Near-Death Experiences: Pam Reynolds, Pete Morton, & Fighter Pilots

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world. All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Albert Einstein

Common characteristics following Near Death Experiences: More spirituality; more compassionate; decreased fear of death; greater sense of meaning & purpose; less interested in competition, prestige, personal power, & material possessions. These changes have been corroborated by many investigators & do not diminish over decades.

At 53, Air Force veteran Pete Morton, found himself with Dr. Michael Sabom after he had suffered two cardiac arrests. He had come to Sabom for a heart catheterization at the Gainseville, Florida Veterans Administration Hospital. The year was 1977. Before beginning, Sabom needed to talk with Morton about the man's medical history. After reading physician Raymond Moody's book, Life After Life, he was also interested in compiling patients' accounts of Near Death Experiences (NDEs).

Morton expected the doctor to ask him about his medical history, which did happen, but then Sabom asked a different kind of question. He asked if Pete ever had an NDE. "The room fell silent." Morton seemed to check if anybody was around to overhear what he was about to say. Satisfied they were alone, he told Sabom "he had left his body during his first cardiac arrest and had watched the resuscitation." Pete recalled the resuscitation with "detail and accuracy."

He said that to restore the heartbeat the physician "struck me. And I mean he really whacked me. He came back with his fist from way behind his head and he hit me right in the center of my chest.” Morton had many details in his account, which could not have been recalled had he not been out of his body looking down on the procedure. From Light and Death by Michael Sabom

Then there is the notable case of Pam Reynolds (her stage name), an American singer-songwriter. At 35 in 1991, she experienced an NDE during a brain operation. Her experience is remarkable because, quite simply, her brain had no blood flow, and no brain-wave activity. Under close medical monitoring, she was clinically revealed as dead. She had undergone surgery to repair an aneurism deep inside her brain, on her brain stem. Here is her page, and here is her Wikipedia page. Below is a video describing her amazing story.



Near Death Experiences have been claimed for pilots undergoing G-LOC tests, wherein they are subjected to extreme g-forces, or gravitational pressures. James E. Winnery became involved with research involving fighter pilots volunteering to undergo a giant centrifuge to simulate the extreme conditions that can occur during aerial combat maneuvering such as dog fights. Under extreme g-forces, fighter pilots in the centrifuge lost consciousness and were claimed to have near-death experiences. More.

So far as I can determine, only Winnery has conducted these experiments, and they have not been repeated. Winnery claims that his subjects had experiences comparable to patients with clinical NDE. I have found no other G-LOC research to support his claims of NDEs, which were based on surveys he devised.

Paleontologists Discover Dinosaur That Was A Different Predator

In fact, it was a sexual predator. Although this dinosaur looks like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, it was really a creepy little thing that liked to peep from behind trees at other dinosaurs and lure them back to its cave. Watch the news coverage below. The paleontologist who discovered its fossil remains is interviewed.

Colleges Ignore Life's Biggest Questions

Why are we here? Don't even ask, say some. They believe the question is sophomoric, the stuff of naive young minds. Anthony Kronman does not agree. I am reminded of Einstein, who had such a "silly, childish" idea as to try to imagine what it would be like to ride a beam of light.

"In a shift of historic importance, America's colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life's most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself. . . . Over the past century and a half, our top universities have embraced a research-driven ideal that has squeezed the question of life's meaning from the college curriculum. . . . [Alexander Meiklejohn] thought it vital that students also explore what he called "the art of living," the spiritual question of how they ought to live their lives. He defended the idea of spiritual seriousness in a nonreligious age, and thought it could be studied without dogmatic commitments.

Our culture may be spiritually impoverished, but what it needs is not more religion. What it needs is an alternative to religion, for colleges and universities to become again the places they once were--spiritually serious but nondogmatic, concerned with the soul but agnostic about God." More at The Boston Globe.

Anthony Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale and author of Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.
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On a wholly different note here is this cat, which seems quite happy sitting inside a container.

