Research & News Links
Reverberation, Cory
Quantum Dream, Inc.
Huping Hu, PhD, JD, is a biophysicist and attorney. He was born in 1962, married to Maoxin Wu, MD, PhD in 1986 and has two children Alice and Allen with Wu. He obtained his B.S. in chemistry from Shanxi Agricultural University in China in 1983 and M.S. in biophysics from Lanzhou University in China in 1986. He came to the United States in January 1987 and obtained his Ph.D. in biophysics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991 and J.D. from New York Law School in 1998.
He is currently the President of QuantumDream, Inc., a R&D company established in 2003, President of Scientific God Inc., a non-profit organization established in March 2010, and principal of the Law Office of Huping Hu. He is admitted to practice law in the State of New York, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
Among his achievements, he is the proponent, in collaboration with Wu, of the oxygen pathway perturbation hypothesis that says general anesthetics produce unconsciousness by perturbing oxygen pathways in neural membranes and proteins and the spin-mediated consciousness theory that says spin is the linchpin between the mind and brain, that is, spin is the mind-pixel. Further, he has recently discovered, in collaboration with Wu, evidence of nonlocal effects of chemical substances on the brain produced through quantum entanglement and evidence of nonlocal chemical, thermal and gravitational effects which support the notion of a quantum brain and demonstrate nonlocal signaling and nonlocal gravity. He has recently also proposed, in collaboration with Wu, the principle of existence which is a theory of everything based on prespacetime (Consciousness).
He is also the founder of Scientific God Institute aimed at scientific inquiry on God and the issuance of Scientific GOD Prize and Science Association for the New Millennium aimed at a new paradigm of science. In the same vein, he has written a Cyberspeech calling all men and women of Science and Reglion to rise up in the pursuit of truth and an Editorial reflecting on the current state of science, religion and consciousness.
In January 2010, he and Wu also founded Scientific GOD Journal , Journal of Consciousness Exploration & research , and Prespacetime Journal. Then in January 2011, he and Wu founded DNA Decipher Journal. He currently serves as the chief editors of these four journals.
He is currently the President of QuantumDream, Inc., a R&D company established in 2003, President of Scientific God Inc., a non-profit organization established in March 2010, and principal of the Law Office of Huping Hu. He is admitted to practice law in the State of New York, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
Among his achievements, he is the proponent, in collaboration with Wu, of the oxygen pathway perturbation hypothesis that says general anesthetics produce unconsciousness by perturbing oxygen pathways in neural membranes and proteins and the spin-mediated consciousness theory that says spin is the linchpin between the mind and brain, that is, spin is the mind-pixel. Further, he has recently discovered, in collaboration with Wu, evidence of nonlocal effects of chemical substances on the brain produced through quantum entanglement and evidence of nonlocal chemical, thermal and gravitational effects which support the notion of a quantum brain and demonstrate nonlocal signaling and nonlocal gravity. He has recently also proposed, in collaboration with Wu, the principle of existence which is a theory of everything based on prespacetime (Consciousness).
He is also the founder of Scientific God Institute aimed at scientific inquiry on God and the issuance of Scientific GOD Prize and Science Association for the New Millennium aimed at a new paradigm of science. In the same vein, he has written a Cyberspeech calling all men and women of Science and Reglion to rise up in the pursuit of truth and an Editorial reflecting on the current state of science, religion and consciousness.
In January 2010, he and Wu also founded Scientific GOD Journal , Journal of Consciousness Exploration & research , and Prespacetime Journal. Then in January 2011, he and Wu founded DNA Decipher Journal. He currently serves as the chief editors of these four journals.
Emergent Mind / Journal of Nonlocality
http://emergentmind.org
http://emergentmind.org/journal.htm
JNLRMI is an open online journal offering its readers a forum for the scientific investigation of our human potential. Based on current research in physics, parapsychology and complementary medicine, and drawing on the discipline of meditative arts such as qigong, the discussion will revolve around the nature of space-time, causality, and individual selves; focused intentionality as a tool for shaping personal and social reality; the cultivation of mental energy and "psi" abilities; and the creation of global resonance to ensure a peaceful, meaningful and humane future for our planet.
The function of JNLRMI is to:
1. create a network of physicists, biologists, physicians, healers and consciousness researchers to identify the frontiers of our theoretical understanding of nonlocal mental interactions
2. develop concrete proposals with respect to the possible mechanisms and dynamics of nonlocal communication
3. pool our experimental expertise and equipment in order to design and carry out innovative protocols based on these proposals
4. promote this area of research to the scientific mainstream
5. establish contacts with potential sponsors for future experimental studies.
http://emergentmind.org/journal.htm
JNLRMI is an open online journal offering its readers a forum for the scientific investigation of our human potential. Based on current research in physics, parapsychology and complementary medicine, and drawing on the discipline of meditative arts such as qigong, the discussion will revolve around the nature of space-time, causality, and individual selves; focused intentionality as a tool for shaping personal and social reality; the cultivation of mental energy and "psi" abilities; and the creation of global resonance to ensure a peaceful, meaningful and humane future for our planet.
The function of JNLRMI is to:
1. create a network of physicists, biologists, physicians, healers and consciousness researchers to identify the frontiers of our theoretical understanding of nonlocal mental interactions
2. develop concrete proposals with respect to the possible mechanisms and dynamics of nonlocal communication
3. pool our experimental expertise and equipment in order to design and carry out innovative protocols based on these proposals
4. promote this area of research to the scientific mainstream
5. establish contacts with potential sponsors for future experimental studies.
Consciousness Research at ICRL
http://www.icrl.org/
ICRL is an international, interdisciplinary, and inter-generational consortium of some 75 members, most of whom have been associated with the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory as interns or research collaborators over its thirty-year history. Our goal is to extend the work of PEAR into a broader range of inquiry; to encourage a new generation of deeply creative investigators to expand the boundaries of scientific understanding; and to strengthen the foundations of science by reclaiming its spiritual heritage. Ultimately, we seek to integrate the subjective and objective dimensions of human experience into a self-reflexive Science of the Subjective.
Pragmatic Applications, all of which focus on the exploration and representation of the role of consciousness in physical reality. ICRL thereby serves as the coordinating hub of a diverse, yet unified community of participants bringing many varied skills and backgrounds to a shared vision for the future. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBxjJM_kMWo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlGICmH2a0s
http://www.icrl.org/pdf/Filters.pdf
Sensors, Filters, and the Source of Reality
ROBERT G. JAHN AND BRENDA J. DUNNE
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
Princeton University
D-334 Engineering Quadrangle
School of Engineering/Applied Science
Princeton NJ 08544-5263
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
Abstract—The failure of contemporary scientific theory to correlate and explicate anomalous consciousness-related physical phenomena may trace to inadequate comprehension of the process of information exchange between the
mind and its ultimate source. Elevation of the subjective capacities of consciousness to complementary status with the more objective physical senses, along with recognition of the bi-directional capabilities of both categories, allows establishment of resonant channels of communication between the mind and its source environment that can exceed conventional expectations. In this manner, order can be introduced into randomicity, and self-consistent realities can be extracted from transcendent chaos. The key elements in tuning these channels to amplify such information creation are the physiological and psychological filters imposed upon them, some of which can be enhanced or altered by conscious or unconscious attention. Specifically, such attitudinal tactics as openness to alternative perspectives, utilization of transdisciplinary metaphors, self-sacrificial resonance, tolerance of uncertainty, and replacement of dualistic rigor by mental complementarity can enable experiential realities that are responsive to intention, desire, or need, to an extent consistent with prevailing empirical evidence.
ICRL is an international, interdisciplinary, and inter-generational consortium of some 75 members, most of whom have been associated with the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory as interns or research collaborators over its thirty-year history. Our goal is to extend the work of PEAR into a broader range of inquiry; to encourage a new generation of deeply creative investigators to expand the boundaries of scientific understanding; and to strengthen the foundations of science by reclaiming its spiritual heritage. Ultimately, we seek to integrate the subjective and objective dimensions of human experience into a self-reflexive Science of the Subjective.
Pragmatic Applications, all of which focus on the exploration and representation of the role of consciousness in physical reality. ICRL thereby serves as the coordinating hub of a diverse, yet unified community of participants bringing many varied skills and backgrounds to a shared vision for the future. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBxjJM_kMWo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlGICmH2a0s
http://www.icrl.org/pdf/Filters.pdf
Sensors, Filters, and the Source of Reality
ROBERT G. JAHN AND BRENDA J. DUNNE
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
Princeton University
D-334 Engineering Quadrangle
School of Engineering/Applied Science
Princeton NJ 08544-5263
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
Abstract—The failure of contemporary scientific theory to correlate and explicate anomalous consciousness-related physical phenomena may trace to inadequate comprehension of the process of information exchange between the
mind and its ultimate source. Elevation of the subjective capacities of consciousness to complementary status with the more objective physical senses, along with recognition of the bi-directional capabilities of both categories, allows establishment of resonant channels of communication between the mind and its source environment that can exceed conventional expectations. In this manner, order can be introduced into randomicity, and self-consistent realities can be extracted from transcendent chaos. The key elements in tuning these channels to amplify such information creation are the physiological and psychological filters imposed upon them, some of which can be enhanced or altered by conscious or unconscious attention. Specifically, such attitudinal tactics as openness to alternative perspectives, utilization of transdisciplinary metaphors, self-sacrificial resonance, tolerance of uncertainty, and replacement of dualistic rigor by mental complementarity can enable experiential realities that are responsive to intention, desire, or need, to an extent consistent with prevailing empirical evidence.
Medigrace.org - Medical Applications of Meditation
MEDIGRACE, INC.
Calm Healing * Calm Birth * Alzheimer's Care * Near Death Care
New Healthcare Methods * Medical Uses of Meditation
"The true calculus of healing makes conventional approaches look like five-fingered arithmetic. CALM HEALING is a marvellous description of the healing powers that are freely available -- here, now, everywhere." --Larry Dossey, MD, Author: Healing Words; Reinventing Medicine; The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things
"We have known for over 30 years that eighty-five percent of illnesses are the result of unhealthy behavior. Modern medicine is essential about 15% of the time and 85% of the time is a stop-gap attempt to salvage the barn after the horse has escaped and the barn is burning. CALM HEALING offers Real Medicine for the 21st century." --C. Norman Shealy, MD, PhD, Founding President, American Holistic Medical Association. Author: The Creation of Health; Miracles do Happen; Life Beyond 100 / Secrets of the Fountain of Youth
"Calm Healing offers extraordinary and essential insight into wholeness and healing. To read Calm Healing is to experience the essential light and healing that are available to all of us right now, at this very moment. So helpful. Such a relief." --Christiane Northrup, MD Author, Mother-Daughter Wisdom and Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom
"Newman and Miller have written a virtual bible of "calm healing", a primer for a new medicine. Not only have they explored it's history and science, but they have created actual protocols and prayers - word by word incantations. Thus the book is not only an account of possibility. It is the manual, the starting point for practice. What we have here is a rare thing: phonemes that are things, statements that breathe medicines." --Richard Grossinger, PhD, Author of Planet Medicine, Embryogenesis; Galaxies, Embryos, and Sentient Beings
http://medigrace.weebly.com/
http://calmbirth .org
Calm Healing * Calm Birth * Alzheimer's Care * Near Death Care
New Healthcare Methods * Medical Uses of Meditation
"The true calculus of healing makes conventional approaches look like five-fingered arithmetic. CALM HEALING is a marvellous description of the healing powers that are freely available -- here, now, everywhere." --Larry Dossey, MD, Author: Healing Words; Reinventing Medicine; The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things
"We have known for over 30 years that eighty-five percent of illnesses are the result of unhealthy behavior. Modern medicine is essential about 15% of the time and 85% of the time is a stop-gap attempt to salvage the barn after the horse has escaped and the barn is burning. CALM HEALING offers Real Medicine for the 21st century." --C. Norman Shealy, MD, PhD, Founding President, American Holistic Medical Association. Author: The Creation of Health; Miracles do Happen; Life Beyond 100 / Secrets of the Fountain of Youth
"Calm Healing offers extraordinary and essential insight into wholeness and healing. To read Calm Healing is to experience the essential light and healing that are available to all of us right now, at this very moment. So helpful. Such a relief." --Christiane Northrup, MD Author, Mother-Daughter Wisdom and Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom
"Newman and Miller have written a virtual bible of "calm healing", a primer for a new medicine. Not only have they explored it's history and science, but they have created actual protocols and prayers - word by word incantations. Thus the book is not only an account of possibility. It is the manual, the starting point for practice. What we have here is a rare thing: phonemes that are things, statements that breathe medicines." --Richard Grossinger, PhD, Author of Planet Medicine, Embryogenesis; Galaxies, Embryos, and Sentient Beings
http://medigrace.weebly.com/
http://calmbirth .org
Mankind Research Unlimited - Psychotronic Thinktank Archive
http://mankindresearchunlimited.weebly.com/
MRU VIDEO -- "NEED TO KNOW"
http://www.vimeo.com/10785553
MRU VIDEO -- "NEED TO KNOW"
http://www.vimeo.com/10785553
Wave Genetics / Wave Biology
Wave Biology video by Nobel Winner
http://larouchepac.com/node/19140
Wave Genetics on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/groups/wavegenetic/167326283389358/?notif_t=group_activity
DECODING DNA Folding Patterns
http://www.kurzweilai.net/decoding-dna-folding-patterns?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e3e337c477-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email
Peter Gariaev, Toronto 2002
QuantumBionet
http://www.quantumbionet.org/eng/
QuantumBioNet
The Network for the Scientific Enhancements in the Fields of Quantum Science, including Quantum Mechanics , Quantum Consciousness, Quantum Information , Quantum Computing , Quantum Logic , Quantum Biology , Nanobiotechnology , Quantum Art
A network of people with various backgrounds and cultures, on a global basis to create an ideal platform for sharing the latest thinking in quantum sciences, examining current trends and assessing the likely changes for the future. The network include well-known intellectuals, teachers and laboratories supporting the development of sciences and aimed by taking an active role on the international stage for human health and wellness enhancement. The network will be the bridge between science and spirituality by using real economical basis on knowledge valorization
Site History
The idea for a Quantum Biology Network started at the end of 2005. At that time I was reading two books that fascinating me, they were: The Holographic Universe - Michael Talbot and The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose. These readings stimulate my curiosity and I began to collect several informations through the web among Quantum mechanics and Consciousness. As a scientist and not only a reader, I selected very quickly the informations among the enormous quantity of material spreaded throughout the web and I started to form a personal background on this topic. At the beginning of 2006 I started my activity as Human Biocatalists (HB). I coined the term in analogy with the topic of my research. In Biocatalysis an Enzyme do nothing but accelerating the chemical reaction between chemical entities (Substrates) to form, in a very fast way, the Products. This metafora will be very useful to exemplify what I did at the beginning of January 2006. An enzyme does not catalyze every reactions because of its selectivity, in the same way, as a HB I followed my intuit in contacting some scientists and proposing them a sort of exchange and collaboration between us. The first people I contacted were Stuart Hameroff and Jack Tuszynski. The idea shared with them was to partecipate to "Toward a Science of Consciousness 2006 - April 4-8, 2006, Tucson, Arizona" and during the conference to start a project in collaboration. In the next weeks I met some other people, Paola Zizzi and Giulia Battilotti in Padova, Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano and Lorenzo Maccone from the Quantum Information Theory Group in Pavia, Eliano Pessa and Stefano Govoni in Pavia too. The discussions were always interesting and stimulating and the idea of creating a Network started to grow. In the middle of February a dramatic event in my life stopped any activities as HB. At the end of February I felt completely inhibited and I needed to interrupt my connections with the partners that nevertheless were very kind with me and understood the difficulty I was living. I disregarded the Tucson Conference and I took seven months to recover myself and start again my activities. At the beginning of September some connections were restored (Paola Zizzi and Eliano Pessa) and the works restarted with the creation of this website. The Network was born officially the 28th October 2006 by the Sala del Maggior Consiglio - Palazzo Ducale - Venezia.
