physicist Eugene Wigner wrote about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics". Most of us resonate with the perplexity expressed by Wigner, and also with Einstein's dictum that "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible". We marvel at the fact that the universe is not anarchic - that atoms obey the same laws in distant galaxies as in the lab. The aliens would, like us, be astonished by the patterns in our shared cosmos and by the effectiveness of mathematics in describing those patterns.

Rees then takes us through an exploration of the different mathematical breakthroughs which occurred in the twentieth century, which moves us on to superstrings as the dominant cosmological theory of our time. He mentions that despite the commercial success in the last few years of popular books claiming that string theory is "not even wrong", many of the brightest minds of our day continue to explore this promising field. Martin Rees writes:

String theory involves scales a billion billion times smaller than any we can directly probe. At the other extreme, our cosmological theories suggest that the universe is vastly more extensive than the patch we can observe with our telescopes. It may even be infinite. The domain that astronomers call "the universe" - the space, extending more than 10 billion light years around us and containing billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, billions of planets (and maybe billions of biospheres) - could be an infinitesimal part of the totality.

There is a definite horizon to direct observations: a spherical shell around us, such that no light from beyond it has had time to reach us since the big bang. However, there is nothing physical about this horizon. If you were in the middle of an ocean, it is conceivable that the water ends just beyond your horizon - except that we know it doesn't. Likewise, there are reasons to suspect that our universe - the aftermath of our big bang - extends hugely further than we can see.

Regular readers of my blog will recognize that Martin Rees is using a similar visualization to the one I used in my blog entry "The Holographic Universe": visualizing that space-time rather than space has a very slight curvature to it allows us to see how we could be like someone floating out in the middle of an ocean, perceiving a universe of a certain size and age, but that the universe itself could be much larger than what we are able to see. Imagining, then, that an alien race billions of light years away would also find themselves to be right at the very center of an equally spherical universe of a similar age ties to the surprising idea we explored in "Where Are You?": no matter who you are or where you are in the universe, you are right at the center! Extending this idea into a set of parallel universes for our own universe, and a multiverse landscape for all other possible universes, becomes even more boggling. Martin Rees writes:

The multiverse confronts us with infinities, multiplied by other infinities - perhaps repeatedly. To bring sense to these concepts, we must deploy the mathematics of transfinite numbers, which date back to Georg Cantor in the 19th century. He showed that there was a rigorous way to discuss infinity and that in a well-defined sense there are infinities of different sizes. Without these exotic concepts, cosmologists will not be able to firm up the concept of the multiverse theory and decide, without paradoxes or ambiguities, what is probable and what is improbable within it.

The final section of Sir Martin's article gets into ideas that seem to relate to our discussions from the past month, as we looked at Computers and Consciousness, Logic vs. Intuition., and Connecting It All Together. He concludes:

Maybe in the far future, though, post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things - even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could even simulate a "universe" that goes far beyond mere patterns on a checkerboard and the best movie special effects. Their simulated universe could be as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in. This raises a disconcerting thought: perhaps that is what our universe really is.

It is fascinating to speculate whether hyper-intelligent aliens already exist in some remote part of our cosmos. If so, would their brains "package" reality in a mathematical language that would be comprehensible to us or our descendants?

Martin Rees is professor of cosmology and astrophysics and master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He was appointed Astronomer Royal in 1995 and is President of the Royal Society. This article is based on contributions to a discussion by a panel that included mathematicians Michael Atiyah and Alain Connes about the relationship between mathematics and science.

It's interesting to think about how the basic physical laws of our universe might be what we would use as a starting point in learning to communicate with an alien species from far, far away. In The Biocentric Universe and The Biocentric Universe Part 2, we've talked about the amazing new theories using "retro-causality": it has now been proven that observations made "now" can affect certain indeterminate conditions back "then". If this is the case, is it possible that the amazing amount of bio-diversity that we see around our planet might also be giving us more glimpses into what alien life is going to look like than we realize? In my book and this blog, I've talked about how there could be other completely different ways of expressing matter and energy that would still rightly be called "life", but perhaps those other formulations exist only within other parts of the multiverse landscape. Perhaps when we do finally find life elsewhere in the universe, the "fine-tuning" of our universe's conditions will have created forms that only seem as alien as the strange assortment of creatures we can find on our own planet. And if biocentricism is true, then it might be that the alien race we eventually encounter could have come from a first spark of life that appeared billions of years before life started on earth, and that it was actually that alien life-form that performed this reverse-fine-tuning of our universe's basic physical constants to allow all life as we know it appear within our universe!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, July 09 Report

Do Animals Have Souls?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM5VFnirTmg

A few days ago we had to say goodbye to the family dog, a seventeen-year-old mostly-Bichon named Buddy. Buddy was one of those amazing creatures who exuded love, forgiveness, and understanding throughout his days, and our lives are richer for having known him.

