Consciousness Moves To Another Universe At Death

from  psychcentral.com



By RICHARD ZWOLINSKI, LMHC, CASAC & C.R. ZWOLINSKI

A God In Therapy conversation…

Is science catching up with Jewish mystical wisdom?

Quantum theory proves that consciousness moves to another “Universe” at death, say scientists.

Consciousness, which is essentially the experiential aspect of the soul, is housed in our bodies only temporarily, in order to complete a life-mission, according to the Jewish wisdom. Judaism, despite claims to the contrary, does acknowledge reincarnation, and also offers sometimes vivid descriptions of what the soul experiences after leaving this World.

Which Came First, The Chicken Or The Brain?

Many of today’s scientists are what I’d call “brain determinists”; that is, if your brain performs a chemical or electrical task, that task determines your emotional/mental/physical experience.

But what causes the chemical or electrical process in the first place? Perhaps one’s consciousness (the soul) is the catalyst that triggers the brain process which then triggers a physical, emotional, or mental follow-up experience?

I remember reading an article about near-death experiences in which a scientist said he proved that the experience of death was merely a chemical process of the brain which when activated, created the experience of the afterlife.

I remember thinking at the time that no proof was evident that the death-experience itself didn’t trigger the chemical process. I found that the scientist stopped short of asking antecedent question that was essential when investigating such weight matters.

Belief that we continue on, without this body, and have a larger existence, knowing that this life isn’t all there is, often gives hope and comfort to those who are struggling.

Chasidic Tale

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880–1950) was imprisoned and tortured by the Soviet regime for the crime of believing in God and sharing that belief with his fellow Jews. The brutal Communist interrogator whipped out a pistol and pointed it at the captive Rabbi.

“This toy has a way of making people cooperate, ” he snarled.

“That toy is persuasive to one who has many gods and only one world; I have One God and two worlds,” said the Rabbi, referring to the Afterlife.

Teens Need Later Start to School Day, Doctors Group Says

from wsj.com

By 

SUMATHI REDDY 

CONNECT

Aug. 25, 2014 12:01 a.m. ET

High Schools, Middle Schools Should Begin Day No Earlier Than 8:30 a.m., American Academy of Pediatrics Says

A growing amount of research finds that teenagers are wired to sleep later and can benefit from school days that start later. WSJ's Sumathi Reddy and Dr. Mary Carskadon, a psychiatry professor at Brown University, join Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero. Photo: Getty

High schools and middle schools should begin the day no earlier than 8:30 a.m. to help teenagers get more sleep, the American Academy of Pediatrics said Monday in its first policy statement on the issue.

Research indicates that later school start times result in improved physical and mental health and, in some cases, better student performance, according to the guidelines. One recent study found a 70% drop in car crashes involving teen drivers after an 80-minute delay in the start time at one high school.

"Delaying school start times has a whole host of benefits that are well documented at this point," said Judith Owens, lead author of the guidelines and director of sleep medicine at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Biological changes associated with puberty result in a shift in circadian rhythms, causing adolescents to get tired later at night, sleep experts say. The changes can start in middle school and can shift a child's bedtime by as much as two hours. Exacerbating that physiological reality is teenagers' tendency to study late at night and to use electronics close to bedtime, when blue-light exposure can further delay sleep.

Students at Park High School in Cottage Grove, Minn., headed to their first classes of the day at 8:35 a.m. in March. The school district pushed back high-school start times five years ago, yielding benefits including higher standardized math test scores and attendance gains that were confirmed by a University of Minnesota study in March. ZUMAPRESS.com

"Circadian rhythms dictate that most teenagers can't fall asleep much before 11 p.m.," Dr. Owens said. "And if they need 8½ to 9½ hours of sleep—do the math. They are best suited to wake up around 8 a.m."

Yet the average start time for public high schools is 7:59 a.m., according to 2011-12 U.S. Department of Education statistics, the most recent available. An estimated 42.5% of public high schools start the day before 8 a.m., while only about 15% start at 8:30 a.m. or later.

Advocates hope the guidelines will provide momentum for organizations across the country working to delay school start times. The issue is often contentious because of concerns about transportation costs due to changing bus schedules, and the effect on time and space for extracurricular activities, particularly athletics.

"To draw a line in the sand and to say what time school should or shouldn't start, that's a huge statement that will ultimately flip this into a public-health issue instead of a negotiable school budget item," said Terra Ziporyn Snider, executive director of Start School Later, a nonprofit based in Annapolis, Md., that advocates for later school start times.

