Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the extraordinary mind of the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. In 1907 Sigmund Freud met a young man and fell into a conversation that is reputed to have lasted for 13 hours. That man was the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Freud is celebrated as the great pioneer of the 20th century mind, but the idea that personality types can be ‘introverted’ or ‘extroverted’, that certain archetypal images and stories repeat themselves constantly across the collective history of mankind, and that personal individuation is the goal of life, all belong to Jung: “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart… Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens”, he declared. And he also said “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you”.
Decided to gather the videos about LSD that have a scientific/philosophical approach and expanded on the powerful effects it has on the human mind. Found this really fascinating clip from a 1956 television program on mental health issues. Dr Sidney Cohen at the time was dosing random volunteers at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Los Angeles; he is the one sitting at the table wearing a lounge suite asking the housewife all the questions. The housewife’s last remarks are what get me, “if you can’t see it, you’ll never know about it. I feel sorry for you.” The doesage she took, if you didn’t catch it was 100 gamma of LSD 25- one tenth of a milligram, the equivalent of one 600th of a grain. It’s interesting to see her accept this ‘new’ reality so readily and how she feels whole, unified with everything and everyone; I wonder if our sense of empathy is related to the DMT that’s naturallymade in our brains. Not so keen about the message at the very end though, once you read more about the leaders of the psychedelic movement you’ll find that they had good intentions, which were shot down by the strictness of the Nixon era.
God, i love this man. Richard Alpert before he became the famed Ram Das, talks about the shifts society could have taken to become more collaborative, motivational and whole. I loved the slogan the presentor saw, which said “all wars are civil wars because all men are brothers.” It’s quite saddening that a powerful psychological tool like this would have such a negative stigma labeled onto it. Keep it in the labs and off the streets, no need to ban it from science as well. Then maybe we can start to recreate Huxley’s more utopian society that he wrote about in Island; a civilization that is truly ‘civilized’ without the “I’ve got to fuck you over to get where i want to get” mentality.
This video is so great, it shows the effects of LSD on military personnel during a military training exercise. Some of the things they do are just straight up comical, it’s almost like they’re children again.
Another experiment tested LSD with artistic ability, a series of 9 drawing were created during the trip; the test was conducted by the US government during it’s dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950′s. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. If you want to see the results go to this link!
A friend showed me this interesting video on how to make a laser microscope; with three simple steps you’ll be exploring the microscopic world at home- makes for a fun project to do with your friends or kids! Check it out and try it out.
A short story about the Semantic Web. Some Internet experts believe the next generation of the Web – Web 3.0– will make tasks like your search for movies and food faster and easier. Instead of multiple searches, you might type a complex sentence or two in your Web 3.0 browser, and the Web will do the rest. For example, you could type “I want to see a funny movie and then eat at a good Mexican restaurant. What are my options?” The Web 3.0 browser will analyze your response, search the Internet for all possible answers, and then organize the results for you. That’s not all. Many of these experts believe that the Web 3.0 browser will act like a personal assistant. As you search the Web, the browser learns what you are interested in. The more you use the Web, the more your browser learns about you and the less specific you’ll need to be with your questions. Eventually you might be able to ask your browser open questions like “where should I go for lunch?” Your browser would consult its records of what you like and dislike, take into account your current location and then suggest a list of restaurants.
“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, starting with the sad attempt to scoop some of that star candy up. Even though white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest one is still 8.6 light-years away, which is roughly 81,360,544,300 kilometers. So assuming you’ve got a light-speed spaceship, a bunch of books and videos to keep you amused for 8.6 years and that the heat and radiation emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach you might be able to get somewhere. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.” (This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)
Now that you have your super volatile sample and have somehow removed it from the superdense, high-pressure star; you got the problem of containing it on Earth’s low-pressure environment, which would cause it to explode if not encapsulated properly. Let’s just say it didn’t blow up or vaporize your entire being, since the teaspoon sample temperature would range about 5538˚ and 55538 C˚- and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, it’d be pretty damn hard to feed yourself: A single teaspoon weighing in excess of five tons!
“You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth,” Hammergren says. “The good news is that it’s not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out.”Ouch. If you observed your friend doing all of this and still wanted a taste for yourself, but don’t want to travel the 8.5 light-years or die, you can always open your fridge since it’s full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything we see around us were formed in the cores of stars. We fall in love, play with, eat and live on star poop.
Pleasure is vital for our survival – without it we wouldn’t eat or have sex, and would soon die out as a species. But how does pleasure work and what gives us the most pleasure in life? In an attempt to find out, Michael Mosley learns how the hottest chilli in the world creates euphoria in the brain, why parents have an overwhelming surge of love for their newborn child and what happens if you turn your own wedding into a chemistry experiment. We all know that where there is pleasure, pain can’t be far behind, and Michael gamely exposes himself to some painful experiments to show why the two are so interlinked. Why is pain so important and how can we measure it? How much pain are we prepared to put up with if the reward is right and what would happen if we couldn’t feel pain at all? And how far is Michael prepared to go in the name of pleasure? Will he be able to overcome enormous pain and stress in order to experience one of the biggest pleasure kicks in the world? A over all lighthearted documentary with interesting insights, give it a watch!
