http://mindhacks.com/2014/12/29/why-you-...f-a-brain/

EXCERPT: [...] A number of stories have appeared in the news in recent months about people with chunks of their brains missing or damaged. These cases tell a story about the mind that goes deeper than their initial shock factor. It isn’t just that we don’t understand how the brain works, but that we may be thinking about it in the entirely wrong way.

Earlier this year, a case was reported of a woman who is missing her cerebellum, a distinct structure found at the back of the brain. By some estimates the human cerebellum contains half the brain cells you have. This isn’t just brain damage – the whole structure is absent. Yet this woman lives a normal life; she graduated from school, got married and had a kid following an uneventful pregnancy and birth. A pretty standard biography for a 24-year-old.

The woman wasn’t completely unaffected [...] But the surprise is how she moves at all, missing a part of the brain that is so fundamental it evolved with the first vertebrates.

[...] This case points to a sad fact about brain science. We don’t often shout about it, but there are large gaps in even our basic understanding of the brain. We can’t agree on the function of even some of the most important brain regions, such as the cerebellum. Rare cases such as this show up that ignorance. Every so often someone walks into a hospital and their brain scan reveals the startling differences we can have inside our heads. Startling differences which may have only small observable effects on our behaviour.

Part of the problem may be our way of thinking. It is natural to see the brain as a piece of naturally selected technology, and in human technology there is often a one-to-one mapping between structure and function. [...] The case of the missing cerebellum reveals there is no such simple scheme for the brain. Although we love to talk about the brain region for vision, for hunger or for love, there are no such brain regions, because the brain isn’t technology where any function is governed by just one part.

Take another recent case, that of a man who was found to have a tapeworm in his brain. Over four years it burrowed “from one side to the other“, causing a variety of problems such as seizures, memory problems and weird smell sensations. Sounds to me like he got off lightly for having a living thing move through his brain. If the brain worked like most designed technology this wouldn’t be possible. If a worm burrowed from one side of your phone to the other, the gadget would die. Indeed, when an early electromechanical computer malfunctioned in the 1940s, an investigation revealed the problem: a moth trapped in a relay – the first actual case of a computer bug being found....

Late night reading and discussing..Anti-religiousness..Long bouts of staring off into the distance..Tendency not to conform..Habitual use of words you've never heard of.

I just thought I would add this is a general discussion topic since it's something that can occasionally occur.  I had a rather nasty stain on a rather decent shirt and attempting to scrub it out wouldn't remove it. 

Instead I found that filling a bowl with hot water, placing some washing powder into it and stirring it.  Also applying some "vanish" spray (There might be other names for the detergent spray in other countries) to the surface of the stain, I then proceeded to first scrunch the shirt multiple times in the water.  After a few minutes of doing that, I held the are of shirt with the stain stretched while still in the water and motioned it back and forth.  (You could move it from the bottom of the bowl upwards so that the water drains through the shirt)

The idea is that rather than attempting to scrub a stain of the fibres, I was letting the flow of water and the detergent do the work since it permeates the fibres. 

Once that had been done a little bit I then placed it through the wash on a hot cycle.  The outcome was about a 99% stain removal, you can just faintly see where the stain was but you have to be staring at the patch from about 4 inches away for a little while.

Anyone else have a anecdote of how to remove such stains? (since I'm not quitting curry any time soon)

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...-football/

EXCERPT: [...] Prior to football’s postwar rise in popularity, antebellum Americans enjoyed sporting events like boxing, harness racing and early forms of baseball. According to the historians Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein, however, the Civil War “engendered an ethos of sacrifice, of dedication to the heroic cause” in male soldiers who played a variety of organized sports on teams within military units. After the war’s end, universities took on the role of creating student athletes through organized sports initiatives that inculcated young men with the Victorian virtues of masculinity and sportsmanship. Educational institutions began to emphasize the importance of athletics; in 1872, The New York World remarked: “There can scarcely be any question … that the increasing impulse towards athletics in all our colleges is in itself a good thing.”

Football was one of the most popular of these new collegiate activities, and it developed rapidly. The first intercollegiate American football game occurred on Nov. 6, 1869, when students from Princeton and Rutgers faced off in an informal match. Rutgers confronted Columbia in 1870, and Harvard and Yale first battled in 1875. University football teams continued to multiply in number after Princeton, Yale, Columbia and Harvard established the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1876.