High schools in places including Columbia, Mo., and Glens Falls, N.Y., have delayed the start of the school day. While there is no official tally, Dr. Owens said an unofficial count found about 70 districts with a total of about 1,000 schools have made the move to a later school day. Still, other schools maintain earlier start times, such as Cheyenne High School in North Las Vegas, Nev., which starts as early as 6:50 a.m.

The Fairfax County School Board in Virginia, near Washington, is slated to vote in October on delaying its 7:20 a.m. start time, after studying the issue for more than a decade. The school district, one of the country's largest, hired Children's National Medical Center to consult on options for delaying the start of the high-school day to 8 a.m. or later.

Experts point to research findings that delays in start times of as little as 25 minutes can lead to measurable changes. Some studies have found improvements in hours slept, daytime sleepiness, attendance, academic performance and mood, and decreases in driving accidents and risky behaviors, experts say. Especially compelling, experts say, is evidence that delaying school start times reduces the number of driving accidents involving teen drivers.

In a March study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers at the University of Minnesota found a 65%-to-70% decrease in vehicle crashes among 16- to 18-year-olds in two high schools, in Wyoming and Minnesota, excluding crashes caused by unrelated factors, such as intoxication.

The study looked at more than 9,000 high-school students in five districts in Wyoming, Minnesota and Colorado that had delayed school start times to the 8 a.m.-to-8:55 a.m. window. The researchers compared attendance records, academic performance, mental health and car-crash rates before and after the changes to start times.

"The later the start time, the more that we had positive outcomes in all measures," said Kyla Wahlstrom, director of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota and the study's lead researcher. "There were cumulative benefits based on the later start."

Dr. Wahlstrom said her research and other studies by the CDC have found eight hours of sleep appears to be the dividing line in terms of risky behaviors by teens. Getting less than eight hours increases the risk of taking drugs or alcohol, for example.

Surveys show that teenagers are chronically sleep deprived. A 2006 study by the National Sleep Foundation, a nonprofit, found 87% of high-school students got less than the recommended 8½ to 9½ hours of sleep on school nights, and 28% of students reported falling asleep in school.

Ameen Al-Dalli, 16 years old, who will begin his junior year at Langley High School in Fairfax County in September, said he has fallen asleep in class. Last year, his Advanced Placement world history teacher took a picture of him dozing in class and posted it on Instagram. "A lot of kids fall asleep during class," he said. "It's not intentional."

The high-performing honors student said he has to get up at 5:30 a.m. and be at the bus stop at 6:20 to get to school for the 7:20 start time. He says just getting up requires the use of two alarm clocks—one near the bed and one further away, with his mother, Zeena Aljibury, as a backup.

Ameen said he aims for a bedtime of 11:30 p.m. but if he has a big test or a paper he might not go to bed until 12:30 or 1 a.m. At most, he gets seven hours of sleep at night and usually around five or six, he said. "Thankfully I can keep my grades up but it's really difficult," he said.

Write to Sumathi Reddy at sumathi.reddy@wsj.com

Kandinsky’s Cosmic Consciousness

from hyperallergic.com

• by Debra Brehmer on August 18, 2014
• 1

Installation view, ‘Kandinsky: A Retrospective’ at the Milwaukee Art Museum (photo by Front Room Photography)

MILWAUKEE — In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue,  Bernard Blistene and Alain Seban of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, glue together a new retrospective on Wassily Kandinsky with two words: “intrinsic coherence.”

They are right. This well-staged and tersely edited exhibition, organized by the Pompidou and the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM), traces Kandinsky (1866–1944) through two world wars, two wives and a long-term relationship, the Bolshevik Revolution, residence in three countries, and a swath of art movements, from Post-Impressionism to Suprematism. Yet, symbolic threads within Kandinsky’s oeuvre hold it all together.

Milwaukee, a city know for its beer and Germanic history, has one of the country’s best collections of work by Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky’s long-term partner, as well as his former student and collaborator in founding Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group. This exhibition unites both artists’ formative work done in Murnau, Germany, and then spins a tale of Kandinsky’s evolving explorations into abstraction.

Wassily Kandinsky, “Old Town II” (Alte Stadt II, 1902), oil on canvas, 20 1/2 × 30 7/8 in, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (© Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Service de la documentation photographique du MNAM / Dist.RMN-GP, © 2014 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris) (click to enlarge)

Prior to Murnau, Kandinsky was entrenched in his native Russia, studying for a law and economics degree. It is said that at in 1897, aged 30, he happened upon a painting from Claude Monet’s haystack series — and abandoned his career path to study art in Munich. Richard Wagner’s operaLohengrin was another riveting influence.

A row of small landscape paintings from 1900 to 1906 marks his initial developmental phase, which was swift. Surprisingly, even these Signac-influenced, modest studies have an inventiveness. The mark making is already more self-conscious and assertive than the desire to represent. They also carry a hallmark of Kandinsky’s enduring style, a sense of calculation. Each daub feels painstakingly decisive.