USA
Tucson (AZ)
Acton (MA)
Schnecksville (PA)
Orinda (CA)
Grants Pass (OR)
Monterey (CA)
QuantumBioNet
The Network for the Scientific Enhancements in the Fields of Quantum Science, including Quantum Mechanics , Quantum Consciousness, Quantum Information , Quantum Computing , Quantum Logic , Quantum Biology , Nanobiotechnology , Quantum Art
A network of people with various backgrounds and cultures, on a global basis to create an ideal platform for sharing the latest thinking in quantum sciences, examining current trends and assessing the likely changes for the future. The network include well-known intellectuals, teachers and laboratories supporting the development of sciences and aimed by taking an active role on the international stage for human health and wellness enhancement. The network will be the bridge between science and spirituality by using real economical basis on knowledge valorization
Site History
The idea for a Quantum Biology Network started at the end of 2005. At that time I was reading two books that fascinating me, they were: The Holographic Universe - Michael Talbot and The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose. These readings stimulate my curiosity and I began to collect several informations through the web among Quantum mechanics and Consciousness. As a scientist and not only a reader, I selected very quickly the informations among the enormous quantity of material spreaded throughout the web and I started to form a personal background on this topic. At the beginning of 2006 I started my activity as Human Biocatalists (HB). I coined the term in analogy with the topic of my research. In Biocatalysis an Enzyme do nothing but accelerating the chemical reaction between chemical entities (Substrates) to form, in a very fast way, the Products. This metafora will be very useful to exemplify what I did at the beginning of January 2006. An enzyme does not catalyze every reactions because of its selectivity, in the same way, as a HB I followed my intuit in contacting some scientists and proposing them a sort of exchange and collaboration between us. The first people I contacted were Stuart Hameroff and Jack Tuszynski. The idea shared with them was to partecipate to "Toward a Science of Consciousness 2006 - April 4-8, 2006, Tucson, Arizona" and during the conference to start a project in collaboration. In the next weeks I met some other people, Paola Zizzi and Giulia Battilotti in Padova, Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano and Lorenzo Maccone from the Quantum Information Theory Group in Pavia, Eliano Pessa and Stefano Govoni in Pavia too. The discussions were always interesting and stimulating and the idea of creating a Network started to grow. In the middle of February a dramatic event in my life stopped any activities as HB. At the end of February I felt completely inhibited and I needed to interrupt my connections with the partners that nevertheless were very kind with me and understood the difficulty I was living. I disregarded the Tucson Conference and I took seven months to recover myself and start again my activities. At the beginning of September some connections were restored (Paola Zizzi and Eliano Pessa) and the works restarted with the creation of this website. The Network was born officially the 28th October 2006 by the Sala del Maggior Consiglio - Palazzo Ducale - Venezia.
USA
Tucson (AZ)
Acton (MA)
Schnecksville (PA)
Orinda (CA)
Grants Pass (OR)
Monterey (CA)
EGOCREANET - Science-Art
PRESIDENTE EGOCREANET
Director of LRE/EGO-CreaNet – University of Florence
DIPARTIMENTO DI CHIMICA ,
[email protected]
http://www.wikipazia.org/
http://www.egocreanet.it/Postnuke/html/
http://blu.chim.unifi.it/group/education/index.html
http://www.edscuola.it/lre.html
http://www.egocrea.net/
http://www.descrittiva.it/calip/dna/
http://cseonns.splinder.com/
Director of LRE/EGO-CreaNet – University of Florence
DIPARTIMENTO DI CHIMICA ,
[email protected]
http://www.wikipazia.org/
http://www.egocreanet.it/Postnuke/html/
http://blu.chim.unifi.it/group/education/index.html
http://www.edscuola.it/lre.html
http://www.egocrea.net/
http://www.descrittiva.it/calip/dna/
http://cseonns.splinder.com/
NEWS - 2012
Video Story - Real-time single-molecule imaging of quantum interference
The observation of interference patterns in double-slit experiments with massive particles is generally regarded as the ultimate demonstration of the quantum nature of these objects. Such matter–wave interference has been observed for electrons1, neutrons2, atoms3, 5, 6, 7 and, in contrast to classical physics, quantum interference can be observed when single particles arrive at the detector one by one. The build-up of such patterns in experiments with electrons has been described as the “most beautiful experiment in physics”8, 9, 10, 11. Here, we show how a combination of nanofabrication and nano-imaging allows us to record the full two-dimensional build-up of quantum interference patterns in real time for phthalocyanine molecules and for derivatives of phthalocyanine molecules, which have masses of 514 AMU and 1,298 AMU respectively. A laser-controlled micro-evaporation source was used to produce a beam of molecules with the required intensity and coherence, and the gratings were machined in 10-nm-thick silicon nitride membranes to reduce the effect of van der Waals forces. Wide-field fluorescence microscopy detected the position of each molecule with an accuracy of 10 nm and revealed the build-up of a deterministic ensemble interference pattern from single molecules that arrived stochastically at the detector. In addition to providing this particularly clear demonstration of wave–particle duality, our approach could also be used to study larger molecules and explore the boundary between quantum and classical physics.
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.34.html
Video Story: Superstring Code?
Prof. James Gates, Jr.
"Doubly-even self-dual linear binary error-correcting block code," first invented by Claude Shannon in the 1940's, has been discovered embedded WITHIN the equations of superstring theory!
Why does nature have this? What errors does it need to correct? What is an 'error' for nature? More importantly what is the explanation for this freakish discovery? Your guess is as good as mine.
References
1.) Recent NPR interview with Professor Gates: http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2012/codes-for-reality/gates-symbolsofp...
2.) Gates original paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.0051
3.) A potential explanation, Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
Category: Science & Technology
Tags: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1LCVknKUJ4&feature=youtu.be
"Doubly-even self-dual linear binary error-correcting block code," first invented by Claude Shannon in the 1940's, has been discovered embedded WITHIN the equations of superstring theory!
Why does nature have this? What errors does it need to correct? What is an 'error' for nature? More importantly what is the explanation for this freakish discovery? Your guess is as good as mine.
References
1.) Recent NPR interview with Professor Gates: http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2012/codes-for-reality/gates-symbolsofp...
2.) Gates original paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.0051
3.) A potential explanation, Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
Category: Science & Technology
Tags: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1LCVknKUJ4&feature=youtu.be
Life-Changing Experiments: The Biological Higgs
http://www.nature.com/news/life-changing-experiments-the-biological-higgs-1.10310
Biologists may have little cause to envy physicists — they generally enjoy more generous funding, more commercial interest and more popular support. But they could have been forgiven a moment of physics envy last December when, after a week of build-up and speculation, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva in Switzerland addressed a tense, standing-room-only auditorium.
Scientists there had caught the strongest hints yet of the Higgs boson: what some have called the 'God particle' and the final missing piece of the standard model that explains the behaviour of subatomic particles. The discovery, if confirmed, will mark the culmination of a hunt that has taken years and cost billions of dollars, and will shape the field for years to come. The research community was abuzz. “There were lots of rumours flying around about how significant the signal was,” says Lisa Randall, a theoretical particle physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who got up at 4 a.m. to talk to the press before watching the webcast of the presentation at the LHC. “It's been quite exciting.”
All this led Nature to wonder: what fundamental discoveries in biology might inspire the same thrill? We put the question to experts in various fields. Biology is no stranger to large, international collaborations with lofty goals, they pointed out — the race to sequence the human genome around the turn of the century had scientists riveted. But most biological quests lack the mathematical precision, focus and binary satisfaction of a yes-or-no answer that characterize the pursuit of the Higgs. “Most of what is important is messy, and not given to a moment when you plant a flag and crack the champagne,” says Steven Hyman, a neuroscientist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Related stories
Nevertheless, our informal survey shows that the field has no shortage of fundamental questions that could fill an anticipatory auditorium. These questions concern where and how life started — and why it ends.
Is there life elsewhere? In 1964, palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote a stinging dismissal of exobiology, the search for life on other planets. “This 'science' has yet to demonstrate that its subject matter exists!” he wrote1. The searing critique caused many researchers in the nascent field to shy away from exobiology.
But it was unfair, says planetary scientist Christopher Chyba of Princeton University in New Jersey. Chyba has for years been comparing the search for life on other planets to the search for the Higgs: another quest whose subject has never been proved to exist. “Why should we suddenly become giggly when it is biology at stake, rather than physics?” Chyba wrote in a 2005 rebuttal to Simpson's attack2.
The search for extraterrestrial life can be described as one way to test “a standard model of biology”, says astrobiologist Chris McKay of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “It's the model of DNA and amino acids and proteins and a genetic code,” he says. “It's the common features of all biology, and the framework through which everything we know about life is based.” If life fundamentally different from this standard model — perhaps relying on a wildly different biochemistry — were found on another planet, it would show that there is more than one way to produce a living system, he adds.
Others say they don't need evidence of such a 'second genesis' to get a Higgs-like thrill from the prospect of life on other planets. “If we found our same biology, but on Mars, that would be pretty exciting,” says biochemist Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. “Then the question would be: where did it come from first?”
But whereas the Higgs-hunters in Geneva have a good idea of what to look for, astrobiologists seeking alternative forms of life face a bigger logistical challenge: figuring out what clues are most revealing. The chemical signatures of compounds that are commonly associated with life, such as methane or liquid water, could identify planets to focus on. But atmospheric signatures of life are unlikely to be convincing, says Chyba.
B. MONROE
Within the Solar System, McKay puts his money on three habitats as most likely to harbour life: Enceladus, an icy moon orbiting Saturn that, according to NASA's Cassini spacecraft, probably has liquid water and is spewing organic material from cracks in its surface3; Mars, but “old Mars, not Mars today”; and Jupiter's moon, Europa, whose icy surface masks tantalizing seas of water. The Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled to land on the red planet in August, will include a simple mass spectrometer and a laser spectrometer, enabling it to detect methane, and could reveal preliminary signs of life. But the mission is not designed to yield definitive evidence.
Another way to hunt for life is to look for organic molecules that are too complex to have arisen by simple chemical synthesis, unaided by enzymes. “Let's say you came to Earth and scooped up matter,” says McKay. “You'd find all of this chlorophyll and DNA: big, huge, complex molecules that were clearly there in high abundance and distinctly different from what you'd expect from a chemical mix.” Finding this would require sophisticated equipment that had been baked and scrubbed free of earthly contaminants and, at present, there are no concrete plans to include such equipment on NASA's proposed trips to Mars or Europa. “My sense is that people are just trying to avoid it as long as possible,” Chyba says. “Money is extremely tight, but at some point we'll just have to bite the bullet.”
Searching rocks on other planets for fossils is another popular proposition, says Jeffrey Bada, a planetary geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. “That's easy enough,” he says. “But if you don't find them, does that tell you that life never existed there?” McKay argues that fossil evidence or living proof of life may be required to convince a field. “Ultimately, you'll have to have a body,” he says. “It doesn't have to be alive, but you'll have to have a body.”
Is there foreign life on earth? Alien life — and a Higgs moment — might also be lurking close to home. Some have postulated the existence of a 'shadow biosphere' on Earth, teeming with life that has gone undiscovered because scientists simply don't know where to look. It could contain life that relies on a fundamentally different biochemistry, using different forms of amino acids or even entirely novel ways of storing, replicating and executing inherited information that do not rely on DNA or proteins.
The idea is not as far-fetched as it might sound, says Steven Benner, a chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida. Researchers have found shadow biospheres before. The invention of the microscope revealed whole new worlds, says Benner; and the discovery of a new realm of microorganisms, the archaea, opened a window on another. “The question is: is it going to happen again?”
The trick is deciding what to look for and how to detect it. The usual way that researchers search for new organisms — by sequencing DNA or RNA — will not pick up life that does not depend on them.
Some scientists have speculated that desert varnish, a peculiar dark-coloured coating of unknown origin found on many desert rocks, could be a product of a shadow biosphere. Benner suggests looking in nooks and crannies that cannot support conventional life, such as areas with extremely high temperatures, radiation levels or harsh chemical environments.
Felisa Wolfe-Simon, now at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, and her colleagues took this approach when they searched for life in the arsenic-rich environment of California's Mono Lake. In late 2010, they reported the discovery of a life form that can use arsenic in place of phosphorus in its DNA and proteins — a seemingly remarkable departure from conventional life4. But at least one attempt to reproduce the result has failed.
Another approach is to search on the basis of size. If cells were liberated from their reliance on bulky ribosomes and proteins, they could be much smaller, says Benner, perhaps tucked away in rocks with pores only nanometres across. That is the rationale behind a project that John Atkins, a molecular geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, is pursuing with Richard Herrington of the Natural History Museum in London. They plan to sequence the contents of rocks of different ages and origins with pores less than 100 nanometres in diameter. By screening for nucleic-acid sequences that lack the code for protein-making ribosomes, they hope to find a protein-free life form that has its roots in RNA, as known life probably does, but that arose independently. “The RNA world is thought to have originated, in geological terms, relatively quickly,” Atkins says. “So why couldn't it have arisen again multiple times?”
How did life start…? Even if alternative forms of life elude scientists, a fuller picture of how familiar life originated on Earth would surely create ripples in biology.
Joyce says that there will come a point at which researchers learn how to synthesize an evolving, replicating system from scratch. Getting there won't have the “monolithic, big-science march across the goal line” that has characterized the search for the Higgs, he cautions. But it will answer a key biological question: what does it take to create life from a primordial soup? And that could provide insight into how life on Earth began. “We'll never know for sure, but at least you can test plausible hypotheses,” says James Collins, a synthetic biologist at Boston University in Massachusetts.
Several labs have already made headway. Joyce and his collaborators have pioneered work on the RNA-world concept, in which RNA molecules, capable of encoding information and catalysing chemical reactions, replicated and evolved faster than they degraded. RNA is notoriously unstable, and the idea is that, over time, this system gave way to DNA, a sturdier system for storing information, and proteins, a more versatile mode of catalysing reactions. “The transition to DNA and protein created the potential to evolve into more complex things,” Bada says.