Anyone who has spent time getting to know an animal can clearly see that there is an awareness, something that could be called a form of "consciousness" in there, that reasons, yearns, develops likes and dislikes, is happy or sad, energized or depressed from day to day, the same as you and I. In my recent blog entry News From the Future, I talked about this idea from an extreme point of view, but this is not something to be taken lightly - anyone who tells you animals do not feel emotions is, I'm sad to say, operating under a paradigm that has been in both the religious and scientific mainstream for centuries: that old school of thought teaches that we are simply projecting our own thoughts and feelings on these animals, anthropomorphizing their mechanistic actions as we delude ourselves into seeing more than what's really there.

I'm glad to see all the scientific articles that are being published nowadays that indicate science is now waking up to the possibility that animals are not simple automatons, operating in a way that is completely inferior to the human experience. Here's some examples from New Scientist Magazine from the last few months:
June 17 2009 - Monkeys, Coots, Salamanders, and so on can count
May 21 2009 - Evidence of speech in various species
May 13 2009 - Prairie Dogs communicate surprisingly detailed information with their calls
May 12 2009 - Evidence of empathy, compassion and a sense of justice in various species
May 6 2009 - Evidence of a desire for "play for the sake of play" within the animal kingdom
May 1 2009 - Parrots demonstrate an ability to "groove along" with rhythmic music
April 2 2009 - New book demonstrating surprising animal intelligence
March 12 2009 - Chimps use geometry to navigate through the jungle

And of course, in a discussion of whether animals can think, who can forget Alex, the African Grey parrot who demonstrated speech, reasoning, and creativity in his use of language:


A direct link to the above video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yGOgs_UlEc
Scientist Irene Pepperberg published a book late last year about this amazing animal's achievements, called "Alex and Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process".

One of the self-serving fallacies humans have bought into is that it's their giant brains that give them unique capabilities, and animals can therefore not be capable of the same achievements. While there's no question that brain size is part of the equation, we go too far when we assume a small brain can't exhibit any of our capabilities. The picture we're looking at here comes from an article published a few days ago by Reuters, titled "Fish Can Learn Despite Small Brains". Imagine how tiny the brain must be in the fish pictured here, which is called a nine-spined stickleback, and is found in streams across Europe. From the article: "Jeremy Kendal of Durham University and colleagues from St. Andrews University found in tests that 75 percent of sticklebacks were clever enough to know from watching others that a feeder in a tank was rich in food, even though they had previously got little from it themselves." The scientists described this as an unusually sophisticated social learning skill, normally only associated with humans. Isn't that amazing?

Let's back up for a moment. What do I mean then, when I say "soul"? Last week in "Happy Birthday Paul" I reviewed the idea that what is often thought of as the soul is really an interlocking system of memes and behaviors, a system that is constantly in a state of change and renewal, and which is connected outside of our physical bodies through ways that acknowledge the proven non-local nature of our universe. Last blog, in Logic vs. Intuition, we looked at a new approach to computer intelligence that might some day allow for the emergent properties of consciousness to arise in a very way similar way, using large numbers of tiny nested routines all working in concert with one another. Could the computer that some day demonstrates these emergent traits of consciousness be said to have a soul? Food for thought.

Here's one of the discussions I had about the concept of souls in my book:

Viewed as a set, one could describe the many memes that make up an individual as being their personality, or their way of looking at the world. One might also call this set of memes the soul. A common assumption is that each of us has a single soul which we carry with us from conception to death. But consider this: if we were to meet up with our own younger self from twenty years ago, what are the chances that we would share the very same set of memes? It should be obvious that the chances of direct correlation are virtually nil. According to this line of reasoning, the illusion that a single body contains a single “soul” is a fiction. Each of us is a dynamic system, mutating and developing over time. Certainly, there is a core set of physical memories that will be encoded over time into each of our brains that will create links from past to present to future unique to each of us. But the memes and belief systems that make up our “soul” are much more complicated and transcendent across time and space than the set of physical memories each of us carries in our neurons. The memory of “What I Had for Lunch Last Thursday” will stretch out across time only for as long as any individual’s brain cells recall it. Larger belief systems and emotions that make a person unique can extend well beyond the death of a body, and would be what survives, while the niggling details of day-to-day life would not.

Do animals have souls, some simpler, some more complex? It seems self-evident to me that they do, but as I mentioned there are branches of both religion and science which have insisted that animals' awareness of the world around them is not in any way comparable to our own. In Logic vs. Intuition we talked about scientific materialism, the old school of thought that says the only thing that matters is matter, and that consciousness has no part in the universe we are observing. Thankfully, that point of view is being gradually overturned, as new evidence comes to light that even bacteria communicate to each other, that our gene expression can be changed by changing our lifestyle and attitude, and all forms of life are not nearly so different from us after all.

Ultimately, we have to understand that humans are part of a continuum that connects from the simple to the complex, in fractal iterations that repeat at different scales, and we should abandon old ways of thinking that place humans as somehow being "better" than other life on the planet: the more that we can see that we are each just one part of a multi-layered system, the better the decisions we will make as a species. Here are some other past blogs where the subject of "what is a soul?" has come up:
Where Are You?
Could I Meet My Incarnation?
The Musician
You Have a Shape and a Trajectory
I Know You, You Know Me
Magnets and Souls

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, June '09 Report

Polls Archive 36 - Do Plants Use Quantum Effects?