Thylacine aka Tasmanian Wolf. (Plus "You Can Go Home Again")

In addition to a brief, wishful-thinking introductory clip of an alleged recent sighting, this video contains all known footage of Thylacinus cynocephalus, the largest predatory marsupial of modern times. The Thylacine is also known as the Tasmanian wolf and the Tasmanian tiger, though it was of course neither wolf nor tiger. It has been extinct for 72 years. The last one died in the zoo at Hobart, Tasmania in 1936. As you will see, the creature's quarters were not conducive to long life.



On the lighter side, Hoofy and Boo are at it--and at one another--again (after a very brief commercial).

Peter Singer & The New Atheism

Peter Singer is professor of Bioethics at Princeton. Provacateur? Yes, he is. Does he say outrageous things just to get attention? I don't think so.

In Animal Liberation, Singer holds that we discriminate against animals because they don't belong to our species. All beings, he says, are capable of suffering and worthy of our respect in that regard, regardless of their intelligence. Just as discrimination against skin color is wrong, so is what he calls specieism.

As for abortion, he argues that the preferences of the mother should be weighed against the preferences of the fetus. As a fetus is incapable of preferences till about 18 months, the mother's preferences should at least obtain until then.

With regard to poverty, he argues that there is not injustice in that some people live in abundance while others starve.

He forces people to take sides, for or against his views.

As for the new atheism, he is once again taking his own position.

"To understand Singer, it's helpful to contrast him with 'New Atheists' like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. The New Atheists say we can get rid of God but preserve morality." More

Jude McConkey: Storm Approaching

This post is off-topic for me, but I happened on a scene that was for me remarkable. Here is a stunning photograph with the title as shown above. It reminds me of paintings by Nineteenth Century American Realists such as Eastman Johnson or Winslow Homer. I quote the artist/photographer, Jude McConkey: "Storm Approaching" is a photo I took on April 5, 2008 while visiting the town of Marquette in Michigan. This scene is the lighthouse there at the coast guard station. Found here at Etsy.

Jill Bolte Taylor & A New Way of Seeing

A brain scientist, Taylor suffered a massive left hemisphere stroke, silencing as she put it, "the I am," and as it crept through her brain, she began to see the world differently. Her recovery took eight years, but she has a vivid new commentary on how the left and right brain hemispheres work. Her account evokes the descriptions of people who had what we call mystical experiences. She describes disappearing into a great, beautiful, universal energy field.



Her book is titled My Stroke of Insight.

Patience Loader & The Terrible Hand Cart Trek of Brigham Young's Followers

The Great Basin of Utah looked desolate with the Great Salt Lake Desert spreading in a sea of white toward the Western horizon.

Brigham Young and his fellow pioneers saw none of that. They saw the future. “This is the place,” Young, declared on July 24, 1847. He had left Nauvoo, Illinois, as the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They were believers in the face of hatred and violence that fell on them. They determined to create a home in the West far from those who threatened them. Some of Young's later followers came in hand carts, and therein lies a tale.

Brigham Young has been criticized for encouraging people to undertake the arduous, deadly journey to Utah pulling their worldly belongings in a hand cart. Wallace Stegner wrote about the West, and in one scene he described the Mormons who trekked out of Iowa to Utah with hand carts. "In all its history, the American West never saw a more unlikely band of pioneers than the four hundred-odd who were camped on the banks of the Iowa river at Iowa City in June 1856. They were not colorful--only improbable . . . starved cheeks, pale skins, bad teeth, thin chests . . . There were more women than men, more children under fifteen than either. . . herded from their crowded immigrant ship and loaded into the cars and rushed to the end of the Rock Island Line [they] had never pitched a tent, slept on the ground, cooked outdoors, built a campfire. They had not even the rudimentary skills that make frontiersmen." Yet, they had "grit and faith, and in the weeks ahead . . . they were tested beyond human endurance. . . ."