When, in 1909, Kandinsky and Münter moved to the Bavarian village of Murnau, contact with Franz Marc and others fueled their expressionist explorations. Following the Fauvist impulse, Kandinsky’s work from Murnau turns increasingly painterly, now in service to creating rhythms that suggest emotion rather than describing hill, house, or mountain. The group was reading and thinking about Madame Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, and theosophy. They retreated to this village to shun fin de siecle industrialization and materialism, replacing smoke stacks and factories with auras, astral bodies, and atoms. Theosophy represented a dimension outside the clutches of greed and development, a more utopian universalism, as did ethnographic sources ranging from Russian folk art to Oceanic, African, Japanese, and Native American art.

Gabriele Münter, “Boating” (1910), oil on canvas, 49 1/4 × 29 in (125.1 × 73.66 cm), Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley (photo by Efraim Lev-er, © Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris)

One painting from this Murnau phase speaks volumes. Gabriele Münter’s “Boating” (1910) shows her from the back, rowing a boat, with a woman and child seated in the middle and Kandinsky standing tall at the prow, lording over both sea and destiny. Münter rows toward the blue hills that mark the countryside. A historically underrated talent, she seems to already know the plight of female artists: hard work, tireless effort on behalf of the male and anonymity.

Indeed, Kandinsky’s gaze is dead set on something. The next year, he published his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, opening a theoretical pathway towards a potent merger of spirituality and abstraction. Kandinsky’s big leap is documented with three paintings from 1913–14. One of them, “Fragment 1 for Composition VII (Center),” owned by MAM, is actually an oil study for a larger, finished work now in Moscow. Symbols replace subjects and all hints of perspective are abandoned. The canvas becomes more of a cosmos than a surface. With WWI on the horizon, Kandinsky’s reds, yellows, and jabbing shapes render cataclysm. Cannons, a boat with oars, barbed wire, orbs and radiant fields of seething color, a serpent, arrows, a horseman, circles pierced by lines — Kandinsky now juggles his already established images as increasingly abstract symbols, winnowing the imagery into calligraphy. It is 1913 and along with Picasso, Duchamp and Matisse, Kandinsky is in the Armory Show in New York with one of these experimental paintings.

Wassily Kandinsky, “Fragment I for Composition VII (Center)” (1913),
oil on canvas, 34 15/16 × 39 7/16 in (88.74 × 100.17 cm), Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley (photo by Larry Sanders, © Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris)

Throughout the exhibition, although Kandinsky sways to the influences around him — be they Suprematism or the more schematized, geometric abstraction of the Bauhaus, where he was employed — his stylistic approach carries through, anchored by repetitive motifs. The boats, horse, and rider, the glowing orbs endure. In an increasingly secular early modern world, he holds onto the reins of religion. We forget that abstraction is borne of faith.

Kandinsky’s major paintings on canvas are airtight affairs — dense, worked, self-contained worlds of mystical vortexes. Always controlled, the paintings developed from preparatory watercolor studies, some with measured angles and dimensions penciled in. Fortunately, this exhibition includes many of those small studies, and this is the knock-out surprise: they feel fresh, alive, contemporary. The air-filled watercolor marks almost dance on the light ground of the paper, unlike the sticky, monumental oil paintings that stew in apocalyptic juices. While the studies feel assured and rehearsed, they also hold an immediacy that transcends their historic moment.

Installation view, Kandinsky mural room (photo by Front Room Photography) (click to enlarge)

The exhibition offers one more big bang. Midway through the show is a constructed room of “wall paintings” that Kandinsky planned and executed in 1922 with students at the Bauhaus. In the 1970s, his surviving wife, Nina, orchestrated their re-creation from preparatory gouache studies for the grand opening of the Pompidou. They have never been shown in the US. One enters the room, engulfed floor to ceiling with enlarged Kandinsky collisions. By the 1920s, whiffs of Matisse, Klee, Miro and Malevich had synthesized into his own sandwich style: compilations and overlapping layers of gloriously colored marks, oozing clouds of fluff, shapes, lines, stuttering rhythms of dots and arcs — a veritable theater of formal inventiveness.

Kandinsky’s later years (1933–44) were spent in Paris with Nina. His palette changed to  pastels, shapes becoming softer, biomorphic, more light and lyrical than prophetic. The show concludes with “Last Watercolor (Derniere Aquarelle)” (1944). Despite WWII, Kandinsky turns to bugs and amoebas; he seems more fascinated by creation than chaos. The compositional noise quiets. Strewn with almost cartoony protoplasmic litter, Kandinsky’s aging cosmic consciousness sides with regeneration rather than destruction. Form generates life. Art making and the chorus of the universe gently hum.