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

Poll 36 -"Plants use quantum physics effects in photosynthesis, and this is why it is such an efficient energy conversion process." Poll ended March 25 2009. 72% agreed, the rest disagreed.

This was another poll created as a companion to a specific blog entry, in this case "Creativity and the Quantum Universe". That post was inspired by an article published in the February Issue of Discover Magazine which really caught my eye - written by Mark Anderson, it was called Entangled Life. The article is an interesting summary of lab experiments and serious theoretical propositions that suggest plants do use quantum effects to make photosynthesis such an efficient process, and that such effects as entanglement and tunneling could also be imparting unique fragrances to molecules that are almost identical, imparting healing qualities to substances like green tea, and perhaps even directly contributing to consciousness.

Here's the video for "Creativity and the Quantum Universe":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNv8LMbEPA

Essentially, then, with this poll question I was asking whether visitors agreed with the suppositions advanced in Mark Anderson's article and reported in my blog, and I'm pleased to see how many were willing to agree with this idea. While I would encourage you to go back and read my blog entry and that Discover magazine article mentioned above, let me underline the interesting parallel I suggested back then.

Paragraph from Discover Magazine article:
Instead of haphazardly moving from one connective channel to the next, as might be seen in classical physics, energy traveled in several directions at the same time. The researchers theorized that only when the energy had reached the end of the series of connections could an efficient pathway retroactively be found. At that point, the quantum process collapsed, and the electrons’ energy followed that single, most effective path.

My paraphrased version to show how creativity might be a quantum process:
Instead of haphazardly moving from one idea to the next, as might be seen in work that has no focus, creative ideas travel in several directions at the same time. By simultaneously exploring a set of connections, the "eureka" of a new inspiration can be found. At that point, the exploration process is "collapsed", and the creative person follows the new idea that they find most inspiring.

Several weeks later, in Our Non-Local Universe, I continued the discussion of how our world is connected together in hidden ways that transcend the limited "now" of space-time, and how the principle of non-locality is an accepted fact in mainstream science. With this project, I am insisting that this non-locality is direct evidence of extra dimensions, and that a great many other seemingly mysterious processes can also be understood when we see how the information that underlies our reality exists in additional dimensions. I find it fascinating that this "timeless" perspective is gaining ground, as more and more people accept that our universe is just one of a multiverse of many other universes, and that perhaps all of those universes and multiverses might be assembled into one perfectly balanced underlying symmetry state which physicist Tim Palmer has recently called The Invariant Set and which I (and others) have referred to as The Omniverse.

Which leads back to the parallels I drew above, between the accepted viewpoint that our universe is non-local, between scientific evidence that plants use non-local effects for photosynthesis, and my notion that all life is a creative process, and which means that creative processes are non-local. While 79% agreed with the non-local nature of photosynthesis being what makes it so efficient, I wonder how many visitors to this blog would be willing to follow me further out on that same limb if I were to re-write the poll question in the same way that I re-wrote the above paragraph. What if I were to ask for agreement/disagreement on this statement?

Life uses quantum physics effects such as tunneling and entanglement to engage with reality "outside" of space-time, and this is true of all creative processes.

For me, this statement logically follows, and is a very important part of understanding the way of visualizing the dimensions that I'm exploring with this project. As I say in my book and have repeated in this blog, I would define "life" as any process that is interested in "what happens next", in other words that finds ways to use the non-local nature of our universe to allow itself to thrive and continue. That would be just as true of the first chemical reactions that became the seeds of life in the primordial soup as it is for you and I. Would you agree? Let's find out. You will now find a poll question over to the right here at the tenth dimension blog which asks that question.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 37 - Do Shamans See Other Dimensions?

Creativity and the Quantum Universe

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNv8LMbEPA

There's an article published in the February Issue of Discover Magazine which really caught my eye - written by Mark Anderson, it's called Entangled Life. Let's look at some excerpts from the article:

Graham Fleming sits down at an L-shaped lab bench, occupying a footprint about the size of two parking spaces. Alongside him, a couple of off-the-shelf lasers spit out pulses of light just millionths of a billionth of a second long. After snaking through a jagged path of mirrors and lenses, these minus­cule flashes disappear into a smoky black box containing proteins from green sulfur bacteria, which ordinarily obtain their energy and nourishment from the sun. Inside the black box, optics manufactured to billionths-of-a-meter precision detect something extraordinary: Within the bacterial proteins, dancing electrons make seemingly impossible leaps and appear to inhabit multiple places at once.

Peering deep into these proteins, Fleming and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered the driving engine of a key step in photosynthesis, the process by which plants and some microorganisms convert water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight into oxygen and carbohydrates. More efficient by far in its ability to convert energy than any operation devised by man, this cascade helps drive almost all life on earth.

One of the central controversies surrounding my project is whether it's really correct to apply the thinking of quantum mechanics to the macro world: traditionally, science has taught that the weird world of the quantum wave function--where outcomes are derived from probabilities and randomness, and particles can be in more than one place at the same time--is completely separate from the physical world we see around us. One of the main ideas of my project is that all of these quantum effects occur in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth, and this logical application of what makes one spatial dimension "outside" the previous one works all the way up - we've talked about this logic in entries like Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions, Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?, and You Can't Get There From Here.