One of these was Patience Loader, a girl fresh from England, whose family joined the Martin Handcart Company. In the middle of the wilderness, her father, James, collapsed one day, exhausted, near death, from pulling the cart. In her memoirs, Patience described the moment in her memoirs when she spoke to her father about his condition. "'Father, you are not able to pull the cart. You had better not try to pull. We girls can do it this afternoon.' 'Oh,' he said...I must not give up...I want to go to the valley to shake hands with Brigham Young.'" But soon her father could not go on. He could pull no more.

Looking at his family, his eyes teared. He said to them, "You know I love my children." Then he died. He was lucky.

Members of the hand cart company watched their rations disappear, their limbs freeze, and their friends die. James' daughters pulled the cart.

That night Patience's sister Zilpha groaned in the darkness under the stars as she gave birth to a boy. Patience's sister Tamar, fell sick to Rocky Mountain Spotted fever as they crossed the Rockies. The company could not wait for Tamar or anybody else. They had to move on.

Patience kept the fire burning bright as wolves howled in the distance. Occasionally they saw gleaming eyes staring at them from the darkness.

For "The Awful March of The Saints" (Patience Loader and her hand cart company), see American Heritage Magazine. Here are photos of Patience Loader, her grave, and an account of her life. If you want to read about Patience Loader, here is Meridian Magazine. In case you want to do a hand cart trek on your vacation, try this.

Michael Frayn & Dreams in The Human Touch

Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly, and now I do not know if I am a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Lao Tsu

"In so far as you can say anything about it at all, a dream, like a story, is something complete unto itself, not verified or justified or given meaning by any causal relationship with the world. Whatever goes in as input, something happens to it that transforms it and makes it what it is. Something or someone takes over.

The question is: who or what takes over?

The answer's obvious: I take over. The dream, after all, is being performed inside a theatre owned and managed by myself, and I surely have a considerable say in the way things are done here.

At once, though, a difficulty arises. I am also an actor in this theatre. I am in among the action, just as I am in life. I am one of the characters, limited to a particular point of view, and while I'm down there on the stage I can't easily take an overview of the script, or keep an eye on the box-office returns. I often seem to know no more about what's going on in my own theatre than the rest of the cast do. In fact, I often seem to know a lot less than I do in the waking world. Things that I know perfectly well in daylight I don't know at all when I'm dreaming. I also entirely fail to notice the existence or significance of a lot of things that seem obvious as soon as I think back on them in the morning. . . . Perhaps dreaming has no function. If it really does have no bearing on whether we live or die, or whether we mate or fail to, perhaps it's not subject to the pressures of selection. Its functioning seems to be largely random. Perhaps its origins were, too - a random series of mutations in the brains of individuals whose genes were dominant for quite other reasons. . . .

It's difficult not to see elements of the random and the indeterminate in all our experience, most striking in dreams but also present, as we have seen, in waking perception. There is a parallel here with the indeterminacy of particles. (And the indeterminacy of experience prevents it shaping our knowledge and behaviour no more than the indeterminacy of particles prevents them determining physical structure and chemical behaviour.)

Then again, maybe there is an element of pure randomness in the apparently unlocatable deciding force at the heart of dreaming (and of all our thinking). Maybe this generative principle, which is both I and not-I, stems from the quantum behaviour of individual particles in the system, deflecting and shaping the throughput of information from external sources as fundamentally and massively as the random release of the beta-particle affects the state of Schrödinger's cat.

One way or another, we have lost the deterministic thread of the universe right here, inside ourselves." Extract from The Human Touch, by Michael Frayn

A Review in The Guardian. Here are excerpts of the book online.

When Is A Head Like A Rock?

Hamlet said that he could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself king of infinite space. And so we all can. We have a three pound universe inside our skulls. Some would argue that we don't stop at the porches of our eyes, ears, and skin, that these receptors are themselves only mental. A sensation, be it visual, tactile, olfactory, cannot refer to anything beyond itself--nothing "out there." The brain shapes input according to useful patterns. Take the eye as an example. Retina images are scrambled by neurons when passed to the visual cortex. The brain doesn't convert image pieces back to original pictures. Neural conditioning allows it to create suitable responses. Rapid visual stimulation induces in the brain an illusion of what is out there. Thus the question of boundary, of stopping, is a question for meta-physicians. Infinite space, old chap, infinite space may be we are.

