Madam Lichtenstein's Cosmic World

Brain Scans Can Decode Your Dream Content

Do you ever wake in the middle of the night from an amazing dream but then forget it by the morning? And what did that dream mean anyway? Dream analysis has always relied on memory but now scientists in Japan have found a way to use brain scanning technology to read the content of people’s dreams.

Here is the methodology: Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of three people as they slept, while simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG).

The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the brain wave patterns associated with the earliest stages of sleep, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then let them go back to sleep. This was done in three-hour blocks, and repeated between 7 and 10 times, on different days, for each participant. During each block, participants were woken up 10 times per hour. Each volunteer reported having visual dreams 6 or 7 times every hour, giving the researchers a total of around 200 dream reports from each of them.

Most of the dreams reflected everyday experiences. “I had a dream [that I was at] a bakery. I took a roll … then went out on the street, and saw a person taking a photograph,” reported one participant. “I saw a big bronze statue … on a small hill [and] below the hill there were houses, streets, and trees,” said another. Some contained slightly more unusual content, such as meeting a film star or being in a recording studio.

Kamitani and his colleagues used a lexical database called WordNet to extract key words from the participants’ verbal reports, and picked 20 categories — such as “car”, “male”, “female”, and “computer” — that appeared most frequently in their dream reports. They then selected photos representing each category, scanned the participants’ brains again while they viewed the images, and compared brain activity patterns with those recorded just before the participants were woken up.

The researchers analysed activity in brain areas V1, V2 and V3, which are involved in the earliest stages of visual processing and encode basic features of visual scenes, such as contrast and the orientation of edges. They also looked at several other regions that are involved in higher order visual functions, such as object recognition.

In 2008, Kamitani and his colleagues reported that they could decode and reconstruct visual images from the activity in these brain areas. Now, they have found that activity in the higher order brain regions could accurately predict the content of the participants’ dreams.

“We built a model to predict whether each category of content was present in the dreams,” says Kamitani. “By analysing the brain activity during the nine seconds before we woke the subjects, we could predict whether a man is in the dream or not, for instance, with an accuracy of 75–80%.”

He adds that the experiments did not examine the visual structure of the participants’ dreams. “It’s about their meaning, but I still think it’s possible to extract structural characteristics like shape and contrast, as we did in 2008.”

This article titled “Brain scans decode dream content” was written by Mo Costandi, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 5th April 2013 09.40 UTC

 

Once you remember your dreams, check this dream analysis dictionary to see what they mean and try some of these interesting dream analysis books on the subject.

Rumpology?

Okay, I admit that I find this sort of strange but if we think that feeling the bumps on ones head (called phrenology) can be predictive,then why not other parts of the body? However I will NOT be going in for a rump reading any time soon!

This from the NY Post:

Sylvester Stallone may be a famous actor, but his mom, Jackie, can read butts. Technically, Ms. Stallone studies rumpology, the supposedly ancient practice of reading the lines, crevices and folds to divine an individual’s character and reveal his future. Her services range from a total rumpology report ($ 300 per cheek) to a gluteal cleft, or ‘‘crack,’’ report ($ 250). ‘‘It is more than an advertising sign for plumbers, teens and nonconformists,’’ she says of the cleft. ‘‘It has real significance.’’

Now You Can Come Back From the Dead - Really

The New York Post reported on a wonderful but eerie capability of the human body to come back to life after being dead for even hours at a time. MAUREEN CALLAHAN reports that death can be reversed as long as certain conditions are there. Read more in the fascinating book by Dr. Sam Parnia called  Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death

The implications are as revolutionary as the discovery of fire and electricity, the invention of aviation and manned space flight, the A-bomb and the Internet. “For millennia, we couldn’t do anything when someone stopped breathing,” Dr Parnia says. “Now, we’re almost having to redefine the way we think about death.”

The science is still in its infancy, and successful resuscitation requires two non-negotiables: a treatable underlying cause of death, such as a clogged artery or fluid in the lungs, and a body that has been cooled, either naturally or artificially. It’s the cooling that retards cell death in the body and the brain, protecting against cognitive impairment.

The possibilities are almost inconceivable. In the near future, if you were to die of cardiac arrest before an organ transplant, you may be dead for hours or days while a new organ is found — or grown from your own stem cells — then transplanted before you’re revived. Studies are underway involving a new drug that slows the rate of brain-cell death by 50%, which could double the viability of a corpse. Death may eventually become less a permanent state than a way station.

“Many who died young and prematurely could have been saved,” Parnia says. “I arrived at Stony Brook in 2010, and we barely had any cooling being done in this unit.” Last Monday, a 50-something patient died in the cath lab at Stony Brook; she had a diseased heart and was on the list for a transplant. “We got her back in an hour and a half,” Parnia says.

“It’s absolutely the cold,” Parnia says, and one of his favorite examples is the Titanic: If we knew then what we know now, Parnia says, almost all of those who died could have been saved, their causes of death ideal — drowning and hypothermia. “Today, we would not have necessarily declared those people dead — at least not in the irreversible and irretrievable sense,” he writes, and when he saw the James Cameron film again recently, he kept coming back to the same question: When did each of those people actually, really die?

Parnia says the most compelling case yet is that of a woman in Japan who was found in a forest; her body temp was 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s estimated she was dead for five hours. Doctors worked on her for another six hours using state-of-the-art medical advances, including an ECMO machine, which provides the blood and oxygen needed to keep organs alive without a heartbeat.