Visualizing the wave function for our universe as coming from the "next dimension up" gives us a way to reconcile how such seemingly strange and unimaginable quantum effects as entanglement and tunneling could be a part of our reality: like the 2D flatlander, who would have some hope of being able to imagine the third spatial dimension as "time" but would find the fourth dimension completely strange and unimaginable, we as 3D creatures are in the same quandary. How can we imagine all this quantum weirdness as being connected to our solid physical world? With my project, I provide a way to visualize the fifth dimension that ties in with that idea and many others.

Here's some more excerpts from that Discover Magazine article:

From tunneling to entanglement, the special properties of the quantum realm allow events to unfold at speeds and efficiencies that would be unachievable with classical physics alone. Could quantum mechanisms be driving some of the most elegant and inexplicable processes of life? For years experts doubted it: Quantum phenomena typically reveal themselves only in lab settings, in vacuum chambers chilled to near absolute zero. Biological systems are warm and wet. Most researchers thought the thermal noise of life would drown out any quantum weirdness that might rear its head.

One of the most significant quantum observations in the life sciences comes from Fleming and his collaborators. Their study of photosynthesis in green sulfur bacteria, published in 2007 in Nature [subscription required], tracked the detailed chemical steps that allow plants to harness sunlight and use it to convert simple raw materials into the oxygen we breathe and the carbohydrates we eat. Specifically, the team examined the protein scaffold connecting the bacteria’s external solar collectors, called the chlorosome, to reaction centers deep inside the cells. Unlike electric power lines, which lose as much as 20 percent of energy in transmission, these bacteria transmit energy at a staggering efficiency rate of 95 percent or better.

The secret, Fleming and his colleagues found, is quantum physics.

To unearth the bacteria’s inner workings, the researchers zapped the connective proteins with multiple ultrafast laser pulses. Over a span of femto­seconds, they followed the light energy through the scaffolding to the cellular reaction centers where energy conversion takes place.

Then came the revelation: Instead of haphazardly moving from one connective channel to the next, as might be seen in classical physics, energy traveled in several directions at the same time. The researchers theorized that only when the energy had reached the end of the series of connections could an efficient pathway retroactively be found. At that point, the quantum process collapsed, and the electrons’ energy followed that single, most effective path.

Electrons moving through a leaf or a green sulfur bacterial bloom are effectively performing a quantum “random walk”—a sort of primitive quantum computation—to seek out the optimum transmission route for the solar energy they carry. “We have shown that this quantum random-walk stuff really exists,” Fleming says. “Have we absolutely demonstrated that it improves the efficiency? Not yet. But that’s our conjecture. And a lot of people agree with it.”

This revelation is amazing enough. But then the article goes on to talk about new research that explores other ways in which the quantum world is very much a part of our macro world, imparting unique fragrances to molecules that are almost identical, imparting healing qualities to substances like green tea, and perhaps even directly contributing to consciousness. Please do read the entire article, here are three more brief quotes:

• Quantum physics may explain the mysterious biological process of smell, too, says biophysicist Luca Turin, who first published his controversial hypothesis in 1996 while teaching at University College London. In 2007 Turin... and his hypothesis received support from a paper by four physicists at University College London.
  

• In 2007 four biochemists from the Auton­omous University of Barcelona announced that the secret to green tea’s effectiveness as an anti-oxidant... may also be quantum mechanical. Free radical molecules, by-products of the body’s breakdown of food or environmental toxins, have a spare electron. That extra electron makes free radicals reactive, and hence dangerous as they travel through the bloodstream. But an electron from the catechin (catechins are among the chief organic compounds found in tea, wine, and some fruits and vegetables) can make use of quantum mechanics to tunnel across the gap to the free radical. Quantum tunneling has also been observed in enzymes...

• Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona... speculates that anesthetics “interrupt a delicate quantum process” within the neurons of the brain. Each neuron contains hundreds of long, cylindrical protein structures, called microtubules, that serve as scaffolding. Anesthetics, Hameroff says, dissolve inside tiny oily regions of the microtubules, affecting how some electrons inside these regions behave.

Visualizing how much this quantum dance is participating in the creation of the world we see around us is really not that dissimilar to the journeys of discovery that we've just looked at in The Shaman and Modern Shamans. In Music and the Dance of Creativity, we talked about this joyful process of creativity that underlies our universe, and in The Holographic Universe we talked about the new scientific evidence announced in 2009 confirming that for our 4D universe, our "line of time" is not continuous but rather being constructed one planck frame at a time. That new scientific evidence can be added to the list of reasons supporting my conclusion that in order for the quantum world to make sense, we have to see how it is coming from the fifth dimension.