"Out there" is itself an idea, some would say. They would add, Oh, sure, we can touch a table, kick a rock, hear a band, see a wall but the touching, the kicking, the hearing, the seeing are only perceptions linked with sensations.

Samuel Johnson tried to prove a rock was real by kicking it. To George Berkeley's theory that all is mental, solipsistic, he said "I refute it thus!" after kicking the rock. He refuted nothing. He felt the rock against his shoe, which was only a sensation. He saw it skitter down the street, also sensation. Etc. The idea of an object is just that--an idea. We must live with assumptions, not validations.

We can assume a subjective world with Bishop Berkeley or one of subject and object with Dr Johnson, but assume we must. Unless, as has been said of Eastern sages (some of whom are charlatans), we learn to see through assumptions altogether.

But I have my boundaries, too. I stop here. I'll leave all that to the sages and metaphysical philosophers.

So, then, the same subject, consciousness, but a change of theme. Here are some curious anecdotes having to do with decapitation and consciousness. Who or what was the "I" decapitated in these anecdotes? Don't ask me. You can make of them what you want.

Beaurieux and Languille. Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Guillotined head opens its eyes! This is the bizarre story of Monsieurs Beaurieux and Languille and a macabre study done in 1905:

Q. Would a guillotined person die instantly or would the severed head live long enough to feel itself hit the ground? How could anyone but those executed ever know?

A. This grisly question is more answerable than one might think. In France in the days of the blade, some of the condemned were asked to blink their eyes to show continued consciousness after decapitation, and a few heads blinked for up to 30 seconds, says Dale McIntyre in New Scientist. "How much of this was voluntary and how much due to nerve reflex action is speculation. Most nations with science sophisticated enough to determine this question have long since abandoned decapitation as a legal tool."

Addressing the reflex issue, one Dr. Beaurieux observed the execution of a murderer in 1905, told in History of the Guillotine by Alister Kershaw. First he saw in the head spasmodic movements of eyes and lips for 5-6 seconds. Then the face relaxed, the lids half closed, "exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to observe every day in the exercise of our profession."

"It was then that I called in a strong sharp voice: 'Languille!' " The lids lifted, and Languille's "undeniably living eyes" fixed on the doctor, after which they closed again. Moments later he called out again, fetching another look by Languille. But a third call went unheeded.

"I have just recounted to you... what I was able to observe. The whole thing had lasted 25-30 seconds."

The above Q & A excerpt comes from the Cincinnati Inquirer (cincinnati.com), 26 August 2002.

The beheading account below, by Cecil Adams, derives from a site called The Straight Dope (straightdope.com) and is dated 12 June 1998:

Charlotte Corday. After Charlotte Corday was guillotined for murdering Jean-Paul Marat, the executioner slapped her cheek while holding her severed head aloft. Witnesses claimed the cheeks reddened and the face looked indignant. According to another tale, when the heads of two rivals in the National Assembly were placed in a sack following execution, one bit the other so badly the two couldn't be separated.

A soldier in Korea. [Can the brain be proven to remain conscious for a duration after decapitation?] This didn't seem like the sort of question that could ever be conclusively resolved.

Or so I thought. Then I received a note from a U.S. Army veteran who had been stationed in Korea. In June 1989 the taxi he and a friend were riding in collided with a truck. My correspondent was pinned in the wreckage. The friend was decapitated. Here's what happened:

"My friend's head came to rest face up, and (from my angle) upside-down. As I watched, his mouth opened and closed no less than two times. The facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion, followed by terror or grief. I cannot exaggerate and say that he was looking all around, but he did display ocular movement in that his eyes moved from me, to his body, and back to me. He had direct eye contact with me when his eyes took on a hazy, absent expression . . . and he was dead."

