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Web delivers new worry for parents: Digital drugs

August 10, 2008 / Klint Finley

Parents, more reason to be afraid:

Websites are targeting your children with so-called digital drugs. These are audio files designed to induce drug-like effects.

All your child needs is a music player and headphones. […]

There are different slang terms for digital drugs. They’re often called “idozers” or “idosers.” All rely on the concept of binaural beats. […]

Other sites offer therapeutic binaural beats. They help you relax or meditate. Some allegedly help you overcome addiction or anxiety. Others purport to help you lose weight or eliminate gray hair.

However, most sites are more sinister. They sell audio files (“doses”) that supposedly mimic the effects of alcohol and marijuana.

But it doesn’t end there. You’ll find doses that purportedly mimic the effects of LSD, crack, heroin and other hard drugs. There are also doses of a sexual nature. I even found ones that supposedly simulate heaven and hell.

Full Story: USA Today

(Thanks Telarus!)

I can’t wait til this hits Fox News

The Hidden Flaw in AI Research

July 28, 2008 / Klint Finley

“Imitation of nature is bad engineering,” he answered patiently. “For centuries inventors tried to fly by emulating birds, and they killed themselves uselessly. If you want to make something that flies, flapping your wings is not the way to do it. You bolt a 400-horsepower engine to a barn door, that’s how you fly. You can look at birds forever and never discover this secret. You see, Mother Nature has never developed the Boeing 707. Why not? Because Nature didn’t need anything that would fly that fast and that high. How would such an animal feed itself?”

“What does that have to do with artificial intelligence?”

“Simply that it tries to approximate man. If you take man’s brain as a model and test of intelligence, you’re making the same mistake as the old inventors flapping their wings. You don’t realize that Mother Nature has never needed an intelligent animal and accordingly, she has never bothered to develop one!”

Full Story: Skilluminati

Synthetic Pot as a Military Weapon? Meet the Man Who Ran the Secret Program

July 25, 2008 / Klint Finley

Ketchum was referring to his work at Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, in the 1960s, when America’s national security strategists were high on the prospect of developing a nonlethal incapacitating agent, a so-called humane weapon, that could knock people out without necessarily killing anyone. Top military officers hyped the notion of “war without death,” conjuring visions of aircraft swooping over enemy territory releasing clouds of “madness gas” that would disorient the bad guys and dissolve their will to resist, while U.S. soldiers moved in and took over.

Ketchum was into weapons of mass elation, not weapons of mass destruction. He oversaw a secret research program that tested an array of mind-bending drugs on American GIs, including an exceptionally potent form of synthetic marijuana. (Most of these drugs had no medical names, just numbers supplied by the Army.) “Paradoxical as it may seem,” Ketchum asserted, “one can use chemical weapons to spare lives, rather than extinguish them.”

Full Story: Alternet

(Thanks Bill!)

Peruvian government recognizes Ayahuasca as cultural heritage

July 21, 2008 / Klint Finley

jamesk painting ayahuasca

Big WOW! Who whould have thought that any government would ever release statements like these: “the effects produced by its consumption are equivalent to entering the secrets of the spiritual world…” and, “knowledge of ayahuasca states is required for all members of Amazonian societies at some point in their lives, and is essential for assuming the role of privileged individuals…”

Full Story: Dose Nation

(Thanks Danny Chaoflux)

Consciousness, Qualia, Power and Self

July 20, 2008 / TiamatsVision

Intergral Praxis has an interesting post up with videos from Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UCSD, who discusses consciousness, qualia, and self. An interview with David Chalmers discussing his theory of consciousness, the hard problem, and the explanatory gap, and part two of a BBC documentary called “The Century of Self”. This part is called ‘Engineering Consent’, and tells the tale of how power elites used psychoanalytic theories to try and control human populations in an age of mass democracy and global capitalism.

(via Integral Praxis)

Susan Blackmore on lucid dreaming

July 15, 2008 / Klint Finley

Lucid dreams used to be a topic within psychical research and parapsychology. Perhaps their incomprehensibility made them good candidates for being thought paranormal. More recently, however, they have begun to appear in psychology journals and have dropped out of parapsychology-a good example of how the field of parapsychology shrinks when any of its subject matter is actually explained.