“Why should we suddenly become giggly when it is biology at stake, rather than physics?”
In 2009, a paper from Joyce's lab reported the development of a system of RNA molecules that undergo self-sustaining Darwinian evolution5. But enzymes and a human hand were needed to create the RNA sequences to start off the reaction, Joyce says, and so far his lab has not found conditions that would allow the system to form spontaneously. “We're still a bit challenged,” he says. “But the system is running more and more efficiently all the time.”
Jack Szostak and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston have taken a different approach, enclosing RNA molecules in fatty-acid vesicles as an early step towards the creation of a primitive cell. The vesicles grow and divide spontaneously, but the genetic material does not replicate without the aid of an enzyme6.
Some believe that RNA may have had a precursor. Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy at the Scripps Research Institute, is testing novel polymers of organic chemicals that could have formed in the primordial goo, in search of those that could replicate and evolve. “RNA was not the first living entity,” says Bada. “It's too complex. Something preceded RNA, and that's where the interest is right now.”
… and can we delay its end? In a 1993 review7, Linda Partridge and Nicholas Barton, both then researchers on ageing at the University of Edinburgh, UK, delivered “a baleful message” to the field of gerontology. The complexity of the biological networks that influence ageing, they wrote, means “it is most unlikely that engineering of a few genes or intervention in a handful of physiological pathways will prevent the process from occurring.”
Things have changed. “I could tolerate that debate 20 years ago,” says Richard Miller, who studies ageing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “But now it's just wrong.”
Some eight months after the publication of Partridge and Barton's review, Cynthia Kenyon and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, reported that mutations in a single gene allowed the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to live more than twice as long as usual8. Three years later, a group led by Andrzej Bartke, who studies ageing at Southern Illinois University in Springfield, reported that mice bearing a single mutation that causes hormonal deficiencies live up to 68% longer than mice without the mutation9.
Both papers, and a slew of work since, have suggested that it might be possible to significantly slow human ageing and its associated diseases. Such an intervention could have a tremendous impact on society, adding years of health and economic productivity, but creating new strains on a society having to support many more older people. And scientifically, the ability to slow ageing would address Higgs-like fundamental questions about human life: why do we age; what pathways control it; and what are the consequences if they are switched off?
There are signs that such interventions may exist. In 2010, Miller and his colleagues showed that feeding mice a drug called rapamycin lengthened their average lifespan by 10% for males and 18% for females10. And slashing calorie intake by 25–40% can extend lifespan in mice and other mammals. But there is no proof that these approaches would work in humans and, even if they did, neither is likely to catch on: rapamycin can suppress the immune system, and few people can tolerate brutal dietary restriction.
One major challenge for the field is to prove that a putative life-extending agent actually works — something that in humans would take 60 years or more. Jay Olshansky, who studies ageing at the University of Illinois in Chicago, says the field should set a concrete goal: a seven-year delay in the onset and progression of age-related disease. “If you look at the risk of most of the things that go wrong with us as we grow older, age-related risk doubles roughly every seven years,” he says. “If you eliminate one doubling, you reduce the risk of everything by half. It would be monumental.”
Miller has a different goal. “We will have the answer when we have something that we can put in dog food that extends the average dog's lifespan by 15 to 20%,” he says. Dogs offer an ideal intermediate between mice and humans, says Miller: they are considered a long-lived species and live side-by-side with humans.
But Partridge and Barton's observations about the complexity of ageing still hold true. Most researchers acknowledge that they are only beginning to understand the molecular networks that regulate ageing and its associated diseases. “I don't believe there's one cause of ageing,” says Brian Kennedy, president of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California. “But there are pathways that are designed to modulate many things at one time. I think a lot of the genes and drugs we're studying are tapping into those.”
At this point, a life-extending therapy seems a much more distant prospect than does confirmation of the Higgs boson. Last month, researchers announced a bump in data from the Tevatron, the US particle collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, that is consistent with results from the LHC. It has added to physicists' excitement that they are on the threshold of discovery.
Ageing, however, “is almost the complete inverse of the situation of the Higgs particle”, reflects Thomas Kirkwood, a leader in the field at Newcastle University, UK. “Everything that we're learning tells us it's highly unlikely that we'll find a single unitary cause.”
Nature483,528–530(29 March 2012) doi:10.1038/483528a References
Biologists may have little cause to envy physicists — they generally enjoy more generous funding, more commercial interest and more popular support. But they could have been forgiven a moment of physics envy last December when, after a week of build-up and speculation, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva in Switzerland addressed a tense, standing-room-only auditorium.
Scientists there had caught the strongest hints yet of the Higgs boson: what some have called the 'God particle' and the final missing piece of the standard model that explains the behaviour of subatomic particles. The discovery, if confirmed, will mark the culmination of a hunt that has taken years and cost billions of dollars, and will shape the field for years to come. The research community was abuzz. “There were lots of rumours flying around about how significant the signal was,” says Lisa Randall, a theoretical particle physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who got up at 4 a.m. to talk to the press before watching the webcast of the presentation at the LHC. “It's been quite exciting.”
All this led Nature to wonder: what fundamental discoveries in biology might inspire the same thrill? We put the question to experts in various fields. Biology is no stranger to large, international collaborations with lofty goals, they pointed out — the race to sequence the human genome around the turn of the century had scientists riveted. But most biological quests lack the mathematical precision, focus and binary satisfaction of a yes-or-no answer that characterize the pursuit of the Higgs. “Most of what is important is messy, and not given to a moment when you plant a flag and crack the champagne,” says Steven Hyman, a neuroscientist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Related stories
- Boost for Higgs from Tevatron data
- Debate bubbles over the origin of life
- Detectors home in on Higgs boson
Nevertheless, our informal survey shows that the field has no shortage of fundamental questions that could fill an anticipatory auditorium. These questions concern where and how life started — and why it ends.
Is there life elsewhere? In 1964, palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote a stinging dismissal of exobiology, the search for life on other planets. “This 'science' has yet to demonstrate that its subject matter exists!” he wrote1. The searing critique caused many researchers in the nascent field to shy away from exobiology.
But it was unfair, says planetary scientist Christopher Chyba of Princeton University in New Jersey. Chyba has for years been comparing the search for life on other planets to the search for the Higgs: another quest whose subject has never been proved to exist. “Why should we suddenly become giggly when it is biology at stake, rather than physics?” Chyba wrote in a 2005 rebuttal to Simpson's attack2.
The search for extraterrestrial life can be described as one way to test “a standard model of biology”, says astrobiologist Chris McKay of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “It's the model of DNA and amino acids and proteins and a genetic code,” he says. “It's the common features of all biology, and the framework through which everything we know about life is based.” If life fundamentally different from this standard model — perhaps relying on a wildly different biochemistry — were found on another planet, it would show that there is more than one way to produce a living system, he adds.
Others say they don't need evidence of such a 'second genesis' to get a Higgs-like thrill from the prospect of life on other planets. “If we found our same biology, but on Mars, that would be pretty exciting,” says biochemist Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. “Then the question would be: where did it come from first?”
But whereas the Higgs-hunters in Geneva have a good idea of what to look for, astrobiologists seeking alternative forms of life face a bigger logistical challenge: figuring out what clues are most revealing. The chemical signatures of compounds that are commonly associated with life, such as methane or liquid water, could identify planets to focus on. But atmospheric signatures of life are unlikely to be convincing, says Chyba.
B. MONROE
Within the Solar System, McKay puts his money on three habitats as most likely to harbour life: Enceladus, an icy moon orbiting Saturn that, according to NASA's Cassini spacecraft, probably has liquid water and is spewing organic material from cracks in its surface3; Mars, but “old Mars, not Mars today”; and Jupiter's moon, Europa, whose icy surface masks tantalizing seas of water. The Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled to land on the red planet in August, will include a simple mass spectrometer and a laser spectrometer, enabling it to detect methane, and could reveal preliminary signs of life. But the mission is not designed to yield definitive evidence.
Another way to hunt for life is to look for organic molecules that are too complex to have arisen by simple chemical synthesis, unaided by enzymes. “Let's say you came to Earth and scooped up matter,” says McKay. “You'd find all of this chlorophyll and DNA: big, huge, complex molecules that were clearly there in high abundance and distinctly different from what you'd expect from a chemical mix.” Finding this would require sophisticated equipment that had been baked and scrubbed free of earthly contaminants and, at present, there are no concrete plans to include such equipment on NASA's proposed trips to Mars or Europa. “My sense is that people are just trying to avoid it as long as possible,” Chyba says. “Money is extremely tight, but at some point we'll just have to bite the bullet.”
Searching rocks on other planets for fossils is another popular proposition, says Jeffrey Bada, a planetary geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. “That's easy enough,” he says. “But if you don't find them, does that tell you that life never existed there?” McKay argues that fossil evidence or living proof of life may be required to convince a field. “Ultimately, you'll have to have a body,” he says. “It doesn't have to be alive, but you'll have to have a body.”
Is there foreign life on earth? Alien life — and a Higgs moment — might also be lurking close to home. Some have postulated the existence of a 'shadow biosphere' on Earth, teeming with life that has gone undiscovered because scientists simply don't know where to look. It could contain life that relies on a fundamentally different biochemistry, using different forms of amino acids or even entirely novel ways of storing, replicating and executing inherited information that do not rely on DNA or proteins.
The idea is not as far-fetched as it might sound, says Steven Benner, a chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida. Researchers have found shadow biospheres before. The invention of the microscope revealed whole new worlds, says Benner; and the discovery of a new realm of microorganisms, the archaea, opened a window on another. “The question is: is it going to happen again?”
The trick is deciding what to look for and how to detect it. The usual way that researchers search for new organisms — by sequencing DNA or RNA — will not pick up life that does not depend on them.
Some scientists have speculated that desert varnish, a peculiar dark-coloured coating of unknown origin found on many desert rocks, could be a product of a shadow biosphere. Benner suggests looking in nooks and crannies that cannot support conventional life, such as areas with extremely high temperatures, radiation levels or harsh chemical environments.
Felisa Wolfe-Simon, now at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, and her colleagues took this approach when they searched for life in the arsenic-rich environment of California's Mono Lake. In late 2010, they reported the discovery of a life form that can use arsenic in place of phosphorus in its DNA and proteins — a seemingly remarkable departure from conventional life4. But at least one attempt to reproduce the result has failed.
Another approach is to search on the basis of size. If cells were liberated from their reliance on bulky ribosomes and proteins, they could be much smaller, says Benner, perhaps tucked away in rocks with pores only nanometres across. That is the rationale behind a project that John Atkins, a molecular geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, is pursuing with Richard Herrington of the Natural History Museum in London. They plan to sequence the contents of rocks of different ages and origins with pores less than 100 nanometres in diameter. By screening for nucleic-acid sequences that lack the code for protein-making ribosomes, they hope to find a protein-free life form that has its roots in RNA, as known life probably does, but that arose independently. “The RNA world is thought to have originated, in geological terms, relatively quickly,” Atkins says. “So why couldn't it have arisen again multiple times?”
How did life start…? Even if alternative forms of life elude scientists, a fuller picture of how familiar life originated on Earth would surely create ripples in biology.
Joyce says that there will come a point at which researchers learn how to synthesize an evolving, replicating system from scratch. Getting there won't have the “monolithic, big-science march across the goal line” that has characterized the search for the Higgs, he cautions. But it will answer a key biological question: what does it take to create life from a primordial soup? And that could provide insight into how life on Earth began. “We'll never know for sure, but at least you can test plausible hypotheses,” says James Collins, a synthetic biologist at Boston University in Massachusetts.
Several labs have already made headway. Joyce and his collaborators have pioneered work on the RNA-world concept, in which RNA molecules, capable of encoding information and catalysing chemical reactions, replicated and evolved faster than they degraded. RNA is notoriously unstable, and the idea is that, over time, this system gave way to DNA, a sturdier system for storing information, and proteins, a more versatile mode of catalysing reactions. “The transition to DNA and protein created the potential to evolve into more complex things,” Bada says.
“Why should we suddenly become giggly when it is biology at stake, rather than physics?”
In 2009, a paper from Joyce's lab reported the development of a system of RNA molecules that undergo self-sustaining Darwinian evolution5. But enzymes and a human hand were needed to create the RNA sequences to start off the reaction, Joyce says, and so far his lab has not found conditions that would allow the system to form spontaneously. “We're still a bit challenged,” he says. “But the system is running more and more efficiently all the time.”
Jack Szostak and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston have taken a different approach, enclosing RNA molecules in fatty-acid vesicles as an early step towards the creation of a primitive cell. The vesicles grow and divide spontaneously, but the genetic material does not replicate without the aid of an enzyme6.
Some believe that RNA may have had a precursor. Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy at the Scripps Research Institute, is testing novel polymers of organic chemicals that could have formed in the primordial goo, in search of those that could replicate and evolve. “RNA was not the first living entity,” says Bada. “It's too complex. Something preceded RNA, and that's where the interest is right now.”
… and can we delay its end? In a 1993 review7, Linda Partridge and Nicholas Barton, both then researchers on ageing at the University of Edinburgh, UK, delivered “a baleful message” to the field of gerontology. The complexity of the biological networks that influence ageing, they wrote, means “it is most unlikely that engineering of a few genes or intervention in a handful of physiological pathways will prevent the process from occurring.”
Things have changed. “I could tolerate that debate 20 years ago,” says Richard Miller, who studies ageing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “But now it's just wrong.”
Some eight months after the publication of Partridge and Barton's review, Cynthia Kenyon and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, reported that mutations in a single gene allowed the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to live more than twice as long as usual8. Three years later, a group led by Andrzej Bartke, who studies ageing at Southern Illinois University in Springfield, reported that mice bearing a single mutation that causes hormonal deficiencies live up to 68% longer than mice without the mutation9.
Both papers, and a slew of work since, have suggested that it might be possible to significantly slow human ageing and its associated diseases. Such an intervention could have a tremendous impact on society, adding years of health and economic productivity, but creating new strains on a society having to support many more older people. And scientifically, the ability to slow ageing would address Higgs-like fundamental questions about human life: why do we age; what pathways control it; and what are the consequences if they are switched off?
There are signs that such interventions may exist. In 2010, Miller and his colleagues showed that feeding mice a drug called rapamycin lengthened their average lifespan by 10% for males and 18% for females10. And slashing calorie intake by 25–40% can extend lifespan in mice and other mammals. But there is no proof that these approaches would work in humans and, even if they did, neither is likely to catch on: rapamycin can suppress the immune system, and few people can tolerate brutal dietary restriction.
One major challenge for the field is to prove that a putative life-extending agent actually works — something that in humans would take 60 years or more. Jay Olshansky, who studies ageing at the University of Illinois in Chicago, says the field should set a concrete goal: a seven-year delay in the onset and progression of age-related disease. “If you look at the risk of most of the things that go wrong with us as we grow older, age-related risk doubles roughly every seven years,” he says. “If you eliminate one doubling, you reduce the risk of everything by half. It would be monumental.”