I have spoken with the author and am satisfied that the event occurred as described. One can of course never be certain about these things. Nonetheless I repent my previous skepticism. Cecil Adams
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During my stay in Paris, the sight of a public execution revealed to me the weakness of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head divided from the body, and heard the sound with which they fell separately into the box, I understood, not with my reason, but with my whole being, that no theory of the wisdom of all established things, nor of progress, could justify such an act; and that if all the men in the world from the day of creation, by whatever theory, had found this thing necessary, it was not so; it was a bad thing, and that therefore I must judge of what was right and necessary, not by what men said and did, not by progress, but what I felt to be true in my heart. Leo Tolstoy
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Of his marvelous invention, Doctor Joseph Guillotin said that it was swift, merciful, and that its victims would only feel a rush of fresh air. How could he have known? Was his confidence based on the testimony of somebody like Languille? ;-)

Scary Economic Times & The American Dream

The American Dream is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, which states it as Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness. These are tough times for the American Dream. As the safe routines of our lives have come undone, so has our characteristic optimism—not only our belief that the future is full of limitless possibility, but our faith that things will eventually return to normal . . . More at Vanity Fair.

Julia Sweeney: Letting Go Of God

Remembered as a comedian on Saturday Night Live, Julia Sweeney developed a monologue after her brother Michael was diagnosed with lymphoma, and she found herself with uterine cancer. She crafted it into a stage show, God Said Ha!, debuting at San Francisco's Magic Theater in 1995. Letting Go of God is her third monologue. In it she makes hilarious remarks on her Catholic upbringing and some Mormon missionary youths whom she invited into her home. The part below covers that segment of the monologue.


This link takes you to the other segments, done when she was younger.

Some other features of her resumé: Sweeney appeared in Pulp Fiction, Clock Stoppers, Whatever It Takes, and Stuart Little. On prime time television she was a series regular on George & Leo and Maybe It's Me. She guest-starred on 3rd Rock from the Sun, Hope & Gloria, Mad About You, and According to Jim. In 2004, Sweeney co-starred in two episodes of Frasier (as Frasier's litigious unwanted house guest, Ann) and had a guest role on Sex and the City.

Music, Emotion, and Memory

Music points to the role emotion plays in memories. You are driving home from work and you hear a song on the radio. Suddenly, memories come flooding back of your first date, or your first prom, and there you are, seemingly in another time as your hands guide the steering wheel down the road. The neuroscientist would tell you that for all your nostalgia, these are bio-chemical tags in your brain. The more the bio-chemistry, the more powerful the feeling. Read at Discover. The article is quite interesting. It reminds me of that old quantum physics question: how can particles be waves, and waves, particles? How can feelings and memory be chemistry and chemistry be feelings and memory? The short answer, for me anyway, is that reductionism can bring us to understandings but also to quandaries. The parts are not the whole.

Put it differently: sound waves vibrate my ear drums, a form of bio-mechanical engineering. I don't sense any of that. I hear music. In the passage from brain to mind, we may be looking for a physical link that does not exist. Could the consciousness we perceive as mind be as fundamental as gravity? Gravity is an emergent property from mass (substrate particles). Is consciousness an emergent property from some substrata as yet unidentified? This still leaves the world of our feelings unexplained. I believe it will remain so. Rather like the eyes, which see as a kind of cyclops, trying to visually perceive themselves as two.

Immortality and Afterlife

So where do you go from here? No, I don't mean the grocery store. Where do you go when you die? Is life just a one-act play? Is there an eternal epilogue? Do you come back for a second chance to learn from your mistakes? How about your loved ones? Will you get to see them again?

From Buddhism to Christianity, something is supposed to survive us. In Buddhism it is our karma; in Christianity it is our soul. What can you make of it all? Is there evidence for any of it? For that matter, why would you want to come back to this place to get cheated or robbed or despondent again? Or live eternally where they smile and are boringly nice to one another all day long and do nothing but sing hymns while standing on fluffy clouds? Check out this conversation about immortality and afterlife at Philosophy Talk.