Out of All Possibilities, One is Selected
In entries like Dreaming of Electric Sheep and Imagining the Omniverse, we looked at trying to visualize how our specific universe might be able to "come into focus" from the omniverse, where every possible state exists simultaneously. Let's think about how that is essentially a creative process that we are describing - out of all possibilities, one is selected. Take a close look at Mark Anderson's Discover Magazine article, and his description of how photosynthesis uses quantum effects to achieve such high efficiency. Now, here's a section of that article in which I've substituted some words to help us to see how "quantum weirdness" can also easily be thought of as a description of the creative process:

Instead of haphazardly moving from one idea to the next, as might be seen in work that has no focus, creative ideas travel in several directions at the same time. By simultaneously exploring a set of connections, the "eureka" of a new inspiration can be found. At that point, the exploration process is "collapsed", and the creative person follows the new idea that they find most inspiring.

Seeing the probability space of our "fifth dimensional hologram" all around us, waiting with new ideas and inspirations for us to bring into our reality simply by observing some aspect of the wave function of possibilities, is another way of understanding how much the quantum world and our macro world are tied together, all part of the same continuum, and all part of the ongoing creative process that is happening at every instant in every part of our universe.

Enjoy the journey of discovery!

Rob

PS - Here's a song about how these quantum processes are part of the creation and creativity that is all around us, and that we are a part of as we distill one physical reality from the many quantum paths available to us: it's called "Making It Up as I Go".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkehQ97ltA

Next: New Translations of Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 14

Poll Question 14: "Every direction has its opposite: up/down, east/west. For us, 'time' is a direction in the 4th spatial dimension: but even though the opposite direction exists our bodies never travel that way because they're made from thermodynamic chemical processes. (poll ended May 18 2008)

78% agreed, while the rest disagreed.

Like Kaluza's 1919 proof that our physical reality is defined at the fifth dimension, the concept of time-reversal symmetry is well-known in the scientific community but not something generally known to the public. The laws of physics make just as much sense if time travels in the opposite direction, so why don't we ever see "time's arrow" traveling from the target back to the archer's bow?

I suggest that our experience of time traveling only in one direction is tied to our role as conscious observers living in bodies made out of thermodynamic processes, and 78% of the visitors to this site were willing to agree with that statement (this also means, presumably, that they were willing to accept that "time" is a direction in the fourth spatial dimension, which is already a somewhat contentious viewpoint according to those who believe time should always be discussed separately from the other spatial dimensions). In my book, as a mental exercise I work through some scenarios of what might have happened if other forms of life were defined by the time-reversal symmetry versions of reality that science tells us are just as real as our own. What would it be like to meet a "reverse-time alien" who was riding time's arrow in the reverse direction, because that alien was constructed from time-reversal symmetry chemical processes?

Like many of the ideas I explore in this project, "time as a part of the observer effect" relates to concepts from quantum physicist John Wheeler, and from Digital Physics. This also relates to one of our most basic questions: what is life? According to this recent blog entry by Hazel Muir over at the New Scientist Blogs, there are 280 accepted definitions of life in the scientific literature. The question of "what is life" takes on greater significance as we discover more about our own solar system, and about the other planetary systems of our universe: any attempts to search for "life" should not assume that all life uses the same chemical processes or matter/energy distributions as life on Earth.

My simple definition of life is "any process that is interested in what happens next". By the time we are thinking of an omniverse of possible expressions of matter, energy, and other patterns of information, we can think of a great many other ways that life might be able to express itself that have nothing to do with genes, and that might even be able to transcend the narrow boundaries of a three-dimensional space being observed one planck length after another to create the arrow of time.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Other entries that relate to these discussions:
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
Time is a Direction
How to Make a Universe
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
You Can't Get There from Here

Click here for the blog discussing polls 1 through 10.
Click here for the blog discussing polls 11 through 15.
Next - Poll 15: A line passing through two points extends to infinity in either direction. Can we call those two directions positive infinity and negative infinity?

Making New Connections

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh8FFfQ8p-s

In "Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse" (a book of interviews conducted by David Jay Brown which I've quoted from a number of times already), neuroscientist Candace B. Pert, famed discoverer of the brain's opiate receptors which bond with endorphins, had this to say:

...we are making new neurons every day in our brains... now it's accepted as a fact, but for a long time it wasn't. Two long-term colleagues... great scientists... were poo-pooing the actual biological importance of it. They were saying... we have no evidence that it's important...

I'm getting ready to give a lecture...I'm going to talk about the implications for our own mind, body, health, and how we can utilize this discovery. I mean, it's no longer just a truism to say think positively, choose positive thoughts, and to make an effort to not put negativity into words. Every time you repeat something, you're stabilizing this neuronal network that's forming. There's always a nascent network that's forming, and there's a constant living and dying of neurons. And what lives and what dies depends on how often it's used. So the more negative things you think or say about yourself, you're just reinforcing those circuits. So to me this is huge. I still can't get over it!

In the same book, well-known author, computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil had this to say:

Am I the same consciousness that Ray Kurzweil was a year ago? And you say, Well, Ray, you're the same stuff. It's the same arm and the same face. But actually, no, I'm completely different particles than I was a year ago. Virtually all of my cells have been replaced. Now you say, Well, okay, but, Ray, most of your neurons haven't been replaced. Some of them have, but neurons tend to last longer than most of the other cells, which get turned over. But even those neurons that existed a year ago actually were made of different particules. The actual physical atoms and molecules making them up have been replaced, so nothing is the same as it was a year ago. Actually, the only thing that's the same is the pattern.