Miller has a different goal. “We will have the answer when we have something that we can put in dog food that extends the average dog's lifespan by 15 to 20%,” he says. Dogs offer an ideal intermediate between mice and humans, says Miller: they are considered a long-lived species and live side-by-side with humans.
But Partridge and Barton's observations about the complexity of ageing still hold true. Most researchers acknowledge that they are only beginning to understand the molecular networks that regulate ageing and its associated diseases. “I don't believe there's one cause of ageing,” says Brian Kennedy, president of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California. “But there are pathways that are designed to modulate many things at one time. I think a lot of the genes and drugs we're studying are tapping into those.”
At this point, a life-extending therapy seems a much more distant prospect than does confirmation of the Higgs boson. Last month, researchers announced a bump in data from the Tevatron, the US particle collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, that is consistent with results from the LHC. It has added to physicists' excitement that they are on the threshold of discovery.
Ageing, however, “is almost the complete inverse of the situation of the Higgs particle”, reflects Thomas Kirkwood, a leader in the field at Newcastle University, UK. “Everything that we're learning tells us it's highly unlikely that we'll find a single unitary cause.”
Nature483,528–530(29 March 2012) doi:10.1038/483528a References
- Simpson, G. G. Science 143, 769–775 (1964).
Show context - Chyba, C. F. Science 308, 495–496 (2005).
Show context - Postberg, F., Schmidt, J., Hillier, J., Kempf, S. & Srama, R. Nature 474, 620–622 (2011).
Show context - Wolfe-Simon, F. et al. Science 332, 1163–1166 (2011).
Show context - Lincoln, T. A. & Joyce, G. F. Science 323, 1229–1232 (2009).
Show context - Mansy, S. S. & Szostak, J. W. Cold Spring Harb. Symp. Quant. Biol. 74, 47–54 (2009).
Show context - Partridge, L. & Barton, N. H. Nature 362, 305–311 (1993).
Show context - Kenyon, C., Chang, J., Gensch, E., Rudner, A. & Tabtiang, R. Nature 366, 461–464 (1993).
Show context - Brown-Borg, H. M., Borg, K. E., Meliska, C. J. & Bartke, A. Nature 384, 33 (1996).
Show context - Miller, R. A. et al. J. Gerontol. A Biol. Sci. Med. Sci. 66, 191–201 (2011).
Show context
There are two complementary descriptions of reality, subjective and objective. Wave and particle are mental concepts in the subjective description and complementary objective features in the physical description.
It is fallacious spiritual-physicali sm to claim the particle aspect is physical and wave is not. The physical evidence for the wave aspect is as precisely manifest as the particle aspect. Every rainbow verifies this. We only know the particulate electron energy levels of the hydrogen atom from looking at a wave spectrograph and finding some frequencies are missing corresponding to the energies of electron orbit transitions in the hydrogen in space. This in turn is how we know the universe is expanding, from the red shift of these lines.
As noted no quantum particle can exist with an energy and momentum without manifesting the wave aspects of frequency and wavelength.
Angell also has a deep confusion between the EM field and the wave aspect. The field is not the wave. The field can be described as a sea of virtual photons emerging from uncertainty, a few of which also briefly become virtual electron-positron pairs. If we feed energy into the EM field some of the virtual particles become real, as in a radio transmission.
As already stated, quantum electrodynamics describes the field in terms of an uncountable infinity of virtual particles propagated by a wave-theoretic Green's function, so although the field is described by particles, they propagate through wave spreading, resulting in a complementary description.
To identify the field with electrons is a clunker showing how little physics the person actually understands. Electrons and all charged particles have the capacity to emit and absorb photons thus generating the EM field through the charge distribution. They are thus not the natural constituents (carriers) of the field. The photons, being uncharged, are likewise not generators. The weak force behaves a little differently because the carriers can also be generators.
From a subjective point of view, both wave and particle are abstract concepts we subjectively apply to phenomena we personally experience, from the rainbow on a CD (wave) to the ticking of a Geiger counter (particle). Most of the subjective evidence for either comes from the wave aspect, as manifest in particle statistics, although we physically detect light as particles in the rhodopsin of our retinas.
To claim the wave is unphysical and the particle is physical is to have no idea of the relation between mind and body at all. This is just a manifestation of toad faced hubris pure and simple. The Mind-Brain list is full of individuals who love to stare at the navels of their own dialectic with little or no relevance to either subjective experience or the physical universe.
Strings at this point are mental concepts used to form a theoretical framework to explaining the self-infinity of point particle energies in terms of string vibrations. The 1o to 12-dimensional Kaluza-Klein space of M-theory and super-string theories is a separate question looking for self-consistent dimensions for a string theory to exist without inconsistencies. The Calabi-Yau manifolds are mental concepts endeavouring to explain how the 12-odd dimensional space is compactified into internal symmetries and 4-D space-time. - Chris King
NO TIME
http://eddiesblogonenergyandphysics.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-is-source-of-directionality-of.html?showComment=1333414115135#c2500511356475799238
Sunday, July 3, 2011 What is the source of the directionality of time? I've been thinking a lot recently about why time only seems to go in one direction. There's still an on-going debate in the scientific community about why (or if) there is a directionality to time. So, I'd like to highlight a few of the opinions in this area. (Other thoughts on this subject can also be found here. And be sure to check out the very end of this post where I discuss research from March 2011 that possible supports the theory that the weak nuclear force is the reason for the directionality of time.)
The directionality of time is an illusion. As stated by Albert Einstein: "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Einstein stated this in part because all of the laws of physics (at that point in time) had time reversal symmetry and in part because special relativity tells us that the lifetime of a unstable particle in our reference frame is a function of how fast it is moving with respect to our reference frame. You can't talk about absolute time if different reference frames can't agree on which event came before another event. (see the barn-door thought experiment.)
The idea of time as an illusion has come under attack from multiple scientific directions; here are a few of the major arguments against time as an illusion.
Prigogine: The directionality of time is due to the fact that there are many particles , which form resonances and singularities such that the future is not longer predictable from the initial conditions. The generation of entropy in chemical and biological process, according to Prigogine, shows that there is a directionality to time. Even more, Prigogine argues that systems far-from-equilibrium exhibit a 'history.' Examples are system with hysteresis or biological evolution. So, for Prigogine, the directionality of time and the meaning of time stems from systems far-from-equilibrium. The concept of time disappears once the system reaches equilibrium. And interestingly, the entropy of a system (either in equilibrium or far-from-equilibrium) is not a function of position, velocity, or angle at which one views the system. So, entropy and special relativity are not at odds with each other, even though absolute time and special relativity are at odds with each other.
The classical argument against Prigogine's argument is that entropy is only a probabilistic concept; and how can the concept of time be defined by probability because there is always a small chance that the system could return close to its initial conditions. But this argument against Prigogine is not a real argument because it fails to understand that there is such things as irreversible processes. Without the addition of work from outside the system, information about the exact microstate of a system disappears with time. However, a valid argument against Prigogine's argument is that there are systems with plenty of interactions but with near-zero generation of entropy that are far-from-equilibrium: superfluids and superconductors. Why entropy generation goes nearly to zero for superfluids and superconductors is still largely an open question? What is it about bosons that allow for minimal generation of entropy? (This question leads to the next concept.)
The Weak-Nuclear Force is not time reversal symmetric : This line of reasoning argues that the directionality of time is due to the fact that the weak nuclear force does not have the symmetry operator of time inversion. This idea stems from the fact that the weak-nuclear force does not conserve parity, and hence this force is not symmetry with respect to reflections of spatial direction, i.e. there is a preferred direction for particle interactions involving the weak-nuclear force. Using relativity to equate spatial and time dimensions, the lack of spatial reflection symmetry implies the lack of a time reflection symmetry operator.
(In technical terms: "this means that the parity operator and the electroweak Hamiltonian do not commute" ) There's also an open question of why we haven't detected any parity violations in the strong nuclear force. As discussed earlier in my post on symmetry and forces of nature, the strong nuclear force is associated with a division algrebra (the octonions) with is even more complicated than the weak-nuclear force (the quaternions.) Parity and hence time reversal symmetry will exist for all interactions that only involve gravity and the electromagnetic force because these forces are associated with division algebras in which all operators commute with each other. (i.e. A*B=B*A) [Perhaps, the reason for time/parity irreversibility has something to do with the fact that the weak nuclear force is the only force that exchanges boson with non-zero rest mass.]
What one could argue here is that since there is no time reversal symmetry for particle interactions involving the weak-nuclear force, then the future can not be predicted given initial conditions. This implies that pure determinism is dead. (Even though, practical determinism really died decades ago when we realized that the Uncertainty Principle implies that we can never really know both the position and velocity of a particle.) The following questions remain: how does the lack of time reversal symmetry imply that the entropy of the universe can only increase or stay the same? Does the increase in entropy in the world have anything to do with the weak force? (i.e. does entropy production in chemical reactions or in molecular diffusion/viscosity have anything to do with the weak nuclear force? Do particles go in random directions after a collision because of the weak nuclear force? This seem a little bit of a stretch at first because the weak nuclear force is really, really weak compared with the E&M force. However, it might not be as crazy as it sounds at first. There are two unknown variables whenever two particles collide in 3-D space. (Due to six variables and four equations) This means that there are many ways in which particles can collide in 3-D space while conserving momentum and energy. If the weak nuclear force violated time reversal symmetry, then there are an infinite number of ways that the particles could go after a collision without violating conservation of energy and momentum, and it wouldn't require a strong force. Hence, we lose information about the starting conditions and entropy has been produced if the system is far-from-equilibrium. But once again, we are left with the problem of bosons vs. fermions. As mentioned above, there appears to be situations in which entropy generation goes nearly to zero (superconductors and superfluids). Why would the weak nuclear force cause entropy production for individual electrons in solid (fermions) but not for pairs of electrons in solid (bosons)? It appears that the weak nuclear force only acts on left-handed particles or righted-anti-particles. So, if electrons could couple together to form zero-spin couplets, then the weak nuclear force might not apply. The same might hold for boson states of superfluid helium. But it's not clear that the formation of bosons is enough to prevent the generation of entropy (i.e. the loss of information about the initial microstate of a system.)
The directionality of time is due to the fact that the universe is expanding. This argument tries to conclude that entropy always increases because the universe is expanding, and hence entropy would always decrease if the universe were contracting. This argument is most likely incorrect because if the equations of motion are deterministic, then they are time reversible, even if it's expanding or contracting. It seems that there could still be irreversible processes that lead to loss of information in a contracting universe. It seems hard to believe that the Rosen-Curie Symmetry principle (i.e. that the symmetry of the future is greater than the symmetry of the past) could ever be violated. Why would a contracting universe imply that the symmetry of the future is less than the symmetry of the past?
The directionality of time is due to the fact that the quantum wave function must collapse when the wave is measured. This argument suggestions that there is a directionality to time because a particle must either be spin up or spin down, but before it was measured it could have been either spin up or spin down. The act of measurement is irreversible. Once measured to be spin up, it can't be in the spin down state until a future interaction with another particle. But this argument isn't very convincing because the real question is: how is information about the state of the particle lost in future interactions? The loss of information is what we mean when we state that the entropy of the universe is always increasing. It's not clear what the wave function collapse has to do with increase in entropy of the universe. In fact, it's the opposite that is more important. Once the state of the particle is known, how does the wave function of the particle uncollapse and go back into a probability? This appears to be the real source of irreversibility, and this seems to require that at least one of the forces of nature to be time irreversible.
So, these are the four main reasons given for a directionality for time: 1) entropy production for multi-particle interactions; 2) time irreversibility of the weak nuclear force; 3) the expansion of the universe; and 4) the wave function collapse.
I personally think that the reason for the directionality of time is a combination of 1) and 2). This means that, in order to have a directionality to time and to talk about the 'history' of a system, you need: 1) a system far-from-equilibrium and 2) a force, such as the weak nuclear force, that does not have a time reversal symmetry operator that commutes with the Hamiltonian of the system. I think that 3) and 4) are not the reason why there is a directionality to time, and I think that Einstein is wrong when he stated that time is an illusion. But I understand where Einstein was coming from because it wasn't until after his death that we realized that the weak nuclear force could be time irreversible. Without the irreversibility of this force of nature, I find it difficult for us to talk about a directionality to time.
____________________
Since writing this post, I found the following quote on superconductivity in a neutron star:
"They say that shortly after the creation of the neutron star, protons would combine to form Cooper pairs, so creating a superconducting state by virtue of their charge. Bound up in this way, the protons would not be able to take part in various neutrino-emitting reactions that occur in non-superfluid matter, reducing cooling early on in the life of the star and leading to a sharper drop in temperature later on."
I think that this quote pretty much explains why I think that the weak nuclear force is actually the reason for the directionality of time. Check out the article above. Two independent research groups suggest that there are still some protons inside of the neutron star, and that the reason that they have not yet converted to being neutrons is that they are in a superconducting state, and hence "would not able to part in various neutrino-emitting reactions." i.e. the protons are in a boson-like state and hence aren't able to interact using the left-handed weak nuclear force. I see this as strong, but speculative, evidence that the weak nuclear force (along with non-equilibrium starting conditions) is the reason why there is a directionality to time. The bosons don't interact using the weak nuclear force, so this appears to be why superconductivity and superfluid flow don't generate entropy.
Sunday, July 3, 2011 What is the source of the directionality of time? I've been thinking a lot recently about why time only seems to go in one direction. There's still an on-going debate in the scientific community about why (or if) there is a directionality to time. So, I'd like to highlight a few of the opinions in this area. (Other thoughts on this subject can also be found here. And be sure to check out the very end of this post where I discuss research from March 2011 that possible supports the theory that the weak nuclear force is the reason for the directionality of time.)
The directionality of time is an illusion. As stated by Albert Einstein: "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Einstein stated this in part because all of the laws of physics (at that point in time) had time reversal symmetry and in part because special relativity tells us that the lifetime of a unstable particle in our reference frame is a function of how fast it is moving with respect to our reference frame. You can't talk about absolute time if different reference frames can't agree on which event came before another event. (see the barn-door thought experiment.)
The idea of time as an illusion has come under attack from multiple scientific directions; here are a few of the major arguments against time as an illusion.
Prigogine: The directionality of time is due to the fact that there are many particles , which form resonances and singularities such that the future is not longer predictable from the initial conditions. The generation of entropy in chemical and biological process, according to Prigogine, shows that there is a directionality to time. Even more, Prigogine argues that systems far-from-equilibrium exhibit a 'history.' Examples are system with hysteresis or biological evolution. So, for Prigogine, the directionality of time and the meaning of time stems from systems far-from-equilibrium. The concept of time disappears once the system reaches equilibrium. And interestingly, the entropy of a system (either in equilibrium or far-from-equilibrium) is not a function of position, velocity, or angle at which one views the system. So, entropy and special relativity are not at odds with each other, even though absolute time and special relativity are at odds with each other.