You Can Improve Your Life (And That's Not A Platitude)

Back when I was in college, back in the days of the Cold War and foreign policies based on MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, I was introduced to the wide world as a rather dismal place. Camus told me that life was meaningless and that, like Sisyphus, all I could do was heroically roll a boulder to the top of a mountain for the rest of my life. Fred Hoyle had me believing that the universe had no origin, was in a steady state, without beginning and end, and was therefore godless. Because Einstein had shown that Newton's matter was not the basic stuff of gravity, like others I was persuaded that all was determined, including the course of my life. B.F. Skinner told me that I was like a pigeon in one of his boxes, governed by stimulus and response, devoid of any inner meaning, including freedom and dignity. Freud said my unconscious was a snake pit of repressed desires to sleep with my mother, and urges to kill my father. He said that I, and civilization with its discontents, could only hope to escape neuroses and find ordinary unhappiness.

Current wisdom has each of these perspectives as out-of-date. I learned slowly, painfully, to question the intellectual fashions of the day. Platitudes are never fashionable and some contain important truths.

Like others of my college generation, I was not inclined to look on the world as warm and cozy. That is still the case for undergraduates today, and right they are, although they can find a counterpoint that was not available to me. It is available to everybody, not just them.

I speak of positive psychology, which holds that one trouble with the world is that people do not work to make their lives happy. I don't speak here of Pollyanna and Panglosse, but of reasonable optimism. Reasonable in that we expect our lives will encounter trials and tribulations, but that we eventually will leave them behind.

Martin Seligman, a major spokesman for the movement, points out studies showing that people who dwell on negative experiences become increasingly negative. In contrast, others experience an improved sense of well-being when they keep "gratitude journals" in which they remind themselves of all they're thankful for.

Happiness requires steady and habitual plugging away at it. Negative feelings are easy to fall into, a path of least resistance. The more we dwell on them the more we return to them and the deeper we sink. Freudian analysis encouraged patients to introspect but they did not improve. The more they looked inward, the more they looked inward, despite insights into their behavor.

Still, for all his wrong-headedness elsewhere, Freud did acknowledge that "unhappiness is much less difficult to experience." He could not see his psychoanalytic method as a cause of discontent, which it was.

Those of an intellectual bent may expect meaty ideas in the teachings of positive psychology, but they would be disappointed. In part, happiness research finds truth behind age-worn platitudes and shows that their significance can become elements of a working program. (Research has found that life satisfaction is unusually high in Ireland, where people remind one another to "count your blessings.") Remember your mother telling you to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Your father told you to stop crying over spilt milk. You may say that's nothing new and that you already observe some platitudes.

Something new is here, and it is available to anybody willing to make the effort. In studying and applying positive psychology, you begin to understand more than what your parents used to tell you. You see more than the platitudes.

Check out a Time Magazine article on the subject, The Positive Psychology Center, "The Pursuit of Happiness" with interesting links at U. Alabama, Birmingham, and Martin Seligman's site, Authentic Happiness.

Echolocation and Ben Underwood, 1992-2009

"To society he's blind," said Ben's mother, "but that doesn't make him handicapped. He just can't see."

She also said, "One thing that I truly get back from Ben being blind is that he truly sees people from within. When he hears someone say that someone else is ugly, or anything negative towards someone else. He says, 'That's whats wrong with sighted people, you all look at one another and judge what you look like,' I see that statement being so true. "

His eyes removed because of cancer, Ben grew up without sight, but at age five learned to click with his tongue about every half second—to echolocate—to ride his bike, shoot hoops, play video games, and throw pillows at his sisters. Echoes informed Ben as to the position of objects, how big they were, their general shape, and how solid they were. Ben recognized a pole as tall and narrow, a building as tall and very broad. A pillow was soft and not dense.

I am left with mystery. Watching the boy in action left me scratching my head in amazement. Take a look for yourself:



Sadly, just shy of his 17th birthday this amazing and inspiring boy died of another cancer after the one that took his eyes. The obit video can be watched here.

By clicking, Ben avoided curbs while riding his bicycle in his Sacramento, California neighborhood. Even though he couldn't see the hoop, he could sink a basketball through the basket. He played video games by distinguishing sounds. He wrote a novel, typing it at 60 words per minute on a standard keyboard. "I can hear that wall behind you over there. I can hear right there--the radio, and the fan," Ben told one reporter.

