MindHacks.Org

Mind controls body in extreme experiments

By William J. Cromie, Harvard Gazette Staff

In a monastery in northern India, thinly clad Tibetan monks sat quietly in a room where the temperature was a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Using a yoga technique known as g Tum-mo, they entered a state of deep meditation. Other monks soaked 3-by-6-foot sheets in cold water (49 degrees) and placed them over the meditators' shoulders. For untrained people, such frigid wrappings would produce uncontrolled shivering.

 If body temperatures continue to drop under these conditions, death can result. But it was not long before steam began rising from the sheets. As a result of body heat produced by the monks during meditation, the sheets dried in about an hour.

Picture Left: A Buddhist monk has his vital signs measured as he prepares to enter an advanced state of meditation in Normandy, France. During meditation, the monk's body produces enough heat to dry cold, wet sheets put over his shoulders in a frigid room (Photo by Herbert Benson).

Attendants removed the sheets, then covered the meditators with a second chilled, wet wrapping. Each monk was required to dry three sheets over a period of several hours.

Why would anyone do this? Herbert Benson, who has been studying g Tum-mo for 20 years, answers that "Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There's another reality we can tap into that's unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world. Buddhists believe this state of mind can be achieved by doing good for others and by meditation. The heat they generate during the process is just a by-product of g Tum-mo meditation."

Benson is an associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He firmly believes that studying advanced forms of meditation "can uncover capacities that will help us to better treat stress-related illnesses."

Benson developed the "relaxation response," which he describes as "a physiological state opposite to stress." It is characterized by decreases in metabolism, breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure. He and others have amassed evidence that it can help those suffering from illnesses caused or exacerbated by stress. Benson and colleagues use it to treat anxiety, mild and moderate depression, high blood pressure, heartbeat irregularities, excessive anger, insomnia, and even infertility. His team also uses this type of simple meditation to calm those who have been traumatized by the deaths of others, or by diagnoses of cancer or other painful, life-threatening illnesses.

"More than 60 percent of visits to physicians in the United States are due to stress-related problems, most of which are poorly treated by drugs, surgery, or other medical procedures," Benson maintains.

The Mind/Body Medical Institute is now training people to use the relaxation response to help people working at Ground Zero in New York City, where two airplanes toppled the World Trade Center Towers last Sept. 11. Facilities have been set up at nearby St. Paul's Chapel to aid people still working on clearing wreckage and bodies. Anyone else who feels stressed by those terrible events can also obtain help at the chapel. "We are training the trainers who work there," Benson says.

The relaxation response involves repeating a word, sound, phrase, or short prayer while disregarding intrusive thoughts. "If such an easy-to-master practice can bring about the remarkable changes we observe," Benson notes. "I want to investigate what advanced forms of meditation can do to help the mind control physical processes once thought to be uncontrollable."

Next: Breathtaking Results: Read More >>

Mindshock is a new series devoted to intriguing and extraordinary medical cases that shed new light on the workings of the mind.

The first film of the series, Transplanting Memories? considers whether it is possible that in receiving a transplanted organ, a patient could inherit some of their donor's memories and tastes as well.

This edition of MindShock, shown on Channel 4 in the UK on 26th June 2006 deals with the idea of heart transplant patients reporting that they experienced memories belonging to their heart donor.

From PsychologyMatters.com comes an interesting article about IQ, beleif and it's implications on student's school performance.

Thinking about intelligence as changeable and malleable, rather than stable and fixed, results in greater academic achievement, especially for people whose groups bear the burden of negative stereotypes about their intelligence.

Can people get smarter? Are some racial or social groups smarter than others? Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, many people believe that intelligence is fixed, and, moreover, that some racial and social groups are inherently smarter than others. Merely evoking these stereotypes about the intellectual inferiority of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the academic perfomance of members of these groups. Social psychologist Claude Steele and his collaborators (2002) have called this phenomenon "stereotype threat."

