Measuring Consciousness,Coma.Illusion?

Consciousness is some thing of which we know precious little.

 

It is  something which we know exists ,yet we do not know how and where.

 

The understanding becomes even more difficult when we are confronted with Coma.

In medicine, a coma (from the Greek κῶμα koma, meaning deep sleep) is a state of unconsciousness lasting more than six hours,^[1] in which a person: cannot be awakened; fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound; lacks a normal sleep-wake cycle; and, does not initiate voluntary actions.^[1] A person in a state of coma is described as being comatose.(wiki)

 

Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.^[1][2] It has been defined as: subjectivity,awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.^[3] Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.^[4] As Max Velmansand Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: “Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.”^[5]

 

As may be seen it is only a description.

 

So Coma is the ‘perceived’ disappearance of Consiuosness while we know not what Consciousness is!

 

Still more intriguing is the confusion whether it is Magnetic or Electrical.

 

So we are faced with the dilemma in diagnosing whether one is in Coma and in a vegetative State.

 

The issue becomes important in case we decide on Euthanasia.

 

Scientists have now found a way of determining whether one is in Coma.

 

‘Scientists can now distinguish between people in vegetative and minimally conscious states by measuring brain waves, a Belgian research team announced at the Society for Neuroscienceconference last week, which could lead to a more clear-cut, objective way to make the diagnosis.

Recording Consciousness..

 

The researchers used EEGs, readouts of the brain’s electrical activity, to study how the brains of healthy and brain-damaged people responded to a mild electrical jolt. They then quantified how complex and widespread the brain activity of different patients was, using this complexity measure as, essentially, a gauge of consciousness. In 32 wide-awake, healthy patients, the jolt elicited a widespread flurry of brain activity; two patients with locked-in syndrome, where patients are fully conscious but unable to move or respond, showed a similarly complex response. The jolt produced less complex brain responses in twelve minimally conscious patients. Six vegetative patients showed even less complex brain activation still, on par with what the researchers saw in sleeping subjects and in those under anesthesia.’

 

Lesser the reaction and complexity, more is the conclusion that it is Coma.

 

Therefore one point is clear, Consciousness is something that makes one more aware.

 

This would help in determining Coma,apart from dispelling the notion that Consciousnesses is not a figment of imagination.

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/10/22/conscious-or-not-brain-responses-bring-scientists-closer-to-making-a-diagnosis-in-the-brain-damaged/

 

 

Is Consciousness an Illusion?

‘

So I’m going to speak about a problem that I have and that’s that I’m a philosopher.

(Laughter)

When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, “I’m a professor,” their eyes glaze over. When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I’m in and I say, “philosophy” — their eyes glaze over.

(Laughter)

When I go to a philosopher’s party

(Laughter)

and they ask me what I work on and I say, “consciousness,” their eyes don’t glaze over — their lips curl into a snarl.

 

Mind Operated Drone. Video

 

Controlling Drone by Mind

Mind Control is a fascinating subject

 

In the Eastern Philosophies Mind, unlike the Occidental Philosophies,is considered to be an Organ like the other sense organs.

 

Indian Systems like the Nyaya,Yoga and Vaiseshika treat the difference between Mind and Matter(including the sense organs) as one of Degree and not in kind.

 

The more the vibrations, subtler the object becomes.The Mind vibrates at a Higher Frequency than Matter.

 

Therefore it is not perceived by the sense organs.

 

If the sense  organs were made to tune to the higher frequency of The Mind or The Mind made to vibrate at a lesser frequency to match the sense organs ,then the communication is possible.

 

However, these systems state that neither is possible.

 

But one Mind can be made to tune into the wave length of the other Mind.

 

The principle behind this is that there is a Universal Mind and the Individual Minds appear to be so because of TIME ,Space and The Vaasanas( the unique remnant traces of actions performed either through Mind,Words, or Actions)

 

They have discovered that it is possible , by practice and determination the Mind can be made to oscillate at different frequencies and thus enables one to achieve Clairvoyance, Clairaudience Kinestasis,Telepathy and Transcending the barrier of Time and Space.

 

The Buddhists are adept in these functional area and many of the Lamas practice this even to-day.

 

Now The Chinese seem to have a developed a Mind Controlled Drone, which obeys Mental Commands .

 

This seems to be based on a Theory not explained .

 

The theoretical base is to be examined.

 

It looks that the thought waves from the Brain are fed into a PC , converted into Mechanical Commands and the connection is set to the Drone.

 

Story:

 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH96O5niEnI&feature=youtu.be

To get the drone to raise or to land, a user would need to “think left” hard. “Think left lightly” if you want to rotate clockwise and “right” if you want it to lurch forward. Give it a lift in the air by thinking “push.” And imagine clenching it if you want to bring it back down to earth.

But moving around is not the only task it can do. Remember how they tell you to avoid blinking when taking photos? Well here it’s the opposite: blinking is the command that tells the drone to photograph its environs.

The video shows a man in a wheelchair using the technology to get a closer view of flowers, to take pictures and even to guide his drone through a battle with another quadrotor controlled through a handheld remote control. Needless to say, mind triumphs over matter and the hand-managed drone is hustled off the mat by its thought-controlled analog.