Ben was not the only blind person who developed echolocation. Others are Daniel Kish, 40, of Long Beach, California, who leads other blind people on hikes in the wilderness or in mountain biking. "I have mental images that are very rich, very complex,” says Kish. (Watch Kish teach others to use echolocation.) James Holman (1786-1857) used the sound of his tapping cane to travel alone around the world.

See the piece on Graham Young, a man who is blind but somehow can see. Young can sense moving objects but doesn't know how he does it. V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist, explained Young's ability.

Here is a web site dedicated to Ben Underwood. Here is his mother's account of him in "Ben's Life."
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Bats send sound signals in rapid bursts at high frequencies. Their sonar can bounce off flying mosquitoes, which the bats swoop on with open mouths. Dolphins find their meals in the same manner. Echolocation, uses sound to identify objects and their locations. As with vision, the brain processes energy reflected off an object—only as sound rather than light.

Not A "Bird Brain": Alex The African Grey Parrot

When Irene Pepperberg said goodnight to Alex, her famous African Grey Parrot, he replied "You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you." Next morning, she found him dead in his cage. He was 31, and apparently died of atherosclerosis. (African Greys can live to 50.)

Although parrots are known to be smart, Alex seemed brilliant, and stirred controversy because of his feats. When he was tired of being tested, he would say “Wanna go back." He wanted the comfort of his cage. If Dr. Pepperberg's face registered annoyance, Alex said, “I’m sorry.” If he said “Wanna banana”, but was offered a nut instead, he stared in silence, asked for the banana again, or took the nut and threw it at the researcher.

Here is a two minute video of Alex with Dr. Pepperberg (or by clicking the scenes at the video end you can watch the entire sequence):



Some say that Alex was just another case of Clever Hans or Nim Chimpsky. They point out that Alex is not a mammal, not a primate, and has a brain the size of a walnut. Dr. Pepperberg might say that some day homo sapiens, man the wise, will be knocked off the pedestal he has placed himself on.

Here are some links: New York Times Obit. First chapter of Pepperberg's book after his death, Alex and Me. An interview in Edge titled That Damn Bird. Did Alex think? See this, taken from The New York Times.

Andrew Newberg: Why God Won't Go Away

Andrew Newberg, M.D., finds in his research evidence that the God factor is hard-wired into the brain so that religion and spirituality are likely to be with the human species for a very long time.

Newberg studies the brain and takes an approach against the mainstream. Rather than dismiss it as irrelevant in matters scientific, he sees the God factor as deeply embedded in the brain's wiring. Eighteenth Century thinkers said that the universe is a great machine, with perhaps a prime mover, but with the universe in motion that mover (God) is no longer needed. They expected history to vindicate them. Two hundred years later, religion and spirituality have not receded from public consciousness but instead are as strong as ever. Here is a video titled "God, Reality and Everything." Part 1 of 2



Click here for Part 2.

Read another take on the issue: Born Believers: How Your Brain Creates God.

The Mail has an update on god spot research.

What Is Time? Countess Toutschkoff Foresaw Her Husband's Death At The Battle of Borodino

I

I am a skeptical person but on two different occasions things happened to me that normal empiricism cannot explain. One day, about to pick up the phone, I knew beyond doubt who was calling and what he would say, although I had never met him, nor did I anticipate the call. Then there was a second time. One morning I awakened, and as my eyes slowly focused on the ceiling, I knew unequivocally that my mother-in-law had died the night before. And she had. These are only two incidents, and they hardly suffice as reliable scientific indicators of paranormal events, but they were enough for my confidence that phenomena occur which are unexplainable by common sense or science. They also helped me understand that scientific materialism is only another form of metaphysics.

Unsatisfied with scientific materialism, Maurice Maeterlinck, (Nobel in Literature, 1911) wrote about death and the meaning of life, and in one book,The Unknown Guest (1914), he has an account that is remarkable. It is about Countess Toutschkoff and her strange dream, one that became famous during the Nineteenth Century, but which is almost forgotten today.

