28
POPSDoes the Human Mind Have Potential “Super Powers”? So, if all of us have latent super-abilities, is it possible to activate them permanently, or at least periodically, without compromising normal brain functioning? Probably, say the Australian scientists who used transcranial magnetic stimulation to temporarily switch off the frontal temporal lobe of volunteers. Afterwards the subjects showed an immediate improvement in calendar calculating, naming the day of the week of any recent history event, and in their artistic abilities. Of course these were just the abilities tested. Scientists do not know all of the latent abilities that humans may possess. It has been predicted that more advanced neurological studies may someday discover how to allow “Regular” people to tap into the incredible latent powers of their own mind, and thereby unleashing some of the “superhuman” potential in all of us.
22
POPSOur "Digital Shadow" -a Mind-Bending Prediction In terms of numbers, the figures are staggering. The size of the digital universe for 2007 reached 281 billion gigabytes, or, 281 exabytes. This works out to be about 45GB of digital information per person on the planet. And, considering the lack of information for some of the third world countries, one can only imagine how much those of us reading this article will have under their belts. Furthermore, the amount of information about us that is generated automatically on a pretty much daily basis outweighs the total volume of information that we create about ourselves. Naturally this has large security implications that the IT sector will have to address more and more as time passes.
18
POPSThink Yourself Healthy by Appreciating the Exercise You Already Do To illustrate with just one of the outcomes they measured, the average weight of those in the intervention group reduced from 145.5 lbs to 143.72 lbs. Over the same period the control group showed no significant change. For those of you working metric-style that's 66.14 kg down to 65.33 kg. That's like dropping a bag of sugar. In four weeks. With no additional exercise.
12
POPSComputer model of bees probes the hive mind Thenius believes the foragers may be picking up clues about the quality of sources from their interactions with receivers. If some foragers have found a bountiful new source, the receivers have more work to do, so average unloading times across all foragers increase. This delay might suggest the existence of a better nectar source than the one a given forager has been visiting. Similarly, receivers are sometimes already half-full from another bee's nectar when a new forager arrives, so a forager needs to unload to more than one receiver. If this occurs more frequently, it may also suggest that a richer nectar source has been found. To test this hypothesis, Thenius's team built a computer simulation of a hive containing 5000 independent virtual bees. Each forager started out visiting one of two different flower patches, but would switch destinations if it had to wait too long to be unloaded or was being serviced by too many receivers.
25
POPSMechanism Behind Mind-body Connection Discovered The study reveals how stress makes people more susceptible to illness. The findings also suggest a potential drug target for preventing damage to the immune systems of persons who are under long-term stress, such as caregivers to chronically ill family members, as well as astronauts, soldiers, air traffic controllers and people who drive long daily commutes.
25
POPSUnintelligent Design At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth. The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.
31
POPSOf Two Minds, One Consciousness But perhaps even more profound, he explains how, even though split-brain patients have isolated hemispheres, they experience a unified consciousness—that is, feel as though they are of one mind.
12
POPSThe InnerSpace Foundation A founding philosophy of The InnerSpace Foundation is that the shortest and most efficient path to solving humanity's most serious problems--including providing complete and lasting cures for the most diseased and disabled--is through widespread improvement of memory and mind, rather than through the best efforts of people who are well-meaning but of naturally limited abilities.
Newest Clips
see Newest Clips
2
Latest Pops
Latest Comments
Most Pops
Tags
Print
Save
Turn on live update