Lucidity has also become something of a New Age fad. There are machines and gadgets you can buy and special clubs you can join to learn how to induce lucid dreams. But this commercialization should not let us lose sight of the very real fascination of lucid dreaming. It forces us to ask questions about the nature of consciousness, deliberate control over our actions, and the nature of imaginary worlds.

Full Story: Susan Blackmore

(via Bruce Eisner)

Technoccult TV: Antero Alli (part 1)

July 2, 2008 / Klint Finley

Update: Part 2 now available

Technoccult TV talks with Antero Alli about paratheater, his films, the 8 circuit model of consciousness, and his plans for the future.

Antero Alli is a paratheater director, filmmaker, astrologer, and the world’s leading expert on the 8 circuit model of consciousness. For more information about his work, or to purchase his DVDs, visit ParaTheatrical ReSearch and Vertical Pool Productions.

And of course, you can see him give a presentation on the 8 circuit model this October at Esozone in Portland.

Special thanks to: Chris Cloke, Bill Whitcomb, and Trevor Blake.

(Watch for more episodes of Technoccult TV, inlcluding part 2 of this interview plus interviews with Paul Laffoley, Nemo, The Red King, and many more)

Study finds long benefit in illegal mushroom drug

July 1, 2008 / Klint Finley

Scientists reported Tuesday that when they surveyed volunteers 14 months after they took the drug, most said they were still feeling and behaving better because of the experience.

Two-thirds of them also said the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they’d ever had.

The drug, psilocybin, is found in so-called “magic mushrooms.” It’s illegal, but it has been used in religious ceremonies for centuries.

The study involved 36 men and women during an eight-hour lab visit. It’s one of the few such studies of a hallucinogen in the past 40 years, since research was largely shut down after widespread recreational abuse of such drugs in the 1960s.

The project made headlines in 2006 when researchers published their report on how the volunteers felt just two months after taking the drug. The new study followed them up a year after that.

Experts emphasize that people should not try psilocybin on their own because it could be harmful. Even in the controlled setting of the laboratory, nearly a third of participants felt significant fear under the effects of the drug. Without proper supervision, someone could be harmed, researchers said.

Full Story: Wired

Thinking ahead: Bacteria anticipate coming changes in their environment

June 10, 2008 / Klint Finley

A new study by Princeton University researchers shows for the first time that bacteria don’t just react to changes in their surroundings — they anticipate and prepare for them. The findings, reported in the June 6 issue of Science, challenge the prevailing notion that only organisms with complex nervous systems have this ability.
“What we have found is the first evidence that bacteria can use sensed cues from their environment to infer future events,” said Saeed Tavazoie, an associate professor of molecular biology, who conducted the study along with graduate student Ilias Tagkopoulos and postdoctoral researcher Yir-Chung Liu.

Full Story: Physorg

(via Kurzweil)

Increase your intelligence with 20mins a day brain excerise

June 10, 2008 / Klint Finley

We’ve mentioned before purported benefits of the N-Back Task on fluid intelligence:

In this case, subjects trained on a complex version of the so-called ‘n-back task’ – a difficult visual/auditory memory test – improved their scores on a set of IQ questions drawn from a German intelligence measure called the Bochumer Matrizen-Test. (The Bochumer Matrizen-Test is a harder version of the well-known Ravens Progressive Matrices).

Initially, the test subjects scored an average of 10 questions correctly on the IQ test.

But after the group trained on the n-back task for 25 minutes a day for 19 days, they averaged 14.7 correct answers, an increase of more than 40 percent. (A control group that was not trained showed only a very slight performance increase.)

Buschkuehl’s team postulates that the n-back task improves working memory – how many pieces of information subjects can keep in their head – as well as the ability to control the brain’s attention. Fluid intelligence tests require those types of thinking, and the training improved performance in these underlying skills.

Grinding points out two applications you can use to practice n-Back Tasks on your own:

Web based N-Back test (requires Microsoft Silverlight)

hback (for Linux)

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