A hybrid of early American folk football and British rugby, post-bellum American football was a violent sport that, according to the historian Allen Guttmann, appealed to young men hoping to “demonstrate the manly courage that their fathers and older brothers had recently proved on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War.” Bravery was a prerequisite for players in an era preceding the widespread use of helmets. In 1905 alone, 18 players were killed and 159 sustained severe wounds, statistics that motivated several universities to shut down the sport on their campuses. Despite its rough nature, football continued to flourish at many leading institutions....

http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-wor...1420234648

EXCERPT: [...] Science fiction often presents us with whole planets that speak a single language, but that fantasy seems more menacing here in real life on this planet we call home—that is, in a world where some worry that English might eradicate every other language. That humans can express themselves in several thousand languages is a delight in countless ways; few would welcome the loss of this variety.

But the existence of so many languages can also create problems: It isn’t an accident that the Bible’s tale of the Tower of Babel presents multilingualism as a divine curse meant to hinder our understanding. One might even ask: If all humans had always spoken a single language, would anyone wish we were instead separated now by thousands of different ones?

Thankfully, fears that English will become the world’s only language are premature. Few are so pessimistic as to suppose that there will not continue to be a multiplicity of nations and cultures on our planet and, along with them, various languages besides English. It is difficult, after all, to interrupt something as intimate and spontaneous as what language people speak to their children. Who truly imagines a Japan with no Japanese or a Greece with no Greek? The spread of English just means that earthlings will tend to use a local language in their own orbit and English for communication beyond.

But the days when English shared the planet with thousands of other languages are numbered. A traveler to the future, a century from now, is likely to notice two things about the language landscape of Earth. One, there will be vastly fewer languages. Two, languages will often be less complicated than they are today—especially in how they are spoken as opposed to how they are written.

Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world’s language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that’s unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard and AC current for similar reasons.

Also, the tones of Chinese are extremely difficult to learn beyond childhood, and truly mastering the writing system virtually requires having been born to it. In the past, of course, notoriously challenging languages such as Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Arabic, Russian and even Chinese have been embraced by vast numbers of people. But now that English has settled in, its approachability as compared with Chinese will discourage its replacement. Many a world power has ruled without spreading its language, and just as the Mongols and Manchus once ruled China while leaving Chinese intact, if the Chinese rule the world, they will likely do so in English.

Yet more to the point, by 2115, it’s possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to today’s 6,000. Japanese will be fine, but languages spoken by smaller groups will have a hard time of it. Too often, colonialization has led to the disappearance of languages: Native speakers have been exterminated or punished for using their languages. This has rendered extinct or moribund, for example, most of the languages of Native Americans in North America and Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Urbanization has only furthered the destruction, by bringing people away from their homelands to cities where a single lingua franca reigns.

Even literacy, despite its benefits, can threaten linguistic diversity. To the modern mind, languages used in writing, with its permanence and formality, seem legitimate and “real,” while those that are only spoken—that is, all but a couple hundred of them today—can seem evanescent and parochial. Few illusions are harder to shed than the idea that only writing makes something “a language.” Consider that Yiddish is often described as a “dying” language at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are living and raising children in it—just not writing it much—every day in the U.S. and Israel.

It is easy for speakers to associate larger languages with opportunity and smaller ones with backwardness, and therefore to stop speaking smaller ones to their children. But unless the language is written, once a single generation no longer passes it on to children whose minds are maximally plastic, it is all but lost. We all know how much harder it is to learn a language well as adults.

In a community where only older people now speak a language fluently, the task is vastly more difficult than just passing on some expressions, words and word endings. The Navajo language made news recently when a politician named Chris Deschene was barred from leading the Navajo nation because his Navajo isn’t fluent. One wishes Mr. Deschene well in improving his Navajo, but he has a mountain to climb. In Navajo there is no such thing as a regular verb: You have to learn by heart each variation of every verb. Plus it has tones.

That’s what indigenous languages tend to be like in one way or another. Languages “grow” in complexity the way that people pick up habits and cars pick up rust. One minute the way you mark a verb in the future tense is to use will: I will buy it. The next minute, an idiom kicks in where people say I am going to buy it, because if you are going with the purpose of doing something, it follows that you will. Pretty soon that gels into a new way of putting a verb in the future tense with what a Martian would hear as a new “word,” gonna.