There's a certain continuity of pattern, of how all these atoms and molecules are put together, that does have a continuity between between myself today and myself a year ago. So that means what we are is a pattern, and the pattern persists. I draw an analogy to the pattern that water makes in a stream, as, say, it darts around some rocks. If you look at a stream going around some rocks, you see a certain pattern, and that pattern can look very stable. It can stay the same for hours or even years. But the actual water molecules making up the pattern changes in a fraction of a second, because water's flowing by... And we're really pretty much like that pattern of water, because this stuff is flowing through us, and we're not the same particles at all.

My song Change and Renewal is about these ideas as well. In fact, the connections between my lyrics and what Kurzweil says may make it seem like my song was written as a response, but in fact the song was written years before the above quote was published. It's yet another demonstration of the fact that a lot of people around the world have been thinking about similar things, as we start to understand the underlying patterns that create our reality.

A direct link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blVNWkbPlII

This is what our brains and our consciousness are made to do: constantly making new connections, creatively stringing together a "chain of attention" one planck length after another to create an observed reality from out of all the possible universes that exist within the multiverse our universe is a part of, and, ultimately, within the omniverse.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Other blogs related to this:
Everyone Has a Story
Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory
The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
Song 24 of 26 - See No Future
I Remember Flying

Coming up next: The Tenth Dimension Polls Archive, questions 11 through 15

Everyone Has a Story

A direct link to the above video blog entry is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn4XcYRRyZ4


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP2mg0KpZs0

Last blog, we talked about the relationship between physical stance and a person's interface with reality. Have you ever tried Foxwalking? Have you ever tried stomping around like a sumo wrestler? As we saw last time with the arm-folding experiment, simple physical and mental tricks can have a profound effect on a person's mood, and the way they interact with their environment. For someone who is not happy with their life, this can be a tricky conversation: how much of what happens to a person is because of their own attitude, and how much is due to random circumstance and the actions of others? Here are a few paragraphs from chapter nine of my book:

Everyone has a story they tell themselves of why their life is the way it is at this present moment, and sometimes that story is not completely truthful. It’s human nature for each of us to want to put ourselves in a good light. Sometimes that means that we pass the blame on to bad luck or the malicious acts of others, when in some situations each of us should be admitting a certain amount of personal responsibility for bad things that have happened to us. From seemingly small things like “I should have exercised more” or “I shouldn’t have eaten that junk food” to much larger acts that seem to be deliberately self-defeating, there is a natural tendency for each of us to say “it’s not my fault”. Separating into fact and fiction the stories we tell ourselves for why our life is not the way we want it to be is not always easy to do.

For each of us, we will be able to remember moments of malicious, random, or foolish action that could have done us in. It’s hard to forget that moment where a large object falling or a silly risk taken might have resulted in our death if we had only been in a slightly different place and time. According to the worldview we’re exploring, all of those things did actually happen: that drunk driver you saw last year came over the hill and smashed into you head on, and now you’re dead.

And all but the most saintly of us will have moments in our own past where we know we made bad or unfortunate choices, yet we lived to fight another day. Each of us will always have a number of life-paths which could have (and in other quantum realities actually did) result in our death. So how did those of us alive at this instant end up choosing the path where we “dodged every bullet” and are here today, while others, it would appear, have chosen a path where they became another sad statistic?

In other words, if all possible timelines exist, does the person dying of cancer have another version of themselves that avoided the cancer-causing conditions and lived to a ripe old age? And if you are the person currently dying of cancer, should you be asking yourself why you chose that life path rather than another? Clearly, your average terminal cancer patient will tell you they did not choose to have cancer, and would find the suggestion completely offensive. This is a hard issue, wrapped in many conflicting emotions. A simplistic answer might be, the person dying of cancer didn’t believe or wasn’t aware they had the power to change their life-path, so they didn’t–a bitter pill to swallow, and one which fails to take into account the many accidents and diseases which a person could not possibly have known were coming, so any choice which avoided the situation would only have been dumb luck.

This gets back to our discussion of the limitations of the Binary Viewpoint. In simple terms, we can choose a path, or we can choose to not take a path, but there’s a third option as well: we can let chance or the actions of others choose a path for us. When we experience pain, injury and serious disease, these tend to eliminate all but the most basic and primal mental processes. Thoughts of higher dimensions and quantum reality (be they conscious thoughts or the subconscious processes we’ve imagined in this book) vanish when our attention focuses down to our body’s most animalistic desire for trying to find a way to get away from intense pain. We become like the fruit fly, whose role as a quantum observer is limited by its inability to imagine anything but the most simple desires for continuance.

Likewise, depression and illness will tend to close our minds to the possibilities for change that might be still available to us, just when that knowledge might be the most beneficial...

I sum it up in Boredom and Consciousness Part Two: "Are you bored? Depressed? Ill? Then of course you will tend to make different choices than if you were excited/happy/healthy. There's nothing unscientific about simple statements like these."