The science of Cymantics is an interesting one, people working in that field study sound and its vibrations; through observing the effect of sound on matter scientists have demonstrated that a single tone can birth unbelievably complex geometric patters and structures. Particles are attracted to one another and create forms found in nature, even mimicking organic movement.
When many tones, or frequencies are coupled together in a simultaneous explosion of chordal harmony, the unified tones create vastly greater complexity, growth and creation. A sequence of tones, a melody, can take this notion even further still. Interestingly enough, music activates the higher brain functions which only human necessities should trigger, such as food and sex. This would mean that the mind values music and sees it as a way of sustaining itself.
Within these experiments, the ‘creator’ of those stunning forms is a speaker located under the metal plates, the surface of the plate is a 2-dimensional plane where the vibrations are emanating only from one direction. Now if you may, imagine at the center of every planet (and of every life form, including you!) and sun there is a kind of speaker, emitting vibrations in a 3-dimentional way from some vibration-emitting force. That force would presumably be consciousness; if the link between it and sound were made, then the increased complexity we witness via cymatics, could also mean increased consciousness and intelligence. It all sounds farfetched but so did flying a hundred years ago, let’s just tease our imaginations.
This is a very, very old film/conversation that was made in 1988. Anyhow, I thought it would be good to have it on here. In a studio setting, Stephen Hawking, Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan (who joins them via satellite) discuss the Big Bang theory, God, our existence as well as the possibility of extraterrestrial life. God, the Universe and Everything Else is an educational colloquium, attempting to uncover a grand unified theory of the laws that govern the universe. This enlightening program delves deep into topics such as the Big Bang Theory, the expansion of the universe, black holes, extraterrestrial life and the origins of creativity. Stephen Hawking is a British theoretical physicist who has dedicated much of his life to probing the laws of time and space described by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Carl Sagan was an American astronomer who played a major role in the development of the American space program, as well as his contributions to planetary science. Arthur C. Clarke is a British author, most famous for the science fiction classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his optimistic vision for mankind exploring the galaxy.
With Cosmos, Carl Sagan and his wife and co-writer, Ann Druyan, brilliantly illustrated the underlying science of his same-titled book, placing the human species within a space-and-time context that brought the infinite into stunningly clear view. The series, which originally aired in 1980 on PBS, has been seen by more than 700 million people worldwide and remains a high-water mark in miniseries history.
Sagan lucidly explains such topics as Einstein’s theory of relativity, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the greenhouse effect, bringing the mysteries of the universe down to a layman’s level of understanding. The footage in these remastered, seven-DVD or seven-VHS sets is as fresh and riveting as it was two decades ago and is certain to fire the imaginations of a whole new generation of viewers. This is THE GREATEST television series ever.
This documentary inspired me to a love of science, learning, and freedom of inquiry that have shaped both my interests and intellectual curiosity. Of the hundreds of high-quality science doc series released in the interim, none approach the majesty and depth of this one. An elegant and artistic enterprise for a well-organized, self-correcting way of reasoning and thinking about the universe/time we occupy. After a quarter of a century, this series is as captivating as it is an education.
Carl Sagan, was a legend, and a personal hero. He’s was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and the giver of space and natural science knowledge. He’s published more that 600 scientific papers and articles, and was the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books! He was the pioneer of exobiology and promoted the SETI project (The one featured in the movie Contact-which is based off of his book). Mr Sagan because recognized by the world from his popular science books and his award-winning 1980′s television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote.
I simultaneously cried, laughed, and screamed ‘holyshitballs’ while nervously shaking because of the utter awe that bullet trained into me when i read this. Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach! Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers. Inception is close in hand, my friends!
As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.”This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuro-scientist, “We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”Eventually, practical applications of the technology could include a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people who cannot communicate verbally, such as stroke victims, coma patients and people with neurodegenerative diseases.
This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed the perception of the human mind and its workings profoundly. His influence on the 20th century is widely regarded as massive. The documentary describes the impact of Freud’s theories on the perception of the human mind, and the ways public relations agencies and politicians have used this during the last 100 years for their engineering of consent. Among the main characters are Freud himself and his nephew Edward Bernays, who was the first to use psychological techniques in advertising. He is often seen as the father of the public relations industry.
For those who don’t know about TED.com, it’s one of the most informative sites on the internets. They have free talks from the top dogs of every field of science and art. In other words, it’s epic. What the link above does is rate the hundreds of videos on TED based on Facebook likes, Reddit votes, Twitter tweets, Digg votes and Google Buzz Mentions! Check it out, it’s worth it. I promise.