Wassily Kandinsky, “Last Watercolor (Dernière aquarelle, 1944), watercolor, India ink, and pencil on paper, 10 1/16 × 13 5/8 in, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (© Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Philippe Migeat / Dist.RMN-GP, © 2014 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / ADAGP, Paris)

Kandinsky: A Retrospective continues at the Milwaukee Art Museum (700 N Art Museum Dr, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) through September 1.

In the Brain, Memories Are Inextricably Tied to Place

from theatlantic

A man made virus that acts like “a remote control” for neurons helped psychologists research the connection


ROBINSON MEYERAUG 12 2014, 6:25 PM ET

Denis Balibouse/Reuters

It’s no coincidence that, when recalling a tragedy, we ask where someone was:“Where were you when President Kennedy was shot?”

Psychologists hypothesize that we lock in that memory by linking it to a where, that integrating many stimuli together helps us remember something particularly important. They call this process episodic memory formation: the locking of ideas and objects to a single place and time, to forming associations between different stimuli.

Using a a new process that involves an injected virus and a chemical “remote control for the brain,” psychologists are now a little closer to understanding it better.

Researchers at Dartmouth and the University of North Carolina announced Tuesday that new evidence indicates that the retrosplenial cortex—a little-studied region near the center of the brain—is important in the formation of this kind of information, called episodic memories. Specifically, they believe the retrosplenial cortex may help make sense of the burst of new stimuli in a new environment: It may be the place where the body’s senses are integrated.

When you walk into someone’s office, your brain records the location of the  pieces of furniture, screens, bookshelves and windows inside, said David Bucci, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and one of the authors of the paper. Your brain may not remember the arrangement of that office if nothing important happens inside—in fact, you’ll probably forget it—but if something memorable does happen, you will commit the setup of that room to your memory. That room will be forever linked to what you learned inside it.

Researchers had known that a network of brain regions contributed to this function, but they weren’t sure how or what. Recent evidence had indicated the hippocampus was in fact less important in this process of immediate sense-making than earlier hypothesized, but researchers weren’t sure what other processes were at play. Bucci and his team now suggest that it's the retrosplenial cortex that dictates that immediate sense-making.

And they learned this with a specially engineered brain virus.

“It’s a remote control, if you will, of brain cells,” said Bucci. The process is called chemogenetics, and it has only recently become available to researchers. Using a very fine needle, researchers inject a region of a rat’s brain full of a synthetic virus. That virus then adds a line of DNA to nearby neurons, causing them to generate a receptor that essentially shuts down a cell briefly.

“There are plenty of naturally occurring receptors on brain cells,” Bucci told me. “This particular receptor connects to lots of machinery that cause [the cell] to go into silent mode. A part of the brain is turned off for two hours.”

It takes about a month for that receptor to populate the region of the rat’s brain. Then, researchers can inject the rat with a certain chemical that—though it travels throughout its body—activates only that receptor, temporarily shutting a region of the brain down. In this experiment, that meant researchers could shut down the retrosplenial cortex and watch as the test rats became incapable of linking the appearance of certain stimuli with getting fed. In other experiments, researchers have shut down feeding centers of the brain and memory cells. 

The ability, said Bucci, “to go in there and manipulate [a certain region of the brain] for a couple hours” was enormous.

Previous experiments on such centers, said Bucci, would “kill [those regions] permanently,” said Bucci. “And now the animal can’t eat.” Now that they’ve isolated the importance of shutting off the retrosplenial cortex, Bucci said scientists hope to figure out the importance of stimulating it using a similar technique.

Can they make rats better at learning—and, if so, what would be the implications of that?

Researchers also know little about how different regions in the memory-making process interact and communicate. And while Bucci stressed this experiment was “basic science”—meaning it was research for research’s sake and does not have a clinical objective—he said that the retrosplenial cortex was one of the first areas where evidence of Alzheimer’s appears, and understanding the process of episodic memory formation generally may help to make sense of the disease.

And chemogenetics—this fanciful technique that combines synthetic viruses and chemical brain control—is permitting experiments like this one that, half a decade ago, would have seemed impossible.

Consciousness and the collapse of the wave function (1hr 22min)

from ieet.org

David Chalmers

geopkf

Posted: Aug 6, 2014

A public evening lecture held by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers on May 2nd, 2014 in Göttingen.

The Wave Function: In classical physics, systems are described by definite values | A particle’s position is specified by a definite location | In quantum mechanics, systems are described by wave functions | A particle’s position is specified by a wave function, with different amplitudes for different locations.

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