“She walked out of the hospital, unimpaired,” Parnia says. “If doctors put together all the latest advances” — including a machine that performs CPR with far more precision than a human — “we can push back death longer than we ever thought possible.”

The problem, Parnia says, is that there is no external mandate for these protocols in the state or nationwide, no regulatory body in place, not enough doctors and nurses aware these advances exist.

New York City, however, is unique: In 2008, the FDNY — which provides EMS services — began cooling every dying patient intravenously and in 2009 announced that they would not take a patient to any facility that did not have a hypothermia unit. For this reason, every hospital in New York City now has one. Still, if you get dragged out of the East River four hours after drowning, whether you are brought back to life will depend on the doctor you get and the call he or she makes — precisely because there are no enforceable standards.

Even many in the medical community, Parnia says, are trying to comprehend the impact of these advances. “I’ll go to conferences, and someone will say to me, ‘Oh, that patient was clinically dead,’ and I’ll say, ‘No. They were dead.’ They can’t grasp it — this concept is so ingrained in our heads. We have this social and philosophical notion of death, but it’s biological.”

Parnia also thinks we should replace the term “near-death experience” with “actual death experience” and that resuscitation science can only benefit from taking such accounts seriously. “In medicine, we’ve brushed people who’ve had this experience aside,” he says.

Parnia has no religious belief in this area, he says, and is not out to prove whether there’s a heaven or a hell or an afterlife. “We have this horde of evidence of people who have recollections,” he says, and though such accounts have existed for thousands of years, they were rare until the invention of CPR. “There are many millions of them,” he says. “We try to explain [NDEs] as lack of oxygen, hallucinations — but there’s no evidence to show it’s chemical.”

The commonality and uniformity of these accounts, which cut across cultures and religions — even atheists share similar stories — are evidence, Parnia says, that the experience is real. He thinks that those who report nothing have forgotten, just as not recalling our dreams doesn’t mean we didn’t have them. “I think this is a universal experience,” he says. “I think it happens to all of us when we die.”

Among the most reported details: a beam of white light, overwhelming feelings of love and peace, the appearance of deceased loved ones, detailed reports on what doctors and nurses were doing and saying, wearing and even thinking while trying to revive the dead patient — all point to a consciousness, Parnia says, that lives after the body and brain have died. And that consciousness, as the late Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist John Eccles believed, may be independent of the brain.

How long the experience lasts and just what it is — transitory? Does this consciousness itself eventually die? Are our brains simply capable of far more than we know? — will be further explained by those unwitting pioneers of the future who remain dead for days, weeks, months, years and then come back to tell.

“From a medical perspective, I think it’s very hard to argue that when somebody dies, they become annihilated,” he says. “What does that mean for our definition of death? Is this person viable for 24 hours, and if so, where are they? It’s unlikely to think that consciousness dies. The question is: For how long does it exist?”

Read more:New York researchers are bringing people back to life hours after they die - NYPOST.comhttp://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/back_from_the_dead_kghyCkyk8MEEGjSSVmwAhM#ixzz2NBmdt7Rm

 

Unusual Night Time Phenomena

I am not sure I know what is causing this but I wanted to share this email from a reader with you. If you have any explanations for why this might be occuring, please send them on to me.

Dear Madam Lichtenstein,

I write to you to ask if you can help me explain what has been occuring for the past three nights in my bedroom. my husband and I have a queen size bed. On his side he keeps an alarm clock, his cell phone (sometimes turned off at night. Sometimes not.) and the television remotes. On my side I have my cell phone (always turned off at night), my ipod with the headset wired wrapped around it so it cannot be easily turned on and the remote for the overhead fan which is not in use at this time of year.

At around 3am on March 16 I woke to the sound of beeping chimes going like beep beep - beep beep. I thought it was my husbands cell phone recording a message since the sound came from his side of the bed. I opened my eyes at the sound and saw my ipod light go on like someone pressed the pad and then 2-3 seconds later, go off.We checked his cell phone later that morning and there was no message recorded and no call coming through at that time.

The next night -March 10 - at 4am (it was daylight savings time and we pushed the clocks an hour ahead so it was essentially the same time as the previous night) the exact same thing occured. This time I woke my husband and while he did not hear the chimes/beeps, he woke in time to see the ipod light go on and off.In the morning he noted that his cell phone was turned completely off that night so it did not come from his cell phone.

And now last night March 11 at 4am, I was awake waiting to see what would happen. Again, I heard the four beeps from the far side of my husbands side of the bed and then the ipod light went on and then off on my side of the bed.

I can't explain this at all! What do you think is happening? We lost a very dear friend last year at this time so I wonder if these events are in any way connected?

Thank you for any insights that you can send.

 

 

 

The Copiale Cipher

There are many secret societies around - most hearkening back to the early times of science and philosophy. Some of these societies are still around today like the FreeMasons but many are lost in time. And some are buried deep within other secret societies creating even more mystery and intrigue. Take for example the Copiale Cipher which is one of those secret societies (called the Ocultists) within a secret society. Interestingly the Oculists’ insignia show cats watching over mice. It could be an Oculist joke — or a sign that they were spies.

If you want to learn more about Freemasons, check out this fascinating book 101 Secrets of the Freemasons: The Truth Behind the World's Most Mysterious Society

Here is a link to the full article on the Copiale Cipher which tells the story of how the full translation unfolded. And for those who prefer video, check out this overview:

 

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