Nice Comment

Comment was by Stephen on October 23, 2020 at 4:23am

Betty is really up there with the best satirists on YouTube 

Comment was by Ruth Anthony-Gardner on October 22, 2020 at 10:32pm

Betty Bowers

Comment was by Loren Miller on October 16, 2020 at 9:38am

A corollary of Lessing's statement:

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Comment was by Davy on October 16, 2020 at 9:02am

Think wrongly, if you please ; but in all cases think for yourself. — Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781)

Comment was by Stephen on January 21, 2019 at 6:59pm

Is the Atheist Community a Cult?

Comment was by Doone on July 7, 2014 at 8:05am

A Switch For Consciousness

JUL 7 2014 @ 7:29AM

Scientists seem to have discovered one:

In a [new study], Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues describe how they managed to switch a woman’s consciousness off and on by stimulating her claustrum. The woman has epilepsy so the team were using deep brain electrodes to record signals from different brain regions to work out where her seizures originate. One electrode was positioned next to the claustrum, an area that had never been stimulated before.

When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn’t respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event. The same thing happened every time the area was stimulated during two days of experiments (Epilepsy and Behavior, doi.org/tgn).

Comment was by A Former Member on May 21, 2013 at 12:01am

There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them — isn't this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual? -- Václav Havel

Comment was by A Former Member on April 1, 2013 at 10:20pm

Our comforting conviction that [the] world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. -- Daniel Kahneman

Comment was by Doone on January 24, 2013 at 7:59pm

A retrospective editing of consciousness

January 24, 2013 – 9:11 pm

A new study has found that conscious experience can be altered retrospectively, so that experience of visual information can be changed almost half a second later by manipulating where our attention is drawn.

The research, led by cognitive scientist Claire Sergent, involved asking people to stare at a centre point of a screen with two empty circles either side.

At some point, one of the two circles would fill with randomly oriented stripes for just 50ms (one twentieth of a second) and afterwards the participants were asked to say which direction the stripes were pointing in.

Crucially however, each time this happened, one of the two circles would dim either before or after the stripes appeared.

This would happen at different times – from 400ms before the stripes appeared, up to 400ms after the stripes appeared, and the dimmed circle might appear on the matching side to the stripes or on the opposite side.

Dimming one of the circles grabs your attention. It makes you instantly focus more on whichever side of space it happens.

For example, if the left-hand circle dims, it grabs your attention, and if the stripes then appear on the left, you’re more likely to make a correct judgement about which direction they’re pointing because you’re already focused on this area. But if the stripes subsequently appear on the other side, you’re distracted and you do worse.

The key discovery from this experiment was that this also happens if the dimmed circle appears after the stripes. Up to 400ms seconds after.

In other words, you perceive the original visual details that would otherwise have escaped consciousness if your attention is drawn to the area after the picture disappears. It’s like a retrospective editing of consciousness by post-event attention.

This suggests that consciousness isn’t ‘filtered’ sensory information, but an active ‘conclusion’ drawn from information distributed across senses, space and time.
 

Link to locked scientific study.
Link to open-access commentary from same journal.

Comment was by Michel on January 15, 2013 at 10:37am

Yes, good video, thnx for posting.

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