Showing posts with label brain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brain. Show all posts

22 February 2010

The Intelligence of the Body


One of the greatest mysteries among many mysteries concerning the human body is just where memories are stored. Most people would assume the brain of course, but the following article raises some serious implications - suppose the whole body is intelligent? Suppose every part of the body -including the brain- contains intelligent memories? Is memory holographic - where the whole is present in every part?


While the article is talking about memory transfer via organ transplant - what about traces of consciousness being tranferred with the eating of the flesh from an animal which was conscious before it died? Could that lead to an animalistic consciousness in a human?
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Do Our Organs Have Memories?
posted by
Jurriaan Kamp


Feb 21, 2010
Transplant patients sometimes take on part of their donors’ personalities.
Glenda lost her husband, David, in a car crash. She made his organs available for transplant. A few years later, as part of a study by neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall, she met the young Spanish-speaking man who had received her late husband’s heart. Filled with emotion, Glenda asked if she could lay her hand on his chest. “I love you, David,” she said. “Everything’s copa­cetic.”
The young man’s mother, also present, was startled. “My son uses that word now,” she said. “He never said it before his heart transplant. I don’t know that word; it doesn’t exist in Spanish. But it was the first thing he said after the operation.”
Her son appeared to have changed in other ways too. Before, he had been a health-conscious vegetarian; now he craved meat and greasy food. He had loved heavy metal music; now he played nothing but fifties rock ’n’ roll. Glenda’s husband had been an ardent meat-lover and played in a rock ’n’ roll band.
Does the heart have a memory? Is part of an organ donor’s personality also transferred to the recipient in a transplant? Yes, contends Pearsall in his book The Heart’s Code, which provides other remarkable examples of transplanted hearts with memories.
An 8-year-old girl received the heart of a 10-year-old girl who had been murdered. The recipient ended up at a psychiatrist’s office, plagued by nightmares about her donor’s murderer. She said she knew who the man was. After a few sessions, the psychiatrist decided to notify the police. Following the girl’s instructions, they tracked down the murderer. The man was convicted on evidence she had provided the first clues about: the time, the weapon, the place, the clothes he wore, what his victim told him. Everything the girl said turned out to be true.
Pearsall’s book is based on 73 heart-transplant cases in which parts of the donors’ personalities appear to have been transferred to the recipients.

03 January 2010

A Machine That Can Read Your Mind.

Here's a device that reads your thoughts. Of course it is introduced as a help to people with medical conditions. Actually it will work on you too. Don't think that the implanted electrodes are really needed. It can all be done remotely without any wires. What is being shown here is 'old' technology. Is this how Santa Claus finds out who is naughty or nice?
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Device turns thoughts into speech
System tested on a 26-year-old man left paralyzed by a brain stem stroke


By Irene Klotz
Dec . 31, 2009

Scientists have successfully tested a system that translates brain waves into speech, raising the prospect that people left mute by stroke, Lou Gehrig's disease and other afflictions will one day be able to communicate by synthetic voice.
The system was tested on a 26-year-old man left paralyzed by a brain stem stroke, but with his consciousness and cognitive abilities intact. The condition is known as "locked-in syndrome." In this condition,
communication by eye movement or other limited motion is possible, but extremely cumbersome.
For example, British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who is nearly completely paralyzed as a result of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, takes several minutes to compose a short sentence that is rendered into speech by a
computer.
Scientists implanted an electrode about 5 millimeters deep into the part of the subject's brain responsible for planning speech. After a few months nerve cells grew into the electrode, producing detectable signals.
It took several years, however, to develop a computer system that could discriminate
elements of speech from the busy backdrop of neural activity, lead researcher Frank Guenther, with the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, told Discovery News.
"All the neurons are firing all the time, but there's a subtle change in the firing rates. The trick was trying to decode that," Guenther said.
The first "words" detected from the subject's brain were three vowel sounds, but the speed with which the speech thought was transmitted into audible sound was about 50 milliseconds -- the same amount of time it typically takes for naturally occurring speech.
The embedded electrode amplifies neural signals and
converts them into FM radio waves which are then transmitted wirelessly across the subject's scalp to two coils on his head that serve as receiving antennas.
The signals are then routed into a system that digitizes, sorts and decodes them. The results are fed into a program that synthesizes speech which runs on desktop or
laptop computer.
"The most significant thing is that this shows it would be possible for someone who is paralyzed to speak in real-time rather than going through a painful typing process," Guenther said. "This communication is very important because these people are completely locked out from the rest of the world."

The researchers plan a follow-up study in early 2010 that will significantly increase how much information is collected from the brain, with the aim of adding consonants, and then words, to the speech prosthesis.
"The human brain function is very complicated," said Hui Mao, associate professor of radiology at Emory University School of Medicine. "So far we've only scratched the surface. We're recording simple brain processes at this point, but the proof of principle and the demonstration that this works opens the opportunity for different experts to come into the field."
The research was
published this month in the online science journal PLoS ONE.
© 2010 Discovery Channel