The classical argument against Prigogine's argument is that entropy is only a probabilistic concept; and how can the concept of time be defined by probability because there is always a small chance that the system could return close to its initial conditions. But this argument against Prigogine is not a real argument because it fails to understand that there is such things as irreversible processes. Without the addition of work from outside the system, information about the exact microstate of a system disappears with time. However, a valid argument against Prigogine's argument is that there are systems with plenty of interactions but with near-zero generation of entropy that are far-from-equilibrium: superfluids and superconductors. Why entropy generation goes nearly to zero for superfluids and superconductors is still largely an open question? What is it about bosons that allow for minimal generation of entropy? (This question leads to the next concept.)
The Weak-Nuclear Force is not time reversal symmetric : This line of reasoning argues that the directionality of time is due to the fact that the weak nuclear force does not have the symmetry operator of time inversion. This idea stems from the fact that the weak-nuclear force does not conserve parity, and hence this force is not symmetry with respect to reflections of spatial direction, i.e. there is a preferred direction for particle interactions involving the weak-nuclear force. Using relativity to equate spatial and time dimensions, the lack of spatial reflection symmetry implies the lack of a time reflection symmetry operator.
(In technical terms: "this means that the parity operator and the electroweak Hamiltonian do not commute" ) There's also an open question of why we haven't detected any parity violations in the strong nuclear force. As discussed earlier in my post on symmetry and forces of nature, the strong nuclear force is associated with a division algrebra (the octonions) with is even more complicated than the weak-nuclear force (the quaternions.) Parity and hence time reversal symmetry will exist for all interactions that only involve gravity and the electromagnetic force because these forces are associated with division algebras in which all operators commute with each other. (i.e. A*B=B*A) [Perhaps, the reason for time/parity irreversibility has something to do with the fact that the weak nuclear force is the only force that exchanges boson with non-zero rest mass.]
What one could argue here is that since there is no time reversal symmetry for particle interactions involving the weak-nuclear force, then the future can not be predicted given initial conditions. This implies that pure determinism is dead. (Even though, practical determinism really died decades ago when we realized that the Uncertainty Principle implies that we can never really know both the position and velocity of a particle.) The following questions remain: how does the lack of time reversal symmetry imply that the entropy of the universe can only increase or stay the same? Does the increase in entropy in the world have anything to do with the weak force? (i.e. does entropy production in chemical reactions or in molecular diffusion/viscosity have anything to do with the weak nuclear force? Do particles go in random directions after a collision because of the weak nuclear force? This seem a little bit of a stretch at first because the weak nuclear force is really, really weak compared with the E&M force. However, it might not be as crazy as it sounds at first. There are two unknown variables whenever two particles collide in 3-D space. (Due to six variables and four equations) This means that there are many ways in which particles can collide in 3-D space while conserving momentum and energy. If the weak nuclear force violated time reversal symmetry, then there are an infinite number of ways that the particles could go after a collision without violating conservation of energy and momentum, and it wouldn't require a strong force. Hence, we lose information about the starting conditions and entropy has been produced if the system is far-from-equilibrium. But once again, we are left with the problem of bosons vs. fermions. As mentioned above, there appears to be situations in which entropy generation goes nearly to zero (superconductors and superfluids). Why would the weak nuclear force cause entropy production for individual electrons in solid (fermions) but not for pairs of electrons in solid (bosons)? It appears that the weak nuclear force only acts on left-handed particles or righted-anti-particles. So, if electrons could couple together to form zero-spin couplets, then the weak nuclear force might not apply. The same might hold for boson states of superfluid helium. But it's not clear that the formation of bosons is enough to prevent the generation of entropy (i.e. the loss of information about the initial microstate of a system.)
The directionality of time is due to the fact that the universe is expanding. This argument tries to conclude that entropy always increases because the universe is expanding, and hence entropy would always decrease if the universe were contracting. This argument is most likely incorrect because if the equations of motion are deterministic, then they are time reversible, even if it's expanding or contracting. It seems that there could still be irreversible processes that lead to loss of information in a contracting universe. It seems hard to believe that the Rosen-Curie Symmetry principle (i.e. that the symmetry of the future is greater than the symmetry of the past) could ever be violated. Why would a contracting universe imply that the symmetry of the future is less than the symmetry of the past?
The directionality of time is due to the fact that the quantum wave function must collapse when the wave is measured. This argument suggestions that there is a directionality to time because a particle must either be spin up or spin down, but before it was measured it could have been either spin up or spin down. The act of measurement is irreversible. Once measured to be spin up, it can't be in the spin down state until a future interaction with another particle. But this argument isn't very convincing because the real question is: how is information about the state of the particle lost in future interactions? The loss of information is what we mean when we state that the entropy of the universe is always increasing. It's not clear what the wave function collapse has to do with increase in entropy of the universe. In fact, it's the opposite that is more important. Once the state of the particle is known, how does the wave function of the particle uncollapse and go back into a probability? This appears to be the real source of irreversibility, and this seems to require that at least one of the forces of nature to be time irreversible.
So, these are the four main reasons given for a directionality for time: 1) entropy production for multi-particle interactions; 2) time irreversibility of the weak nuclear force; 3) the expansion of the universe; and 4) the wave function collapse.
I personally think that the reason for the directionality of time is a combination of 1) and 2). This means that, in order to have a directionality to time and to talk about the 'history' of a system, you need: 1) a system far-from-equilibrium and 2) a force, such as the weak nuclear force, that does not have a time reversal symmetry operator that commutes with the Hamiltonian of the system. I think that 3) and 4) are not the reason why there is a directionality to time, and I think that Einstein is wrong when he stated that time is an illusion. But I understand where Einstein was coming from because it wasn't until after his death that we realized that the weak nuclear force could be time irreversible. Without the irreversibility of this force of nature, I find it difficult for us to talk about a directionality to time.
____________________
Since writing this post, I found the following quote on superconductivity in a neutron star:
"They say that shortly after the creation of the neutron star, protons would combine to form Cooper pairs, so creating a superconducting state by virtue of their charge. Bound up in this way, the protons would not be able to take part in various neutrino-emitting reactions that occur in non-superfluid matter, reducing cooling early on in the life of the star and leading to a sharper drop in temperature later on."
I think that this quote pretty much explains why I think that the weak nuclear force is actually the reason for the directionality of time. Check out the article above. Two independent research groups suggest that there are still some protons inside of the neutron star, and that the reason that they have not yet converted to being neutrons is that they are in a superconducting state, and hence "would not able to part in various neutrino-emitting reactions." i.e. the protons are in a boson-like state and hence aren't able to interact using the left-handed weak nuclear force. I see this as strong, but speculative, evidence that the weak nuclear force (along with non-equilibrium starting conditions) is the reason why there is a directionality to time. The bosons don't interact using the weak nuclear force, so this appears to be why superconductivity and superfluid flow don't generate entropy.
IRO EWEKA : THE HUMAN FACE, THE HUMAN MIND AND THE POSSIBILITY OF A MYSTICISM INSPIRED BY BENIN OLOKUN SYMBOLISMby Toyin Adepoju on Wednesday, April 4, 2012 at 9:57am · At 7:45 am on Tuesday, March 13, 2012, a great light shot from the earth into the immensity of space, but left its radiance behind.
What features of this luminescence have etched themselves in my mind?
A face inscrutable, as a person who, as was described of Isaac Newton in his quest for the structure, dynamism and source of the cosmos, is understood as having crossed many strange seas of thought, alone[1]. The face a mysterious map, radiating a character difficult to conceptualize. It did not fit into the conventional traceries of a human face. The face would have been easier to understand if it was found in the shrine of some esoteric sect, showing to the world a shaman reputed to journey into spirit realms to bring back those who had found their way there and been lost, or some mystic immersed in arcane and sublime mysteries, recalling Esiri Dafiewhare’s response to my description of a related impression, although more subtle, from my first my meeting with the writer and social activist Wole Soyinka, of a character etched into one’s physical persona through having “immersed oneself in certain numinous streams”. [2]
Yes. The right word in describing Iro Eweka’s face is the word “numinous”. It suggests the complexity of personality, of a universe of closely woven impressions, perceptions, emotions and orientations defining the perhaps unfathomable depths of the self. Philip Pullman’s novelistic cycle His Dark Materials represents the intricate constitution of personality in terms of a coruscation of energy that projects the dominant mental patterns of the individual, constituting a cloud of symbols that constellate around the person[3]. The more complex the mind, the more dense and complex this coruscation.
Victor Ekpuk, evoking the shaping of thought through symbols, creates compelling visual expressions that may suggest this cognitive cloud that defines the abstract form of the individual, unseen but experienced in terms of the distinctive character of the self, the subtle impressions it projects, and its hidden potential, perhaps unknown even to the human being emanating this presence.
What is that glowing core of seeds nestling within the forest of forms, both humanoid and abstract, in Ekpuk’s Children of the Full Moon?[4] Is it perhaps the coordinating centres of the brain, alive with the fire fed though blood and the pulsations of mind, weaving the network of impressions, emotions and attitudes into the complex known as a human mind? The forms are strange but compelling, belonging to no known language even as they recall the figurative and abstract combinations of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Nigerian nsibidi, but transposed in terms of an individualistic imagination feeding from many streams.
A related sense of something meaningful but which is yet beyond grasp, is suggested by my memory of Iro Eweka.
Why was his face so strange? Why did he insist on wearing a white robe and bathroom slippers as he went about his life as a teacher at the University of Benin? How come he presented himself as a consultant psychiatrist and yet taught philosophy of art? He was the first African I knew about who depicted part of his work history as having taught English at the University of Oxford. An African, teaching the English person’s native language at a premier seat of English academic aristocracy? Wow!
He certainly seemed to know his English literature. I remember his referring my sister to one of the Irishman W.B Yeat’s more haunting poems in marking one of her essays in aesthetics. A multi-talented person. [5]
His legacy in my life emerged decisively decades after I had last seen or interacted with him. I woke up one morning with a revelation of a profound implication of his essay on Olokun symbolism which I had stumbled across online. Revelation, beceause the idea emerged fully formed, without my having given it any attention earlier. In “Olokun Symbols”, which I read at the Institute for Benin Studies site, Eweka painstakingly describes the ideational significance of a sequence of graphic symbols created in connection with devotion to Olokun, believed to be the sentient personality of the world’s oceans, as worshipped in Eweka’s native Benin-city, a very rich but understudied field[6].
What gripped me most forcefully about Eweka’s characterization of these symbols was his careful attention to their unified morphological progression, to their visual forms as representing an unfolding sequence of ideas depicting the unity of Osanobua, the creator of the cosmos, Olokun, the aquatic presence pervasive in the world and the human being, within the context of time and space.
Why not draw out clearly the mystical implications of this depiction of Olokun symbols? Is it not possible to take them as an initiatic sequence, enabling a progressive series of contemplations of ultimate meaning as consisting in the unity of the absolute, as represented by Osanobua, and the contingent, as represented by Olokun, the human being and the spatiotemporal coordinates within which these possibilities of being emerge?
Perhaps this sequence of ideas could even be related to a development of mystical theory and practice that takes it from the better known effort to immerse oneself in ultimate reality, and use it as a means of cultivating comprehensive understanding of phenomena, since the unity between constituents of the cosmos Eweka describes can be understood as a unity evident in every aspect of existence.
Perhaps climbing such a ladder of partial unifications of the various constituents of existence, one may arrive at a self constructed cosmic unity. Such a unity, a theoretical construct shaped by combining various sources, could provide a template for exploring the idea that contemplating such a self created form could enable one move from the theoretical to the experiential, from a purely abstract understanding of cosmic unity to an experience of such a unity.[7]
Perhaps from such an experience of cosmic unity one could even travel deeper, transcending knowledge with my thought, in the words of the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross[8], one’s knowledge becoming swallowed up by the transcendence known in various schools of thought as the foundational nothingness. Śūnyatā, the void of Buddhism, beyond being and non-being[9]. Ain Soph, the Unmanifest of Hermetic Kabala, among similar ideas within explicitly religious and philosophical contexts as well as contexts outside those explicit frames, such as the powerful adaptation of the concept by the writer Wole Soyinka[10] and, in a different epistemic context, the quantum nothing of scientific cosmology[11]. A negation of conventional conceptions created by a convergence of intensities of such force the resulting illumination is akin to darkness, as depicted by Aleister Crowley [12], on the highest stage of Samadhi, transformative states in the Indian discipline of Yoga. Light a candle and open the windows at midday. The light of the candle disappears. Expose the light of the sun to a greater light of such intensity the radiance of the sun becomes darkness, adapting Crowley’s metaphor of stages of contemplative transformations of perception.
I have been on this journey for about two years now and an infinity of possibilities is opening up.
I received news of Eweka’s departure as I was preparing to enter the temple of nothingness, so called because is it a series of reflections on nothingness as the most fundamental of expressive forms. Nothingness understood as absence. The absence from light that makes possible the growing life in the womb and in the soil. The pauses between sounds that aids speech becoming legible. The void between the celestial bodies within which they execute their orbits without mutual interference. The emptiness that is the space of non-understanding created by the human being’s sensitivity in the face of the mysteries that define his existence, where he ultimately comes from and where he goes finally. The abyss, the endless zone, resonant with possibilities, from which all issues yet which is beyond all.[13]
I was considering what image to use in inspiring myself in this quest though various fields, autobiography, architecture, literature, religion, music and science, exploring the idea of nothingness.
The image that began to suggest itself to me on the day I learnt of Eweka’s journey is derived from the indelible impression made on me by the stimulus of his essay on Olokun symbolism. Having been inspired by his essay, I sought out more information on this symbol system and discovered Norma Rosen’s fantastic article “Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship”[14], rich with more graphic symbols. I then integrated one of Rosen’s drawings of an Olokun symbol with an Ife head.
The collage needs to be repeated with a fresher image from Werner Forman’s photographs in Basil Davidson’s Africa: History of a Continent, and without the tear on the right from carrying the image with me for years, having ripped it out of the family copy of the book in crude expression of admiration well before I bought my own copy of the book. The slightly faded image and the tear remind me, however, of my own history and of my father who specialized in buying general interest but scholarly works for the family library, the Davidson being one such, and taking me also to the inscrutable look on my father’s face that fateful day when I saw him alive for the last time, during an illness in which he repeatedly told me he was passing way while I refused to believe him. What do people think when they know they are leaving this world, particularly if that departure is accepted by them as inevitable? Perhaps there are some kinds of knowledge one may gain that are so beyond the understanding of other humans that this mesh of perceptions reconfigures one’s face to a form others can hardly read.
The brooding face of the Ife head suggests elevation of mind while the features are expressive of warm blooded participation in the vagaries of human existence, integrated in a serene understanding within the mind expressed by the face, unlike the lofty remoteness of a Buddha, sublime but removed from involvement in the struggles of life as most humans know it. The mind orients itself within the axis of time and space represented by the centrifugal and centripetal thrust of the arrows of time and the shaping of space, converging at their effusion from eternity within which swim the primal forms that beget the cosmos, represented perhaps by the emergence of the first life forms from primeval seas, by the inchoate forms awaiting manifestation within the great womb that is in everyone while it remains in its essence beyond reach.