II

In early June 1812, the wife of General Toutschkoff experienced something that shook her to the core and would change her life forever. She beheld time in a way few have.

About three months before the French army invaded Russia, Countess Toutschkoff had the same dream three times in one night. Her husband slept next her. She dreamed she was at an inn in a town she had never seen. In the dream her father entered her room at an inn, leading her son. "Your happiness is at an end," said the father. Speaking of Countess Toutschkoff's husband, General Toutschkoff, her father told her "he has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino." After the third dream, she sat up in bed, awakened her husband, and asked the location of Borodino. They both looked for it on maps of Russia but could not find it.

Then came the event foretold. Before Napoleon's army reached Moscow, General Toutschkoff, her husband, was ordered to hold the line with his reserves against Napoleon's troops at a place about sixty miles from Moscow.

On the morning of 7 September 1812, her father entered her room at an inn, leading her son. His voice choked and broke as he told her that her husband had died for Mother Russia. Toutschkoff had fallen at the Borodino River, near an obscure village of the same name.

III

Now, quite obviously we have two ways of interpreting this. It is either true or it is false. If true, it disturbingly suggests that the future is predetermined, and is up ahead waiting for us, regardless of our preferences. I take no sides, but having had my own personal experiences,which I mentioned, I cannot handily dismiss it. There is also the experience of my wife, who dreamed of a scene, a canal with buildings, months before we knew we would move to Gouda, in The Netherlands. One day while we rode bicycles she saw the very scene she had dreamed about.

I have support for my openness toward the issue of time. Evidence from quantum physics has opened wider vistas, casting doubt, implying that beyond our common sense world lie other dimensions hidden to us. In philosophic and physics communities it is acceptable to think about time like space, an everywhen as well as an everywhere. And what is time itself? As physicist Julian Barbour puts it, "Time as such does not exist but only change." Long ago St. Augustine said, "If you don't ask me what time is, I know. If you ask me, I know not." We all talk about time, but even our common sense view is only an abstraction--that it occurs as events along a line extending out of the past into the future. When we come down from abstractions we don't have a clue what it is.

None of this explains seeing into the future as in Countess Toutschkoff's dream, but the math of quantum physics finds no reason time's arrow cannot flow backward as well as forward, out of the future into the past. Still, death comes to us all, even to physicists who say it can flow both ways. Our deaths reveal time as asymmetrical. What if it were symmetrical as in math theories? Imagine a movie of a vase falling from a table, shattering into many pieces. Johann Josef Loschmidt held that, because fundamental laws of physics are time-symmetric, a reverse flow is equally possible. Theoretically the vase could also leap back onto the table, reassembling its shards.

In the interest of brevity, this statement does not reason out of the prior one, but here is what I think. The door is open; the proof against such dreams has not arrived. Nor do I believe it ever will.
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(All historians agree that Borodino was one of the bloodiest battles since the introduction of gunpowder. The London Statistical Society places the killed and wounded in the French army at 28,085, out of 133,000 troops present on the field. The Russian army numbered 132,000 at that battle, and the losses were about the same, if not more. )

The Barrel Eye Fish

The barrel eye fish in the photo has a transparent skull, through which its green eyes see.

In the photo you can see eyes looking out from inside its transparent head. The things in front are not eyes but are similar to our nostrils. Its eyes are shaped like barrels (binocular-shaped, if you prefer) and thus its name. Spherical eyes are not as well adapted for the dark deeps in which it has to survive. Its eyes swivel. They can look forward, or rotate to see backward through the top rear of its cranium. Here is one link at Monterey Bay Aquarium Institute. Here is another at YouTube.

V.S. Ramachandran on God, the temporal lobes, and mystical experience.

Part 1. Subject as above.



Part 2. On emotional salience and religious or mystical experiences. Emotional reactions to moral atrocities committed to other people, and omnipotence. Are all brains wired for religious belief? Watch it here.