My song "Thankful" is about taking a moment each day to be grateful for the unlikely and amazing world we find ourselves to be in: and giving thanks is another one of those really powerful ways of changing your interface with reality.


A direct link to the above video is at http://revver.com/video/661217/thankful/

Enjoy the journey. And thank you!

Rob Bryanton

Coming up next: Anime, Gaming, and Cusps

Boredom and Consciousness Part Three

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txe4psJ6pVw


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99oMQvccar0

In Boredom and Consciousness Part Two we talked about how boredom is very much a "conscious" part of our minds. If you are driving a car properly, you are performing a constant series of checks completely automatically: your conscious and subconscious minds are working as one. The brain is entirely capable of taking you from one side of the city to the other without your "narrator voice" interfering with what you're doing. But what if that narrator voice, instead, had been telling you how boring the drive was? You would be much more likely to have had an accident through being inattentive to all of the possible danger signs that our subconscious minds deal with constantly as we drive. Even something as simple and uncomplicated as falling asleep is almost impossible to do if you can't find a way to quiet that darn narrator voice of consciousness, as anyone who has tried to find sleep when they are upset or excited knows only too well.

Do you like to garden? Some people can't stand it because it's so boring. Other people love simple repetitive activities like these because it gives them peace... in other words, gardening can be a form of meditation. And meditation, of course, is actually not that far away from boredom: because meditation is an activity that encourages us to move through and beyond our line of time with an integrated mind, quieting that nagging narrator voice that says "this is boring" and moving into the state that Julian Jaynes tells us we used to always exist within.

Here's what I say in my book about meditation:

Meditation is a particularly interesting example of how people can use the power of the mind to change their health and circumstances. Researchers analyzing the EEGs of persons in a meditative state have seen that the parietal lobe, which processes incoming data to give a person the sense of their location in time and space, becomes much less active during meditation. If the parietal lobe would be what anchors us in the first-through-fourth dimension (time and space), then, could suppressing that part of the brain be what opens the person who is meditating up to the healing paths available to them in higher dimensions?

This same Scientific American "Mind" article on boredom we were discussing in part two also talks about the rising popularity of "mindfulness" training in education, medical, and office settings, which is a form of meditation that helps people to become more in tune with the wonder of their day-to-day lives. Elsewhere in the issue is a review of a book by Jeff Warren called "The Head Trip": Jeff describes consciousness as a wheel that can be broken into twelve states from highly alert to deeply asleep. I was interested to see that what started him down the path of writing this book was exactly what we're talking about here: he was working a potentially boring job as a tree planter, and became fascinated with how his perception of time seemed completely different while doing this job. While some people would look at a menial and repetitive job such as this and find their day agonizingly slow, he found that time passed by almost without him noticing. In other words, one person's boring is another person's meditative state, or even another person's novelty.

When people who have watched my 11 minute animation or read my book say that it's "mind-blowing", my fervent wish is that I have helped to renew and expand their sense of wonder about this amazing universe we live in. There are a great many self-help books and breathing exercises and visualization techniques out there that people can use to change their way of perceiving the world. Imagining the timeless fabric that our universe and all other universes spring from is another: that's why I describe this project on the back of the book as a "mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live".

In part one of this entry we talked about the quantum physics idea that it's actually possible for consciousness to change the past: an idea that hadn't occurred to me, perhaps not surprisingly since I have spent so much time thinking instead about how this way of imagining reality expands out what our possibilities from this moment forward might be. But even if the idea had occurred to me first, I suspect I would have just dismissed it as being too "out there" even for me. However, with esteemed physicists like John Wheeler pointing the way, and the research of physicists such as Rosenblum, Kuttner, Krauss and Dent (all of whom are mentioned in that previous blog entry), this idea takes on interesting resonances when we think about meditation and the integrated bicameral mind as being the mental processes where we stop being bored, and start freeing our conscious minds from our linear 4D succession of frames we call "time".

This week's poll question is about 2012, where do you stand? Could those predictions of a coming global transition be tied to McKenna's Novelty Theory (also known as Timewave Zero), or Kurzweil's approaching Singularity, or the many other impending predictions being pointed to by prophecy and ancient wisdom? Our minds, as pattern recognizing machines, have ways of connecting across the information of time and space. Our bodies, built from chemical processes that obey the laws of entropy, can only move in one direction in time, but if it really is possible for consciousness to "tune" the universe, as John Wheeler suggested, then we would have proof that our consciousness can freely move in any direction, and at any "angle" we choose. Thinking of an accelerating shift, where everyone's consciousness tilts at an ever more extreme angle to our 3D space to eventually encompass all of time, allows us to imagine the potential for our world to enter a timeless mindset. The idea that this possibility appears to be approaching at an increasingly accelerated pace is also one of the ramifications of this that is getting more and more people excited around the world. Are you interested in what happens next? I know I am!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Boredom and Consciousness Part Two

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF8bDBmPlVg


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPNHbuVoIlg

Are you bored with your life? One of the ideas I've been promoting with this project is an all-encompassing definition of life as being "any process that is interested in what happens next".