Let us leave the last word to those who will evoke for us the meaning of the word “numinous” which I have used in describing Iro Eweka’s face. I won’t define the word, though I love its definition in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language 1966, derived from Rudolf Otto’s classic use of the term in his Idea of the Holy,[15] because that definition is not precise enough for this present purpose. I will leave Elechi Amadi in his novel The Concubine and Akin Solanke on Iro Eweka, to indicate this meaning.
Elechi Amadi in The Concubine :
Emenike noticed that the old men averted their faces when the priest appeared to glance at anyone of them; so he decided to stare back whenever the priest’s glance fell on him. His opportunity came before the thought was through his mind. He gazed at the priest and immediately regretted that he had done so, for in the priest’s face he read mild reproach, awe, power, wisdom, love, life and – yes, he was sure – death. In a fraction of a second he relived his past life. In turns he felt deep affection for the priest, and nauseating repulsion which made him want to scream with disgust. He felt the cold grip of despair, and the hollow sensation which precedes a great calamity: he felt a sickening nostalgia for an indistinct place he was sure he had never been to.[16]
The tension between fascination and strangeness central to the concept of the numinous is communicated here.
Akin Solanke :
He was about the best lecturer that taught me then. He was versatile and deep of mind. His strange facial appearance gave room for ambivalent interpretation of his personality. Because he smoked heavily, he appeared dazed and lost like a drug addict; yet, he looked mysterious and unfathomable. His characteristic white garment and beard created further distance and profundity about his strangeness. I had so much admiration for him. I was always excited anytime his psychology course came up on the timetable and I looked forward to it with great expectation[17].
On learning of the great man’s final journey, Akin exclaimed:
Prof. Iro Eweka! Gone ... like that? Hmmmmm! He looked untouchable and daring. Of course, Iro Eweka is beyond death. Like he has been for a long time, he lives in the mind of those of us who adore and admire him and his prodigious intellect. Adieu![18]
14th March 2012
Dedicated to Mr. Opene, my 3rd year teacher in composition at the University of Benin. His undying summation of written composition : “You are the artist”.
Endnotes
[1] As stated in “Isaac Newton in Popular Culture” Wikipedia : “This passage is from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude in which he describes a marble statue of Newton at Trinity College, Cambridge: “And from my pillow, looking forth by light/Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold/The Antechapel where the Statue stood/Of Newton, with his prism and silent face:/The marble index of a Mind for ever/Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton_in_popular_culture. Accessed 3rd April, 2012. The Wikipedia essay links to the particular page in a Google books search where these lines from Wordsworth’s 1850 version of the Prelude are quoted in J. Robert Barth, Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination. Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 2003. p. 19. Accessed 29/03/1012.
[2] Personal communication. Benin-City.
[3] Depicted in the novels The Subtle Knife. London: Scholastic, 1997 and The Amber Spyglass. London: Scholastic, 2000.
[4] Visible at various sites online, including the artist’s site at http://www.victorekpuk.com/victorekpuk.com/drawings%28hide%29.html . Accessed 16/02/12.
[5] Iro Eweka is designated as Consultant Psychologist/Psychiatrist and Associate Lecturer at the Open University, Bristol, UK, at the text of his lecture “We Are Because He Was” , the 3rd Jacob Uwadiae Egharevba Memorial Lecture on 8th December 2000 at the Oba Akenzua II Cultural Complex, Benin City posted at http://www.edo-nation.net/eghar3.htm. Accessed 16, March 2012. SEO Ogbonmwan, “Adieu Prince ( Professor ) Iro Eweka” Message #58442 on the Nigerian Identity Yahoo Group, Wed, March 14, 2012; 10:12 PM http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NigerianID/message/58442 eulogises Iro Eweka in the context of a survey of his educational and professional history. Accessed 16 March 2012.
[6] Iro Eweka, “Olokun Symbols”. Institute for Benin Studies. Accessed 2010. Currently inaccessible. Accessible at Scribd : http://www.scribd.com/doc/87261390/OLOKUN-SYMBOLS-BY-IRO-EWEKA . Accessed 29 , March 2012.
[7] This is a conception of cognitive and aesthetic mysticism, involving contemplative discipline, ratiocinative effort, aesthetic appreciation and inspiration. Contemplative discipline facilitates inspirational insights and syntheses that integrate ratiocinative and aesthetic perceptions at a level of greater complexity and depth than would be possible through ratiocinative and aesthetic appreciation alone. I am developing this approach through practice and a study of various sources, including the mystical theory of Maurice Bucke in Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York : E. P. Dutton, 1969.
[8] From St. John of the Cross, “Verses Written After An Ecstasy of High Exaltation” in Poems. Translated by Peter Campbell. Harmondworth : Penguin, 1968. 47.
[9] The concept of Śūnyatā, the Void, is developed at length in Buddhism. The Wikipedia article “Śūnyatā” states : “The exact definition and extent of emptiness varies from one Buddhist tradition to another; this can easily lead to confusion. These traditions all explain in slightly different ways what phenomena are empty of, which phenomena exactly are empty and what emptiness means.” A collection of essays that studies this idea and a related one in Christianity is Void and Fullness in the Buddhist, Hindu and Christian Traditions : Sunya-Purna-Pleroma. Edited by Bettina Baumer and John R. Dupuche. New Delhi : D. K. Printworld, 2005. .Judith Simmer Brown, Dakini’s Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism, Boston : Shamballa, 2002, expounds in resonant terms on the idea in terms of space, a correlation between voidness, space, being and consciousness that may be adapted to Norma Rosen’s account described below, of the characterization of Olokun in Benin Olokun veneration in terms of the sky. The Buddhist source that has struck me most of the few I have read is the poet Jetsun Milarepa’s summation of his contemplative discipline in the “Song to the Geshé” in Tibet’s Great Yogi, Milarepa : A Biography from the Tibetan. Translated by the Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup and edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz. Oxford : Oxford UP, 1969. 245-247. 246 : “Accustomed long to know the meaning of the Wordless,/ I have forgot the way to trace the roots of verbs and source of words and phrases…”, the “Wordless” being described earlier in the same poem as “the Unborn, the Indestructible and the Unabiding”, being therefore a referent that transcends all forms that structure existence, and consequently “Wordless” since it is beyond conceptualization, language being the primary human means of expressing concepts.
[10] Wole Soyinka’s The Credo of Being and Nothingness . Ibadan : 1991, has a graphic description of a self developed void meditation. His The Man Died. London: Rex Collings, 1976 , chapter XXXIII, is centred in a compelling account of the writer’s use of a similar meditation as a means of orienting himself while in solitary confinement, a meditation reflected in his prison poetry A Shuttle in the Crypt. London: Rex Collings, 1972. His development in Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1990, of the concept of the abyss of transition, a transformative space embodying birth, death and rebirth, in relation to his reflections on space in tragic drama, suggests a relationship between space, voidness and being as central to Soyinka’s aesthetic. Soyinka describestragic dramaas [engaged with] the “profound and elusive phenomenon of being and non-being” and the space within which dramatic action takes place as fundamentally a “symbolic chthonic space [evoking ] man’s fearful awareness of the cosmic context [of his ] existence [shaped by ]the cosmic location of [his] being… [ a space that evokes ] the fundamental visceral questioning [that] intrudes, prompted by the patient, immovable and eternal immensity that surrounds [him] [the reality of which] undented vastness [may have ] created the need to challenge, confront and at least initiate a rapport with the realm of infinity”.
[11] The Kabbalistic and scientific development of a related idea in describing the source of the cosmos may be correlated in terms of metaphysical and epistemic conceptions from Western occultism and contemporary scientific cosmology. Relevant sources from Western occultism are Anonymous. The Office of the Holy Tree of Life. No publication information and Dion Fortune. Sane Occultism in Sane Occultism and Practical Occultism in Daily Life. Wellingborough : The Aquarian Press, 1987. 13-119. A particularly useful source from contemporary scientific cosmology is Tian Yu Cao’s “Ontology and Scientific Explanation” in Explanations: Styles of Scientific Explanation. Edited by John Cornwall. London : Oxford UP, 2004. 173-195.
Correlations between Western occult and scientific conceptions of the source of the cosmos may be developed in terms of conceptions of ontological distance between the source of the cosmos and the manifest cosmos. These involve ideas about the emergence of the positive manifestation represented by the cosmos from the fecund negativity of the source of existence. It includes ideas about the epistemic implications of a negative conception of ultimate reality. This is an understanding of ultimate reality, not in terms of positive attributes, but in terms of nothingness, nothingness understood as an utter transcendence of conventional cognitive categories.
On the ontological distance between the source of the cosmos and the manifest cosmos, the Office of the Holy Tree of Life states “Unidentifiable art thou; and utterly apart from anything thou art “ (11). Tian Yu Cao’s account of scientific cosmology presents a similar idea : “Since nothing has the least possible connection with the observed universe, that is, it has nothing to do with any physical entities and properties, such as particles, fields, energy, momentum, or even any classical space-time substratum, except for being susceptible to quantum fluctuations that are justified by the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, we seem to have an ontological basis for explaining the origin of the observed universe in terms of a natural cause, that is, the quantum nothing” ( 192).
On the emergence of the positive manifestation represented by the cosmos from the fecund negativity represented by the source of existence, the Office of the Holy Tree of Life declares : “Thou art the void, yet breathest forth vitality and being as Eheieh.Thou art uncreate, yet cause of all creation… Thou art motionless, yet every moving nebula proclaims thy power made manifest through nature” (34).Tian Yu Cao expounds a similar idea in scientific cosmology : “…the quantum nothing… is its own cause of its very existence and of its change, without requiring any further external cause. ...together with the most general principles and laws of quantum theory, the quantum nothing gives an ontological basis for a picture whose coherence and articulateness yield a clear understanding concerning the origin and evolution of the universe” ( 193 ).
On the epistemic implications of its negative conception of ultimate reality , the Office of the Holy Tree of Life expounds : “We know we know thee not; and only thus we know thee. We know no symbol for thee; nor have we any name for thee except necessity of nothing. Our solitary means of recognizing thy reality is inwardly through inward stillness of our sense” (11).
Dion Fortunedevelops this idea “…it is said of the Mysteries that the candidate was led on from degree to degree and shown more and more recondite symbols of the Godhead, and at the end, when the final curtain was drawn aside, was revealed to him an empty shrine and a voice whispered in his ear, ‘There is no God’‘. …the Logos can only be apprehended by those who can meditate in an empty shrine, that is, to say, those who can think without a symbol. The training of the degrees is designed to teach the mind to rise to the abstract and transcend thought, for it is only when thought ceases that apprehension begins. ...the occult doctrines are a system of algebra that enables the mind to function beyond the range of thought ( 19).
Tian Yu Cao’s account of scientific cosmology also locates a negative conception of the source of the cosmos in a transcendence of conventional cognitive categories : “Since whatever is physically imaginable is physically connected with our observed universe, ( namely all possible events that are compatible with the observational evidences that we have obtained hitherto), then nothing which is physically imaginable could be responsible for the genesis of the universe. “ (190-191).
[12]Aleister Crowley Magick: Liber Aba : Book Four. Boston: Weiser, 1994. 41.
[13] This will be presented in a forthcoming work tentatively titled Emptiness and Being, consisting of a number of essays that will first be posted online.
[14] Norma Rosen “Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship” in African Arts, Vol. 22, No. 3 (May, 1989), pp. 44-53+88. JSTOR : http://www.jstor.org/stable/3336778 . Posted at http://obafemio.weebly.com/uploads/5/1/4/2/5142021/chalkiconographyinolokunworship.pdf. Accessed 16 March 2012.
[15] Rudolf Otto The Idea of the Holy. Oxford : Oxford UP, 1958.
[16] Quoted in Juliet Okonkwo, “Elechi Amadi “, Perspectives on Nigerian Literature, Vol. Two: 1700 to the Present. Ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos :Guardian Books, 1988.147-153.162.
[17] Personal communication. Quoted in Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. “Unforgettable Teachers : Iro Eweka” at Scribd http://www.scribd.com/Toyin%20Adepoju/d/67088769-UNFORGETTABLE-TEACHERS-IRO-EWEKA and blogger: http://ifastudent-cognitivediary.blogspot.com/2011/10/unforgettable-teachers-iro-eweka.html. Saturday, October 01, 2011
[18] Email communication. Friday, March16, 2012.
References
Adepoju, Oluwatoyin Vincent “Unforgettable Teachers : Iro Eweka” at Scribd http://www.scribd.com/Toyin%20Adepoju/d/67088769-UNFORGETTABLE-TEACHERS-IRO-EWEKA and blogger: http://ifastudent-cognitivediary.blogspot.com/2011/10/unforgettable-teachers-iro-eweka.html. Saturday, October 01, 2011. Accessed 16/02/12.
Amadi, Elechi, The Concubine. Ibadan : Heinemann, 1966.
“Anatta”, Wikipedia. Accessed 16/02/12.
Anonymous. The Office of the Holy Tree of Life. No publication information
Baumer Bettina and John R. Dupuche. Void and Fullness in the Buddhist, Hindu and Christian Traditions : Sunya-Purna-Pleroma. New Delhi : D. K. Printworld, 2005.
Barth, J. Robert, Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination. Columbia : University of Missouri Press., 2003.
Brown, Judith Simmer,Dakini’s Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism, Boston: Shamballa, 2002.
Bucke, Maurice, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969.
Cao, Tian Yu , “Ontology and Scientific Explanation” in Explanations: Styles of Scientific Explanation. Edited by John Cornwall. London : Oxford UP, 2004. 173-195.
Crowley, Aleister, Magick: Liber Aba : Book Four. Boston: Weiser, 1994.
Dafiewhare, Esiri Personal communication. Benin-City.
Ekpuk, Victor, Children of the Full Moon. http://www.victorekpuk.com/victorekpuk.com/drawings%28hide%29.html. Accessed16/02/12.
Eweka, Iro, “We Are Because He Was” , the 3rd Jacob Uwadiae Egharevba Memorial Lecture on 8th December 2000 at the Oba Akenzua II Cultural Complex, Benin City. Posted at http://www.edo-nation.net/eghar3.htm. Accessed 16, March 2012.
-----------------“Olokun Symbols”. Institute for Benin Studies. Accessed 2010. Currently inaccessible. Accessible at Scribd : http://www.scribd.com/doc/87261390/OLOKUN-SYMBOLS-BY-IRO-EWEKA . Accessed 29 , March 2012.
Fortune, Dion. Sane Occultism in Sane Occultism and Practical Occultism in Daily Life. Wellingborough : The Aquarian Press, 1987. 13-119.
“Isaac Newton in Popular Culture”, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton_in_popular_culture . Accessed 29/03/1012.
Milarepa. Tibet’s Great Yogi, Milarepa : A Biography from the Tibetan. Translated by the Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup and edited by Evans- Wentz, W. Y., ed Oxford : Oxford UP, 1969.