In any language that kind of thing is happening all the time in countless ways, far past what is necessary even for nuanced communication. A distinction between he and she is a frill that most languages do without, and English would be fine without gonna alongside will, irregular verbs and much else....

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-155373

EXCERPT: [...] Buddhism, at least in its official doctrine, argues that if we abandon our desires by coming to understand the true nature of the cosmos and follow the Noble Eightfold Path, the end of suffering will follow. Stoicism similarly (but distinctly) counsels that we rid ourselves of emotion, and similarly (but again distinctly) offers a path of recognition of our place in the universe to help us get there. I do not wish to claim that either or both of these or related doctrines are mistaken. Instead, I want to say that most of us, when we really reflect upon our lives, would not want what is officially on offer, but instead something else.

In their official guise, these doctrines are examples of what I am going to label “invulnerabilism.” They say that we can, and we should, make ourselves immune to the world’s vicissitudes. What is central to invulnerabilist views is the belief that we can extricate ourselves from the world’s contingencies so that they do not affect us. We are capable of making ourselves immune to the fortunes of our bodies, our thoughts, and our environment, and we will live better or happier or more pure lives if we do so. Whether the task involves the abolition of desire, the elimination of emotion or the recognition of the ultimate oneness of all things, the guiding idea is that we can and ought to make ourselves invulnerable to the world’s vagaries.

For invulnerabilist views, what matters is only the present. After all, as they argue, the present is all there is, and therefore the only thing we can have an effect upon. Moreover, we can only be assured of having an effect upon ourselves in the present. Our effects upon the world are always uncertain. The task of invulnerabilism, then, is for us to inhabit the present fully and without reserve, letting go of the grip of our past and our desires for the future. Only if we do this can we render ourselves immune to the predations of our psychological tendencies, tendencies tied up with hope, regret, expectation and mourning.

Invulnerabilism recommends that we secrete a distance between ourselves and the world so that ultimately it cannot touch us. The extremity of such a view can be illustrated by reference to the Stoic’s ratification of the ancient philosopher Anaxagoras’ reported remark upon hearing of his son’s death: “I always knew that my child was a mortal.” It is possible perhaps that some few among us can reach this degree of distance from the world. But the question is, do we want it? I suspect I am not alone in thinking that the death of one of my children should shatter me, even if it should not ultimately destroy me.

Most of us want to feel caught up in the world. We want to feel gripped by what we do and those we care about, involved with them, taken up by them. The price of this involvement is our vulnerability. We must stand prepared to feel the loss of what we care about, because that is part of what it means to care. Caring requires desiring for the sake of others, which in an uncertain world entails that that desiring can be frustrated.

There are those who will argue that doctrines like Buddhism do not actually embrace the invulnerabilism I have saddled them with here. There are many Buddhists who feel the world deeply, and in particular are deeply compassionate about others. This is certainly true. I have in my life known two people I would call wise. One described himself as a Buddhist and the other as a Taoist. And both of them made themselves vulnerable to the world, and especially to those around them. So what then am I arguing here?

I am arguing that even many people who describe themselves or their goals in invulnerablist terms do not actually live or seek to live that way. The official doctrines, the ones that offer ultimate peace with oneself, a place of stillness that cannot be shaken, are in most cases a misrepresentation of what people are like or even what they want. Instead, something else is happening, something that involves some of the insights of invulnerabilist doctrines but does not embrace them in what I’m calling their official form.

As far as I can tell, the way to think about these things has less to do with the invulnerability promoted by the official doctrines, and more to do with, one might say, using these doctrines to take the edge off of vulnerability, to allow one to experience life without becoming overwhelmed or depressed or resentful or bitter, except perhaps at the extremity of loss. There is some combination of embedding oneself in the world in a vulnerable way and not being completely undone by that vulnerability that is pointed at, if not directly endorsed, by the official doctrines.