Yet social psychologists Aronson, Fried, and Good (2001) have developed a possible antidote to stereotype threat. They taught African American and European American college students to think of intelligence as changeable, rather than fixed — a lesson that many psychological studies suggests is true. Students in a control group did not receive this message. Those students who learned about IQ's malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group. Even more exciting was the finding that Black students benefited more from learning about the malleable nature of intelligence than did White students, showing that this intervention may successfully counteract stereotype threat.

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Is Reincarnation Real? The evidence is so compelling that it cannot be ignored by any rational mind. Even noted skeptic Carl Sagan declared that reincarnation, because of the evidence being generated, merits further scientific study.

The following article is about one such Scientist and his studies on reincarnation and past lives. You be the judge.

Psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker studies past-life memories of children
from SFGate.com

No one knows for sure what happens to us after death. But Dr. Jim Tucker is trying to find out.

Tucker is medical director of the Child and Family Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Virginia. He also works at the university's Division of Perceptual Studies, which scientifically investigates paranormal phenomena such as near-death experiences, ghosts and reincarnation.

His book "Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives" (St. Martin's Press, 2005) tries to verify statements from children who claim to have had past-life experiences. The work continues the research of Dr. Ian Stevenson, who began studying children's apparent past-life recollections 45 years ago at the University of Virginia.

It's controversial terrain for a scientist, but Tucker takes his work quite seriously. The book has been heralded as "a first-rate piece of research" by Harvard biologist Michael Levin, and Booklist described it as "powerful grounds for credulous speculation." I spoke with him recently by phone from his office in Charlottesville, Va.

Read the Full Story Here

<3Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them. Now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.

Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College in Cambridge, England, said on Tuesday he has conducted experiments that proved such precognition exists for telephone calls and even e-mails.

Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.

"The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

Read the Full Article Here >>

SCIENTISTS are using computer technology to play mind games in a bid to probe the mysteries of the paranormal.

Researchers at Manchester University have created a virtual world to test for evidence of telepathic links between 100 people in what is being described as the most objective study undertaken so far.

Volunteer pairs, including best friends, work colleagues and husbands and wives, have spent hours immersed in what appears to be a life-sized computer game, in a new twist to the old Zener card symbol experiment.

Wearing a 3D "helmet" and an electronic glove, they took turns to navigate their way through electronically-generated rooms containing a variety of objects including a telephone, football and umbrella.

The "sender" would then attempt to communicate the items they had selected to their partner receiver, who could pick from a variety of objects by opening doors and cupboards in the same virtual world.

Over the next few months researchers will painstakingly analyse all the data they have obtained and the results will be contained in scientific papers that should be published by the end of the year.

Read the Full Article Here >> 

The following article created shockwaves through the Internet in the summer of 2006. It was widely circulated and forwarded and even turned into a short film! The article was a satirical look at how Organized Religion sometimes worked.

Written by Reverend James Huber, who describes himself as a "theist and a humanist with slight pantheistic tendencies", the story described the conversation between the protaganist and two people who knock on his door to invite him to join them in "Kissing Hank's Butt".

Here is a link to the sanitized version of the story:

http://www.jhuger.com/kisshankbutt.php

Here are some additional Related Links:

The original Story (warning: some inappropriate words):

http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank.php 

The Short Film on YouTube.com:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDp7pkEcJVQ 

AROUND 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn't ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes -- desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years later and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.

Why? And What Can You Learn from this Experiment?

Read the Full News Story Here >>

THE scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real. 

Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”.

For Collins, unravelling the human genome did not create a conflict in his mind. Instead, it allowed him to “glimpse at the workings of God”.

“When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it,” he said. “But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.

“When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”

Collins joins a line of scientists whose research deepened their belief in God. Isaac Newton, whose discovery of the laws of gravity reshaped our understanding of the universe, said: “This most beautiful system could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

Editors Note: Beleif in God is not the same as support for religion. Many scientist belief in the existence of a higher intelligence but see religion as a man-made hypocritical tool that damages human society and has little place in the 21st century.  While I liked this article I was dissapointed to see that the author did not distuinguish between belief in God and blind faith in primitive dogma.

Read the Full Article Here >> 

March 20, 2006 -- James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped.

McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.

Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.

Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore.

"This is real," he says.

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