Ogbonmwan, SEO “Adieu Prince ( Professor ) Iro Eweka”. Message #58442 on the Nigerian Identity Yahoo Group, Wed, March 14, 2012; 10:12 PM. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NigerianID/message/58442 Accessed 16 March 2012.
Okonkwo, Juliet “Elechi Amadi “, Perspectives on Nigerian Literature, Vol. Two: 1700 to the Present. Ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos :Guardian Books, 1988.147-153.162.
Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy. Oxford : Oxford UP, 1958.
Pullman, Philip, The Subtle Knife. London: Scholastic, 1997
--------------------The Amber Spyglass. London: Scholastic, 2000.
Rosen, Norma, “Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship” in African Arts, Vol. 22, No. 3 (May, 1989), pp. 44-53+88. JSTOR : http://www.jstor.org/stable/3336778 . Posted at http://obafemio.weebly.com/uploads/5/1/4/2/5142021/chalkiconographyinolokunworship.pdf. Accessed 16 March 2012.
Solanke, Akin, , Email communication. Friday, March16, 2012.
Soyinka, Wole, The Credo of Being and Nothingness . Ibadan : 1991
------------------The Man Died. London :Rex Collings, 1976 , A Shuttle in Crypt. London :Rex Collings, 1972.
----------------- Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1990 .
“Śūnyatā” , Wikipedia. Accessed 16/02/12.
“ Three Marks of Existence”. Wikipedia.Accessed 16/02/12.
Wordsworth, William.Wordsworth's Poetical Works, Volume 3: The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind : An Autobiographical Poem. Composed 1799-1805. Published 1850 .Edited by William Knight.1896. Archived at Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12383/12383-h/Wordsworth3c.html. Accessed 02/04/12.
What features of this luminescence have etched themselves in my mind?
A face inscrutable, as a person who, as was described of Isaac Newton in his quest for the structure, dynamism and source of the cosmos, is understood as having crossed many strange seas of thought, alone[1]. The face a mysterious map, radiating a character difficult to conceptualize. It did not fit into the conventional traceries of a human face. The face would have been easier to understand if it was found in the shrine of some esoteric sect, showing to the world a shaman reputed to journey into spirit realms to bring back those who had found their way there and been lost, or some mystic immersed in arcane and sublime mysteries, recalling Esiri Dafiewhare’s response to my description of a related impression, although more subtle, from my first my meeting with the writer and social activist Wole Soyinka, of a character etched into one’s physical persona through having “immersed oneself in certain numinous streams”. [2]
Yes. The right word in describing Iro Eweka’s face is the word “numinous”. It suggests the complexity of personality, of a universe of closely woven impressions, perceptions, emotions and orientations defining the perhaps unfathomable depths of the self. Philip Pullman’s novelistic cycle His Dark Materials represents the intricate constitution of personality in terms of a coruscation of energy that projects the dominant mental patterns of the individual, constituting a cloud of symbols that constellate around the person[3]. The more complex the mind, the more dense and complex this coruscation.
Victor Ekpuk, evoking the shaping of thought through symbols, creates compelling visual expressions that may suggest this cognitive cloud that defines the abstract form of the individual, unseen but experienced in terms of the distinctive character of the self, the subtle impressions it projects, and its hidden potential, perhaps unknown even to the human being emanating this presence.
What is that glowing core of seeds nestling within the forest of forms, both humanoid and abstract, in Ekpuk’s Children of the Full Moon?[4] Is it perhaps the coordinating centres of the brain, alive with the fire fed though blood and the pulsations of mind, weaving the network of impressions, emotions and attitudes into the complex known as a human mind? The forms are strange but compelling, belonging to no known language even as they recall the figurative and abstract combinations of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Nigerian nsibidi, but transposed in terms of an individualistic imagination feeding from many streams.
A related sense of something meaningful but which is yet beyond grasp, is suggested by my memory of Iro Eweka.
Why was his face so strange? Why did he insist on wearing a white robe and bathroom slippers as he went about his life as a teacher at the University of Benin? How come he presented himself as a consultant psychiatrist and yet taught philosophy of art? He was the first African I knew about who depicted part of his work history as having taught English at the University of Oxford. An African, teaching the English person’s native language at a premier seat of English academic aristocracy? Wow!
He certainly seemed to know his English literature. I remember his referring my sister to one of the Irishman W.B Yeat’s more haunting poems in marking one of her essays in aesthetics. A multi-talented person. [5]
His legacy in my life emerged decisively decades after I had last seen or interacted with him. I woke up one morning with a revelation of a profound implication of his essay on Olokun symbolism which I had stumbled across online. Revelation, beceause the idea emerged fully formed, without my having given it any attention earlier. In “Olokun Symbols”, which I read at the Institute for Benin Studies site, Eweka painstakingly describes the ideational significance of a sequence of graphic symbols created in connection with devotion to Olokun, believed to be the sentient personality of the world’s oceans, as worshipped in Eweka’s native Benin-city, a very rich but understudied field[6].
What gripped me most forcefully about Eweka’s characterization of these symbols was his careful attention to their unified morphological progression, to their visual forms as representing an unfolding sequence of ideas depicting the unity of Osanobua, the creator of the cosmos, Olokun, the aquatic presence pervasive in the world and the human being, within the context of time and space.
Why not draw out clearly the mystical implications of this depiction of Olokun symbols? Is it not possible to take them as an initiatic sequence, enabling a progressive series of contemplations of ultimate meaning as consisting in the unity of the absolute, as represented by Osanobua, and the contingent, as represented by Olokun, the human being and the spatiotemporal coordinates within which these possibilities of being emerge?
Perhaps this sequence of ideas could even be related to a development of mystical theory and practice that takes it from the better known effort to immerse oneself in ultimate reality, and use it as a means of cultivating comprehensive understanding of phenomena, since the unity between constituents of the cosmos Eweka describes can be understood as a unity evident in every aspect of existence.
Perhaps climbing such a ladder of partial unifications of the various constituents of existence, one may arrive at a self constructed cosmic unity. Such a unity, a theoretical construct shaped by combining various sources, could provide a template for exploring the idea that contemplating such a self created form could enable one move from the theoretical to the experiential, from a purely abstract understanding of cosmic unity to an experience of such a unity.[7]
Perhaps from such an experience of cosmic unity one could even travel deeper, transcending knowledge with my thought, in the words of the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross[8], one’s knowledge becoming swallowed up by the transcendence known in various schools of thought as the foundational nothingness. Śūnyatā, the void of Buddhism, beyond being and non-being[9]. Ain Soph, the Unmanifest of Hermetic Kabala, among similar ideas within explicitly religious and philosophical contexts as well as contexts outside those explicit frames, such as the powerful adaptation of the concept by the writer Wole Soyinka[10] and, in a different epistemic context, the quantum nothing of scientific cosmology[11]. A negation of conventional conceptions created by a convergence of intensities of such force the resulting illumination is akin to darkness, as depicted by Aleister Crowley [12], on the highest stage of Samadhi, transformative states in the Indian discipline of Yoga. Light a candle and open the windows at midday. The light of the candle disappears. Expose the light of the sun to a greater light of such intensity the radiance of the sun becomes darkness, adapting Crowley’s metaphor of stages of contemplative transformations of perception.
I have been on this journey for about two years now and an infinity of possibilities is opening up.
I received news of Eweka’s departure as I was preparing to enter the temple of nothingness, so called because is it a series of reflections on nothingness as the most fundamental of expressive forms. Nothingness understood as absence. The absence from light that makes possible the growing life in the womb and in the soil. The pauses between sounds that aids speech becoming legible. The void between the celestial bodies within which they execute their orbits without mutual interference. The emptiness that is the space of non-understanding created by the human being’s sensitivity in the face of the mysteries that define his existence, where he ultimately comes from and where he goes finally. The abyss, the endless zone, resonant with possibilities, from which all issues yet which is beyond all.[13]
I was considering what image to use in inspiring myself in this quest though various fields, autobiography, architecture, literature, religion, music and science, exploring the idea of nothingness.
The image that began to suggest itself to me on the day I learnt of Eweka’s journey is derived from the indelible impression made on me by the stimulus of his essay on Olokun symbolism. Having been inspired by his essay, I sought out more information on this symbol system and discovered Norma Rosen’s fantastic article “Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship”[14], rich with more graphic symbols. I then integrated one of Rosen’s drawings of an Olokun symbol with an Ife head.
The collage needs to be repeated with a fresher image from Werner Forman’s photographs in Basil Davidson’s Africa: History of a Continent, and without the tear on the right from carrying the image with me for years, having ripped it out of the family copy of the book in crude expression of admiration well before I bought my own copy of the book. The slightly faded image and the tear remind me, however, of my own history and of my father who specialized in buying general interest but scholarly works for the family library, the Davidson being one such, and taking me also to the inscrutable look on my father’s face that fateful day when I saw him alive for the last time, during an illness in which he repeatedly told me he was passing way while I refused to believe him. What do people think when they know they are leaving this world, particularly if that departure is accepted by them as inevitable? Perhaps there are some kinds of knowledge one may gain that are so beyond the understanding of other humans that this mesh of perceptions reconfigures one’s face to a form others can hardly read.
The brooding face of the Ife head suggests elevation of mind while the features are expressive of warm blooded participation in the vagaries of human existence, integrated in a serene understanding within the mind expressed by the face, unlike the lofty remoteness of a Buddha, sublime but removed from involvement in the struggles of life as most humans know it. The mind orients itself within the axis of time and space represented by the centrifugal and centripetal thrust of the arrows of time and the shaping of space, converging at their effusion from eternity within which swim the primal forms that beget the cosmos, represented perhaps by the emergence of the first life forms from primeval seas, by the inchoate forms awaiting manifestation within the great womb that is in everyone while it remains in its essence beyond reach.
Let us leave the last word to those who will evoke for us the meaning of the word “numinous” which I have used in describing Iro Eweka’s face. I won’t define the word, though I love its definition in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language 1966, derived from Rudolf Otto’s classic use of the term in his Idea of the Holy,[15] because that definition is not precise enough for this present purpose. I will leave Elechi Amadi in his novel The Concubine and Akin Solanke on Iro Eweka, to indicate this meaning.
Elechi Amadi in The Concubine :
Emenike noticed that the old men averted their faces when the priest appeared to glance at anyone of them; so he decided to stare back whenever the priest’s glance fell on him. His opportunity came before the thought was through his mind. He gazed at the priest and immediately regretted that he had done so, for in the priest’s face he read mild reproach, awe, power, wisdom, love, life and – yes, he was sure – death. In a fraction of a second he relived his past life. In turns he felt deep affection for the priest, and nauseating repulsion which made him want to scream with disgust. He felt the cold grip of despair, and the hollow sensation which precedes a great calamity: he felt a sickening nostalgia for an indistinct place he was sure he had never been to.[16]
The tension between fascination and strangeness central to the concept of the numinous is communicated here.
Akin Solanke :
He was about the best lecturer that taught me then. He was versatile and deep of mind. His strange facial appearance gave room for ambivalent interpretation of his personality. Because he smoked heavily, he appeared dazed and lost like a drug addict; yet, he looked mysterious and unfathomable. His characteristic white garment and beard created further distance and profundity about his strangeness. I had so much admiration for him. I was always excited anytime his psychology course came up on the timetable and I looked forward to it with great expectation[17].
On learning of the great man’s final journey, Akin exclaimed:
Prof. Iro Eweka! Gone ... like that? Hmmmmm! He looked untouchable and daring. Of course, Iro Eweka is beyond death. Like he has been for a long time, he lives in the mind of those of us who adore and admire him and his prodigious intellect. Adieu![18]
14th March 2012
Dedicated to Mr. Opene, my 3rd year teacher in composition at the University of Benin. His undying summation of written composition : “You are the artist”.
Endnotes
[1] As stated in “Isaac Newton in Popular Culture” Wikipedia : “This passage is from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude in which he describes a marble statue of Newton at Trinity College, Cambridge: “And from my pillow, looking forth by light/Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold/The Antechapel where the Statue stood/Of Newton, with his prism and silent face:/The marble index of a Mind for ever/Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton_in_popular_culture. Accessed 3rd April, 2012. The Wikipedia essay links to the particular page in a Google books search where these lines from Wordsworth’s 1850 version of the Prelude are quoted in J. Robert Barth, Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination. Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 2003. p. 19. Accessed 29/03/1012.
[2] Personal communication. Benin-City.
[3] Depicted in the novels The Subtle Knife. London: Scholastic, 1997 and The Amber Spyglass. London: Scholastic, 2000.
[4] Visible at various sites online, including the artist’s site at http://www.victorekpuk.com/victorekpuk.com/drawings%28hide%29.html . Accessed 16/02/12.
[5] Iro Eweka is designated as Consultant Psychologist/Psychiatrist and Associate Lecturer at the Open University, Bristol, UK, at the text of his lecture “We Are Because He Was” , the 3rd Jacob Uwadiae Egharevba Memorial Lecture on 8th December 2000 at the Oba Akenzua II Cultural Complex, Benin City posted at http://www.edo-nation.net/eghar3.htm. Accessed 16, March 2012. SEO Ogbonmwan, “Adieu Prince ( Professor ) Iro Eweka” Message #58442 on the Nigerian Identity Yahoo Group, Wed, March 14, 2012; 10:12 PM http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NigerianID/message/58442 eulogises Iro Eweka in the context of a survey of his educational and professional history. Accessed 16 March 2012.
[6] Iro Eweka, “Olokun Symbols”. Institute for Benin Studies. Accessed 2010. Currently inaccessible. Accessible at Scribd : http://www.scribd.com/doc/87261390/OLOKUN-SYMBOLS-BY-IRO-EWEKA . Accessed 29 , March 2012.
[7] This is a conception of cognitive and aesthetic mysticism, involving contemplative discipline, ratiocinative effort, aesthetic appreciation and inspiration. Contemplative discipline facilitates inspirational insights and syntheses that integrate ratiocinative and aesthetic perceptions at a level of greater complexity and depth than would be possible through ratiocinative and aesthetic appreciation alone. I am developing this approach through practice and a study of various sources, including the mystical theory of Maurice Bucke in Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York : E. P. Dutton, 1969.
[8] From St. John of the Cross, “Verses Written After An Ecstasy of High Exaltation” in Poems. Translated by Peter Campbell. Harmondworth : Penguin, 1968. 47.
