The latest on biofeedback, consciousness, neuroscience & neurotechnology.
Discussion on brain plasticity, or neuroplasticity, has increased during the past several years. What is it and why should we be concerned about it? Our brains can migrate activity associated with specific functions to a different location as a result of neuroplasticity. This is an extremely important ability to have after a brain injury or even after normal experience (such as aging). Neuroplasticity allows the brain to re-wire itself as a response to changes in the environment. It is also what is behind the learning process and memory formation.
Plasticity consists of laying out preferred pathways within the brain for circulating important information and is the brain's ability to adapt.
Biofeedback/neurofeedback may play an important role in the future if specific operant condition techniques can be designed to increase voluntary control of neuron responses that will increase neuroplasticity.
Here is a link to a great audio interview from CBC radio with Dr. Norman Doidge. He is the author of "The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science".
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.
Neuropsychology 