The students hope their technology will be able to help disabled people become more interactive with the world around them, and are slated to present their invention at the ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp), which will be held next week in Pittsburg.

While handicap assistance and gaming is one potential application for the system, only the imagination can limit the potential uses mind-controlled drones could have in the future, both for civilian and other purposes.

http://current.com/1ngkgkc

 

Scientists Find a Way To Hack Human Brain.

Scary!

What can one say?

The EEG results for a target and a non-target stimulus

Story:

The idea is simply this: have your brain mapped by sensors (here, an EEG or Electroencephalograph is used), which pick up crucial brain activity and then sophisticated software can help understand what it is that the brain is trying to do! These are called ‘brain-computer interfaces’ (or BCI’s) for obvious reasons.

These can actually help you mentally control your computer using specific thought patterns.

What is interesting is how a computer can browse through your mental database and steal away some pieces of sensitive information. Security researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Geneva and University of California, Berkeley have developed a program to be used by the software that has only one purpose – finding information like home address, debit card PIN and date of birth. They found 28 willing participants, who didn’t know about the hacking (of course, otherwise the whole exercise is futile, right?) and tested this program on them. The success rate varied from a mere 10% to a respectable 40% for different fields of sensitive data.

The technique is a lot like hacking passwords. The key response tracked by the program is known as a P300 response – the brainwave activity that the brain undergoes when it recognizes something familiar, like a known face, own neighbourhood, own debit card PIN and so on! The peaks in the P300 activity were noted and the analysis of this data can give a very good indication of what the right answers are!

http://techie-buzz.com/science/brain-hack.html#eDGHFT0axkrQayOF.99

Train and Tone Your Your Mind, Interactive Website

A good site worth trying.

Story:

Squareeater uses a combination of binaural audio and stroboscopic visual effects in an attempt to achieve brainwave entrainment in the user. The ideal result is to change the user’s brainwaves to a specific frequency associated with a specific mental state. In general, lower EEG frequencies correspond to relaxation and sleep while higher frequencies are for alertness or anxiousness.

Tips on using:

1. Get comfortable. Consider using squareeater as a meditative device. Try laying in bed, or sitting in a traditional meditation position. Focus on the audio, and the rhythm of the beating. Be aware of your breathing

2. USE HEADPHONES, preferrably of a decent quality. The binaural audio needs to be isolated specifically to each ear, which is only possible via headphones. The audio should be relatively loud, while still remaining comfortable.

3. Try to make your environment as dark as possible, then get as close to the screen while remaining comfortable. The visuals have been designed to have different effects with eyes opened or closed, so try both. Some visuals will cause visual distortions while others cause the user to see colors that aren’t actually represented.

4. Have fun! Try squareeater at different times of the day, under different mind sets, etc.

If you have ANY history with epilepsy, DO NOT USE!!!..

Squareeater uses a combination of binaural beats and psychostrobic flicker effects to attempt to induce brainwave entrainment in the viewer.

Binaural beats are achieved by putting a tone in one ear of the listener and a slightly different tone in the other. For example, if the left ear is hearing a sine wave tone of 397hz (cycles per second) and the right is hearing 403hz, the brain perceives a pulse of 6hz, the difference in the frequencies.

Under ideal conditions, frequency following response occurs in brainwave functions, meaning the brain starts to function at the same frequency as the binaural stimulus. Different frequencies of stimulus correspond to different brainwave states, for example 4-7hz correspond to theta waves, a brain state associated with deep meditation or early stages of sleep.

Additionally, the stimulus does not have to be auditory, but psychostrobic visuals can also induce similar effects (ie. the dream machine).

We are often asked “aren’t the effects just placebo?”. While there certainly have been users whose response is largely imagined, there have been a number of studies (see research below) published in legitimate scientific journals drawing a correlation between binaural beats and brainwave functions. While the research is insufficient at this point to fully understand how the brain reacts with entrainment, a variety of responses have been well documented.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/7ulRay/:1Vyj+D+aU:5Qjid@4u/squareeater.com/?sms_ss=stumbleupon&at_xt=4dd6501e7ad7d2ae,0/

 

Scientists Measure Pain.-New Technic.

Every thing seems to be quantified!

 

Physicians gauging pain have little to go on besides a patient’s self-report. And some sufferers simply can’t communicate how they’re feeling.

So scientists have searched for a reliable way to measure pain physiologically. And they may finally have one.

Researchers performed functional MRI scans on the brains of 24 subjects who were having an arm heated to the point of moderate pain. The subjects’ brain patterns were recorded both as they experienced pain and zero pain. The researchers then used an algorithm to develop a pain model, based on the patterns. The work was published in the journal PLoS One.

The researchers then analyzed the brain scan patterns of 16 new subjects, some experiencing pain, some not. They found that their model accurately predicted pain levels 81 percent of the time.

Most studies of physiology-based measurements of pain have focused on heart rate, skin conductance and EEG. These measures correlate with pain, but nothing has been accurate enough to substitute for self-reports.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/21/measure-pain-mri_n_974213.html