[9] The concept of Śūnyatā, the Void, is developed at length in Buddhism. The Wikipedia article “Śūnyatā” states : “The exact definition and extent of emptiness varies from one Buddhist tradition to another; this can easily lead to confusion. These traditions all explain in slightly different ways what phenomena are empty of, which phenomena exactly are empty and what emptiness means.” A collection of essays that studies this idea and a related one in Christianity is Void and Fullness in the Buddhist, Hindu and Christian Traditions : Sunya-Purna-Pleroma. Edited by Bettina Baumer and John R. Dupuche. New Delhi : D. K. Printworld, 2005. .Judith Simmer Brown, Dakini’s Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism, Boston : Shamballa, 2002, expounds in resonant terms on the idea in terms of space, a correlation between voidness, space, being and consciousness that may be adapted to Norma Rosen’s account described below, of the characterization of Olokun in Benin Olokun veneration in terms of the sky. The Buddhist source that has struck me most of the few I have read is the poet Jetsun Milarepa’s summation of his contemplative discipline in the “Song to the Geshé” in Tibet’s Great Yogi, Milarepa : A Biography from the Tibetan. Translated by the Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup and edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz. Oxford : Oxford UP, 1969. 245-247. 246 : “Accustomed long to know the meaning of the Wordless,/ I have forgot the way to trace the roots of verbs and source of words and phrases…”, the “Wordless” being described earlier in the same poem as “the Unborn, the Indestructible and the Unabiding”, being therefore a referent that transcends all forms that structure existence, and consequently “Wordless” since it is beyond conceptualization, language being the primary human means of expressing concepts.
[10] Wole Soyinka’s The Credo of Being and Nothingness . Ibadan : 1991, has a graphic description of a self developed void meditation. His The Man Died. London: Rex Collings, 1976 , chapter XXXIII, is centred in a compelling account of the writer’s use of a similar meditation as a means of orienting himself while in solitary confinement, a meditation reflected in his prison poetry A Shuttle in the Crypt. London: Rex Collings, 1972. His development in Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1990, of the concept of the abyss of transition, a transformative space embodying birth, death and rebirth, in relation to his reflections on space in tragic drama, suggests a relationship between space, voidness and being as central to Soyinka’s aesthetic. Soyinka describestragic dramaas [engaged with] the “profound and elusive phenomenon of being and non-being” and the space within which dramatic action takes place as fundamentally a “symbolic chthonic space [evoking ] man’s fearful awareness of the cosmic context [of his ] existence [shaped by ]the cosmic location of [his] being… [ a space that evokes ] the fundamental visceral questioning [that] intrudes, prompted by the patient, immovable and eternal immensity that surrounds [him] [the reality of which] undented vastness [may have ] created the need to challenge, confront and at least initiate a rapport with the realm of infinity”.
[11] The Kabbalistic and scientific development of a related idea in describing the source of the cosmos may be correlated in terms of metaphysical and epistemic conceptions from Western occultism and contemporary scientific cosmology. Relevant sources from Western occultism are Anonymous. The Office of the Holy Tree of Life. No publication information and Dion Fortune. Sane Occultism in Sane Occultism and Practical Occultism in Daily Life. Wellingborough : The Aquarian Press, 1987. 13-119. A particularly useful source from contemporary scientific cosmology is Tian Yu Cao’s “Ontology and Scientific Explanation” in Explanations: Styles of Scientific Explanation. Edited by John Cornwall. London : Oxford UP, 2004. 173-195.
Correlations between Western occult and scientific conceptions of the source of the cosmos may be developed in terms of conceptions of ontological distance between the source of the cosmos and the manifest cosmos. These involve ideas about the emergence of the positive manifestation represented by the cosmos from the fecund negativity of the source of existence. It includes ideas about the epistemic implications of a negative conception of ultimate reality. This is an understanding of ultimate reality, not in terms of positive attributes, but in terms of nothingness, nothingness understood as an utter transcendence of conventional cognitive categories.
On the ontological distance between the source of the cosmos and the manifest cosmos, the Office of the Holy Tree of Life states “Unidentifiable art thou; and utterly apart from anything thou art “ (11). Tian Yu Cao’s account of scientific cosmology presents a similar idea : “Since nothing has the least possible connection with the observed universe, that is, it has nothing to do with any physical entities and properties, such as particles, fields, energy, momentum, or even any classical space-time substratum, except for being susceptible to quantum fluctuations that are justified by the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, we seem to have an ontological basis for explaining the origin of the observed universe in terms of a natural cause, that is, the quantum nothing” ( 192).
On the emergence of the positive manifestation represented by the cosmos from the fecund negativity represented by the source of existence, the Office of the Holy Tree of Life declares : “Thou art the void, yet breathest forth vitality and being as Eheieh.Thou art uncreate, yet cause of all creation… Thou art motionless, yet every moving nebula proclaims thy power made manifest through nature” (34).Tian Yu Cao expounds a similar idea in scientific cosmology : “…the quantum nothing… is its own cause of its very existence and of its change, without requiring any further external cause. ...together with the most general principles and laws of quantum theory, the quantum nothing gives an ontological basis for a picture whose coherence and articulateness yield a clear understanding concerning the origin and evolution of the universe” ( 193 ).
On the epistemic implications of its negative conception of ultimate reality , the Office of the Holy Tree of Life expounds : “We know we know thee not; and only thus we know thee. We know no symbol for thee; nor have we any name for thee except necessity of nothing. Our solitary means of recognizing thy reality is inwardly through inward stillness of our sense” (11).
Dion Fortunedevelops this idea “…it is said of the Mysteries that the candidate was led on from degree to degree and shown more and more recondite symbols of the Godhead, and at the end, when the final curtain was drawn aside, was revealed to him an empty shrine and a voice whispered in his ear, ‘There is no God’‘. …the Logos can only be apprehended by those who can meditate in an empty shrine, that is, to say, those who can think without a symbol. The training of the degrees is designed to teach the mind to rise to the abstract and transcend thought, for it is only when thought ceases that apprehension begins. ...the occult doctrines are a system of algebra that enables the mind to function beyond the range of thought ( 19).
Tian Yu Cao’s account of scientific cosmology also locates a negative conception of the source of the cosmos in a transcendence of conventional cognitive categories : “Since whatever is physically imaginable is physically connected with our observed universe, ( namely all possible events that are compatible with the observational evidences that we have obtained hitherto), then nothing which is physically imaginable could be responsible for the genesis of the universe. “ (190-191).
[12]Aleister Crowley Magick: Liber Aba : Book Four. Boston: Weiser, 1994. 41.
[13] This will be presented in a forthcoming work tentatively titled Emptiness and Being, consisting of a number of essays that will first be posted online.
[14] Norma Rosen “Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship” in African Arts, Vol. 22, No. 3 (May, 1989), pp. 44-53+88. JSTOR : http://www.jstor.org/stable/3336778 . Posted at http://obafemio.weebly.com/uploads/5/1/4/2/5142021/chalkiconographyinolokunworship.pdf. Accessed 16 March 2012.
[15] Rudolf Otto The Idea of the Holy. Oxford : Oxford UP, 1958.
[16] Quoted in Juliet Okonkwo, “Elechi Amadi “, Perspectives on Nigerian Literature, Vol. Two: 1700 to the Present. Ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos :Guardian Books, 1988.147-153.162.
[17] Personal communication. Quoted in Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. “Unforgettable Teachers : Iro Eweka” at Scribd http://www.scribd.com/Toyin%20Adepoju/d/67088769-UNFORGETTABLE-TEACHERS-IRO-EWEKA and blogger: http://ifastudent-cognitivediary.blogspot.com/2011/10/unforgettable-teachers-iro-eweka.html. Saturday, October 01, 2011
[18] Email communication. Friday, March16, 2012.
References
Adepoju, Oluwatoyin Vincent “Unforgettable Teachers : Iro Eweka” at Scribd http://www.scribd.com/Toyin%20Adepoju/d/67088769-UNFORGETTABLE-TEACHERS-IRO-EWEKA and blogger: http://ifastudent-cognitivediary.blogspot.com/2011/10/unforgettable-teachers-iro-eweka.html. Saturday, October 01, 2011. Accessed 16/02/12.
Amadi, Elechi, The Concubine. Ibadan : Heinemann, 1966.
“Anatta”, Wikipedia. Accessed 16/02/12.
Anonymous. The Office of the Holy Tree of Life. No publication information
Baumer Bettina and John R. Dupuche. Void and Fullness in the Buddhist, Hindu and Christian Traditions : Sunya-Purna-Pleroma. New Delhi : D. K. Printworld, 2005.
Barth, J. Robert, Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination. Columbia : University of Missouri Press., 2003.
Brown, Judith Simmer,Dakini’s Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism, Boston: Shamballa, 2002.
Bucke, Maurice, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969.
Cao, Tian Yu , “Ontology and Scientific Explanation” in Explanations: Styles of Scientific Explanation. Edited by John Cornwall. London : Oxford UP, 2004. 173-195.
Crowley, Aleister, Magick: Liber Aba : Book Four. Boston: Weiser, 1994.
Dafiewhare, Esiri Personal communication. Benin-City.
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Eweka, Iro, “We Are Because He Was” , the 3rd Jacob Uwadiae Egharevba Memorial Lecture on 8th December 2000 at the Oba Akenzua II Cultural Complex, Benin City. Posted at http://www.edo-nation.net/eghar3.htm. Accessed 16, March 2012.
-----------------“Olokun Symbols”. Institute for Benin Studies. Accessed 2010. Currently inaccessible. Accessible at Scribd : http://www.scribd.com/doc/87261390/OLOKUN-SYMBOLS-BY-IRO-EWEKA . Accessed 29 , March 2012.
Fortune, Dion. Sane Occultism in Sane Occultism and Practical Occultism in Daily Life. Wellingborough : The Aquarian Press, 1987. 13-119.
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Ogbonmwan, SEO “Adieu Prince ( Professor ) Iro Eweka”. Message #58442 on the Nigerian Identity Yahoo Group, Wed, March 14, 2012; 10:12 PM. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NigerianID/message/58442 Accessed 16 March 2012.
Okonkwo, Juliet “Elechi Amadi “, Perspectives on Nigerian Literature, Vol. Two: 1700 to the Present. Ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos :Guardian Books, 1988.147-153.162.
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Rosen, Norma, “Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship” in African Arts, Vol. 22, No. 3 (May, 1989), pp. 44-53+88. JSTOR : http://www.jstor.org/stable/3336778 . Posted at http://obafemio.weebly.com/uploads/5/1/4/2/5142021/chalkiconographyinolokunworship.pdf. Accessed 16 March 2012.
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After anesthesia, “primitive” consciousness awakens first
April 4, 2012
Courtesy of the Academy of Finland
and World Science staff
Our confused first waking moments after general anesthesia represent a rudimentary form of consciousness that arises from ancient brain structures, new research concludes.
The scientists involved described this muddled mental state as a “primitive” consciousness based on deep brain structures that humans possess in common with many animals.
PET scan findings are said to show that the emergence of consciousness after anesthesia is associated with activation of deep, ancient brain structures. The cross-sections above show this activation as red-yellow areas in the anterior cingulate cortex (i), thalamus (ii) and the brain stem (iii). (Credit: Turku PET Center)
The investigators didn’t take on the more difficult question of whether this vague awareness actually resembles animal consciousness. But they did say that studies of the anesthetized brain could shed light on how that mysterious quality, consciousness, arises in our brains and emerged in evolution.
The researchers used scans to examine volunteers’ brains as they woke from general anesthesia. Meanwhile, the experimenters who had awoken them assessed their level of awareness, based on their responses to a spoken command.
“The central, core structures of the more primitive brain structures… appeared to become functional first, suggesting that a foundational primitive conscious state must be restored before higher-order conscious activity can occur,” explained Harry Scheinin of the University of Turku in Finland, who led the study.
The brain areas involved in these fuzzy early stages of awareness are known as the brain stem, thalamus, hypothalamus and the anterior cingulate cortex, he explained. This excludes the outer region of the brain, called the cortex, which is a relatively recent evolutionary development most fully developed in humans.
Twenty-two young, healthy volunteers went under anesthesia for the study using either of two powerful anesthetics, dexme-detomidine or propofol. The first is used as a sedative in intensive care; its effect is thought to closely resemble normal sleep, as it can be reversed with mild stimulation or loud voices at normal doses. Propofol is widely used for general anesthesia, and is also the substance that—improperly used as an all-around sleep aid—was allegedly connected to pop singer Michael Jackson’s death.
Despite differences between the drugs, the brain processes seen in the waking volunteers were similar in both cases, said the investigators, who reported their findings in the April 4 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. As full awareness bloomed, the “primitive” brain areas became linked through electrical nerve activity with more advanced areas called the frontal and inferior parietal cortex. The type of brain scanning used was positron emission tomography, which employs radiation, or nuclear medicine imaging, to produce three-dimensional, color images of processes within the body.
Showing which brain mechanisms are involved in the emergence of the conscious state is an important step forward in the scientific explanation of consciousness, according to the researchers. Yet much harder questions remain, they stressed: how and why these neural mechanisms create the subjective feeling of being, the awareness of self and environment, that characterize consciousness.
April 4, 2012
Courtesy of the Academy of Finland
and World Science staff
Our confused first waking moments after general anesthesia represent a rudimentary form of consciousness that arises from ancient brain structures, new research concludes.
The scientists involved described this muddled mental state as a “primitive” consciousness based on deep brain structures that humans possess in common with many animals.
PET scan findings are said to show that the emergence of consciousness after anesthesia is associated with activation of deep, ancient brain structures. The cross-sections above show this activation as red-yellow areas in the anterior cingulate cortex (i), thalamus (ii) and the brain stem (iii). (Credit: Turku PET Center)
The investigators didn’t take on the more difficult question of whether this vague awareness actually resembles animal consciousness. But they did say that studies of the anesthetized brain could shed light on how that mysterious quality, consciousness, arises in our brains and emerged in evolution.
The researchers used scans to examine volunteers’ brains as they woke from general anesthesia. Meanwhile, the experimenters who had awoken them assessed their level of awareness, based on their responses to a spoken command.
“The central, core structures of the more primitive brain structures… appeared to become functional first, suggesting that a foundational primitive conscious state must be restored before higher-order conscious activity can occur,” explained Harry Scheinin of the University of Turku in Finland, who led the study.
The brain areas involved in these fuzzy early stages of awareness are known as the brain stem, thalamus, hypothalamus and the anterior cingulate cortex, he explained. This excludes the outer region of the brain, called the cortex, which is a relatively recent evolutionary development most fully developed in humans.
Twenty-two young, healthy volunteers went under anesthesia for the study using either of two powerful anesthetics, dexme-detomidine or propofol. The first is used as a sedative in intensive care; its effect is thought to closely resemble normal sleep, as it can be reversed with mild stimulation or loud voices at normal doses. Propofol is widely used for general anesthesia, and is also the substance that—improperly used as an all-around sleep aid—was allegedly connected to pop singer Michael Jackson’s death.
Despite differences between the drugs, the brain processes seen in the waking volunteers were similar in both cases, said the investigators, who reported their findings in the April 4 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. As full awareness bloomed, the “primitive” brain areas became linked through electrical nerve activity with more advanced areas called the frontal and inferior parietal cortex. The type of brain scanning used was positron emission tomography, which employs radiation, or nuclear medicine imaging, to produce three-dimensional, color images of processes within the body.
Showing which brain mechanisms are involved in the emergence of the conscious state is an important step forward in the scientific explanation of consciousness, according to the researchers. Yet much harder questions remain, they stressed: how and why these neural mechanisms create the subjective feeling of being, the awareness of self and environment, that characterize consciousness.