The latest on biofeedback, consciousness, neuroscience & neurotechnology.
Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University showed a computer screen grid of nine numbers to six chimpanzees. The chimps were previously trained to recognize the ascending nature of the numbers. They were also shown to nine college students. When subjects touched one of the numbers, all of the others vanished. They then had to touch the squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.
When the numbers flashed for just four-tenths of a second or less, one of the chimps beat all of the college students.
Here's the press release from 'Current Biology', a publication of Cell Press:
CogSciTechBiofeedback Video: Interesting Experiment - Richard Dawkins on the God Machine
Video: Interesting Experiment - Richard Dawkins on the God Machine
Wednesday, 19 September 2007
Michael Persinger is a neuropsychologist at Canada's Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. His theory is
that the sensation described as "having a religious experience" is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's
feverish activities. He has attempted to create experiments to show that when the right hemisphere of the brain
is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere is called
upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates what is felt as a 'sensed presence.'
Many of Persinger's studies detail the reactions that people have when their temporal lobes are stimulated with complex magnetic fields. Some of the subjects experience a 'sensed presence' in the form of the deity from the culture that they were raised in. They see the God (or spirits associated with their God - the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, etc) that they believe in. Others have had experiences that mimic the feeling that one would have during alien/UFO visitation - these people tend to be more agnostic.
In 2003 the BBC arranged for Prof. Richard Dawkins to be a subject in one of Persinger's experiments.
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