It seems to me that Taoism, Buddhism, Stoicism, etc. work not by making one invulnerable but rather by allowing one to step back from the immediacy of the situation so that the experience of pain or suffering is seen for what it is, precisely as part of a contingent process, a process that could have yielded a very different present but just happened to yield this one. This, of course, is not the official doctrine either, especially for Stoicism, for which the unfolding of the cosmos is a rational one. (Buddhists will periodically refer to the contingency of the cosmos’ unfolding; however, the concept of nirvana bends that contingency toward something more nearly rational, or at least just.) But it does seem to me to capture their common insight that there is so much about the world that we cannot control; seeking to master it is an illusion. We must learn instead to live with the process in all its contingency, even where we hope to change it for the better. And we must understand that for most of us suffering is inevitable. We can recognize all this and take solace from it without having to take the step of removing ourselves from the desires that lead to suffering....

I like to take note of various word fads---the tendency for certain words to be used in a certain new way for a period of time. Take "really?" for example. Used to be asking really? meant "is that really true?" But over the past several years it has assumed a certain faddish hip function of asking "seriously" in regards to someone's outlandish words or behavior. Other new word fads I've noticed: "full on" and "nailed it!". How about "don't go there!" Or "sick" and "sweet" meaning something especially fine. And lets not forget "wow" usually said in a droll monotone voice as if the sarcastically express surprise regarding something only moderately odd. Here's another one that gets me:

"It’s time once again for whining about words. There is just so much fodder out there, how can I resist?

I do tend to go on and on about bad word usage, which, to the uptight wordies among us, is like squeaky chalk on a blackboard. Surely, people still remember chalk and blackboards – and I know some readers remember and care about speech and words and writing as well. I know because they tell me they do.

So I rail on and share the pulpit with those of you I consider fellow travelers in language. But I begin by revisiting an old friend. I have spoken about the word “amazing” before, but it deserves an encore, now that care about it has been officially, sort of, sanctioned by TV’s “The View.”

I complain that everything is amazing. Listen to any conversation or interview or any group of words spoken aloud, and there it is, ad nauseam – a new bauble is declared amazing, as is a new application for your iPhone, haircut or whatever other new little distraction is being discussed. These items may be pretty, nice, colorful, sweet, silly or maybe even mildly interesting. But please, let’s snatch back amazing from trivialization and save its use for things that truly are – a breakthrough in research on a dread disease, discovery of a new species or a near-death experience.

Earlier this month on “The View,” daytime TV’s topical gab fest among a group of women, Joy Behar, a comedian whose style I find irritating (I irritate easily, it appears), complained that amazing is overused, applied equally to someone’s outfit and something of true significance. I may have to rethink my evaluation of Behar."===http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2010/ma...t-amazing/

Dreaming as a function of the chaos in the self-organizing brain
David Kahn, Allan Combs, and Stanley Krippner

"This paper agues that REM state dream experiences owe both their structure and meaning to chaotic self-organizing properties of the brain during REM sleep. Several lines of evidence support the notion that the REM dreaming brain can be understood as a process system that exists near the edge of chaos, one highly sensitive to internal influences. This sensitivity is due, first, to the fact that the dreaming brain gates out external input, thus operating without the stabilizing influences of waking feedback. Second, the pre-frontal cortex in REM sleep is only minimally activated, thus the brain operates with weakened volition, reduced logic, and diminished self-reflection. Third, there is a reduction of neuromodulatory inhibition during REM sleep, allowing the brain to respond to minute internal stimulation. Finally, the REM sleeping brain is subject to powerful intermittent cholinergic PGO stimulation that may initiate creative patterns of dream activity. Taken in overview, this conception of dreaming offers a common meeting ground for brain-based studies of dreaming and psychological dream theory


Self-organizing dynamics are fundamental to processes at many levels of the organic as well as the physical world, an idea shaped by both empirical and theoretical research over the last thirty years (e.g., Kauffman, 1993; Laszlo, 1987; Maturana, Varela, & Uribe, 1974; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). Recent work shows the same self-organization in the brain (e.g., Freeman, 1991; Kahn, & Hobson, 1993; Pribram, 1995; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), as well as in the process structure of human experience itself (e.g., Combs, 1996; Combs & Krippner, 1998). This paper discuses self-organizing dynamics in the brain with the intention
of understanding the REM dream experience alone and in relation to waking consciousness..."===http://www.academia.edu/4427865/Dreaming...zing_Brain