As regular visitors to this blog will know, I have come to believe that there were certain organizing patterns and forces that can be seen to have influenced the creation of our universe right from its beginning, and that each of us is a participant in the ongoing act of creation that was set in motion back then and which continues to this day. In Boredom and Consciousness Part One, we talked about the respected physicists like John Wheeler have even suggested that the quantum observer could change not just the present or the future, but the past right back to the big bang! Still, no matter what perspective you approach this idea from, we have to recognize the name that is given to those organizing patterns and forces is contentious: and since some people are uncomfortable with words like "God", I have tended to call these the "big picture memes" that we can see were a part of the narrowing-down processes that caused our particular universe to be the one selected out of all possible universes within the multiverse.

Most of us (but not all of us!) believe that we have free will, which implies that we have some degree of control over "what happens next" as we travel down our 4D line of time, twisting and turning in the fifth dimension down at the planck length. What this means, then, is that very simple truths like "attitude affects outcome" have profound implications if in fact the parallel universes that are created by the branching choices of our actions really do exist, and we have talked in previous blogs about some of the modern cosmologists who say that this is indeed the case. Are you bored? Depressed? Ill? Then of course you will tend to make different choices than if you were excited/happy/healthy. There's nothing unscientific about simple statements like these.

In my book I talk several times about what happens when we stop being interested in what happens next:

...many of us are painfully familiar with the experience of watching a loved one who, due to illness, extreme depression, or simple old age, have had their soul material gradually dissipate or be ground away. This can reach the point where we can see that the person that used to occupy that body is no longer there, even though the body continues to function. Where did they go? Perhaps they really did lose coherence and drift away. Or, more likely, most of the meme-set that made up that person lost interest in the diseased and tired body they were in and has already freed itself from its confines.
Witnessing the death of any living creature shows us one of the great mysteries of the universe: what leaves the body?

For our planet, every living thing is based on water. To quote from Paul Davies' article on alternate lifeforms on earth in the December issue of Scientific American:

...even the hardiest microorganisms have their limits. Life as we know it depends crucially on the availability of liquid water.

A couple of blog entries ago we looked at the relationship between music and creativity, and not long before that we looked at a song of mine ("Change and Renewal") which proposes that creativity and water may be more closely tied to each other than any of us realize. In a sense, this is because the opposite of creativity is death: with no water, there's no life, and therefore no creativity. So, as I say in the song: "take a drink of water and find a new idea". :-)

We could also say that the opposite of boredom is novelty. But boredom and novelty are much more subjective terms, because they are based upon the way that our conscious minds perceive reality: in other words, one person's boring is another person's novelty. In part one I talked about synchronicity: the joyous connections our brains can make from seemingly unconnected bits of information, and how that can make it feel like the universe is trying to tell you something. I had been planning last week to write about Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind, but then two magazines arrived in my mailbox the same day and I saw so many connections to what I was thinking about that I felt it was important to explore them.

The first of the two magazines is the new special issue of Scientific American "Mind": the cover story is dedicated to the study of boredom, and there are quite a few articles within that issue that relate very nicely to what we're talking about here. The other magazine was the latest issue of New Scientist magazine, which has as its cover story "The Smart, Strange World of the Subconscious".

The article in New Scientist makes the point that neurobiologists sometimes prefer to use terms like "non-conscious", "pre-conscious", or "unconscious" in these discussions about the subconscious. This is because it's much easier to define what is a conscious activity for our minds, than it is define all of those other processes which are bubbling beneath the surface, some of which are operating at much higher operations per second, and some of which are stretched out into much slower processes. We have already talked in this blog about how consciousness is thought by modern science to be a process that, for most people, operates at between thirty and ninety "bings" per second.

One of the studies discussed in the Scientific American "Mind" issue concerns persons with long-term substance abuse problems: an ongoing study of 156 addicts at a New York methadone clinic revealed that the only reliable indicator of whether an addict is about to relapse was their reported level of boredom. My song "Addictive Personality" talks about the pitfalls that can happen when people are trapped in repetitive loops that lead them to believe that "what happens next" will always be the same as "what happened before", a sure-fire recipe for boredom:


Julian Jaynes, in his epic masterwork "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", proposed that our current mode of operation, with a conscious part of the brain that is "narrating" our activities from moment to moment, and a subconscious (or non-conscious/pre-conscious/unconscious) part of the brain that is processing data "behind the scenes", is a fairly recent development. He proposed that only a couple of thousand years ago humans lived in a more integrated form of consciousness, where conscious and subconscious processes were not divided. This seems to imply that everyone existed in a semi-dreamlike state, a state which modern society has taught us to be suspicious of: which is strange, because there are still many activities that we perform much better when we are not "Thinking" about what we're doing. Athletes talk about being "in the zone": the place where they become one with their activity, rather than thinking about all of the component parts, is how they achieve success. Be it musicians, public speakers, or a teenager on their first date: the times that we become self-conscious about what we're doing or saying, we are much more likely to not be at our best. Here is another video with me in discussion with master musician Jack Semple where we touch upon some of these ideas:




Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - We wrap up this exceedingly long entry in part three. Click here to read part three now.