We might as well know what some of the different forms of ESP actually are
http://yeoldefalseflag.com/thread-top-1 ... -abilities
Top 10 Paranormal Abilities
This list is a look at some of the abilities people claim to have that science can not verify
Psychic Talents
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Blue Frost
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Re: Psychic Talents
[video][/video]
No more video
No more video
"Being alone isn't what hurts. It's when the people around you make you feel alone" ~ Naruto Uzumaki, an Anime Character
Why Scientists Deny Psychic Phenomena
This video is interesting. I read a book by Rupert Sheldrake when I was 18 years old. The New Science Of Life. This book wasn't so new at the time though. I believe that the top academics that are denying psychic phenomena actually know it exists and know a lot more than we do about it too.
http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/07/12/s ... phenomena/
http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/07/12/s ... phenomena/
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Blue Frost
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Re: Psychic Talents
I don't buy it, but do believe there is people with much better cognitive skills than others.
Guessing what a card is with probability, and other things can seem like magic to some people, and esp.
We are all different, and some really different as the video suggest.
Guessing what a card is with probability, and other things can seem like magic to some people, and esp.
We are all different, and some really different as the video suggest.
"Being alone isn't what hurts. It's when the people around you make you feel alone" ~ Naruto Uzumaki, an Anime Character
Re: Psychic Talents
I know a girl who has proven to me countless times that she has some degree of psychic powers. I would like to see how she would do on this test.
Would you like to take part in a scientific study on psychic phenomena? If so, then you’ve come to the right place!
Thank you for coming to our website! We are a group of academic and professional researchers looking to see if there’s a way to easily improve people’s innate psychic abilities. The current study explores the possible effects on psychic performance of the electromagnetic waves that surround all of us every day. We know that things like TV and radio station broadcasts, and Wi-Fi and cell phone signals have an effect on how our brains work. Is it possible that they have an effect on our psychic abilities as well?
If you’d like to take part in this study, click on the link below or the “Card Guessing Exercise” tab above.
http://acesstudy.com/
Would you like to take part in a scientific study on psychic phenomena? If so, then you’ve come to the right place!
Thank you for coming to our website! We are a group of academic and professional researchers looking to see if there’s a way to easily improve people’s innate psychic abilities. The current study explores the possible effects on psychic performance of the electromagnetic waves that surround all of us every day. We know that things like TV and radio station broadcasts, and Wi-Fi and cell phone signals have an effect on how our brains work. Is it possible that they have an effect on our psychic abilities as well?
If you’d like to take part in this study, click on the link below or the “Card Guessing Exercise” tab above.
http://acesstudy.com/
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Blue Frost
- SUPER VIP
- Posts: 98099
- Joined: May 14th, 2012, 1:01 am
- Location: Yodenheim
Re: Psychic Talents
I can't guess my name right now, forget a test 
"Being alone isn't what hurts. It's when the people around you make you feel alone" ~ Naruto Uzumaki, an Anime Character
Re: Psychic Talents
Well now science has finally proven one sixth sense and how it works. I believe that there are many other 6th senses though......which might mean that the term 6th sense may have to be altered to 7th sense then to 8th sense and so on. 
Evidence of ‘magnetic’ sixth sense in humans, scientist claims
https://www.rt.com/viral/348576-magneti ... rschvink-/
Evidence of ‘magnetic’ sixth sense in humans, scientist claims
https://www.rt.com/viral/348576-magneti ... rschvink-/
Re: Psychic Talents
A Forgotten Adventure With a Telepathic Tribe
Near the top of a mountain in the Peruvian Andes is a small lake named Laguna McIntyre. This is the source of the Amazon River, so named for the National Geographic photographer, writer, and prolific explorer who made the discovery. “Amazing is the word heard most often at National Geographic headquarters to describe Loren McIntyre, who surmounts all obstacles with ease,” read a 1987 editor’s note marking his 70th birthday.
But there was one adventure McIntyre rarely spoke about. In the late 1960s, he went to Brazil in search of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon rain forest called the Mayoruna. McIntyre was dropped off on a riverbank, and followed the tribe into the forest. Before long he was unable to find his way back and ended up missing his return flight. McIntyre lived with the tribe for two months. Although they shared no common language, he discovered he could communicate with the chief via telepathy, in a manner he began to call “beaming.” This skill, he later learned, was known to the tribe as the “other language,” a way of communicating possessed only by the elders.
The Mayoruna were on the run, moving deeper into the forest to escape encroaching developers and settlers. As McIntyre followed them, they began to destroy their possessions in a quest to return to “the beginning,” a time before outside civilization intruded into their lands. One night, in the midst of these preparations, a tributary flooded their camp, and McIntyre grabbed onto a drifting balsa raft. He floated down the river and was rescued by a pilot.
If it sounds too good to be true, the New York Times thought so as well. In 1991 McIntyre’s story was published in a book called Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu. They’d met on a trip to the basin, where McIntyre confided in him, telling him about his strange experience 16 years earlier. It was, McIntyre later said, the first time he’d told anyone. The Times book reviewer skeptically lists the events that left McIntyre stumbling out of the jungle with one ruined roll of film and no notebooks, but a conviction that he’d communicated with his mind.
The writer says he was “tempted to dismiss this story as the work of somebody angling for a contract with Steven Spielberg.” Then he observes: “But Loren McIntyre, a veteran National Geographic photographer and journalist widely respected for his eye, his prose, and his careful observation, is not one to tell tall tales; and truth can be stranger than fiction.”
McIntyre moved to Latin America after a stint in the Navy during World War II, working for the U.S. Agency for International Development and as a filmmaker, until he started to write for National Geographic in the 1960s. For years, McIntyre, who considered himself as much scientist as journalist, kept his unusual experience secret. “I’m pretty reluctant to voice very much about the beaming experience because I didn’t want my friends to think I’d gone around the bend. ‘What is this? The guy’s hallucinating?’” he later told the Los Angeles Times.
This fall, Popescu’s book debuted in its newest form, a one-man Broadway play called The Encounter. Simon McBurney, a Brit who’s made his name in pushing the boundaries of traditional theater, wrote, directed, and stars in it. In his quest to understand consciousness, he’d read Popescu’s book in the ’90s, and he felt drawn again and again to McIntyre’s story. “It’s the last great unsolved mystery—the one we carry inside our heads,” McBurney says in an interview. He was fascinated by the white Western explorer who became so immersed in another culture that he began to experience something that so defied logic.
In the play, McBurney is both himself and McIntyre. Despite the bare stage and lone actor, the audio-centric show develops so many layers it becomes hard to differentiate past and present, reality and illusion. Headphones provide full immersion into the sounds of the Amazon rain forest, and, as McBurney describes it, “You begin to see things that are not there.”
http://sorendreier.com/a-forgotten-adve ... hic-tribe/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016 ... tographer/
Near the top of a mountain in the Peruvian Andes is a small lake named Laguna McIntyre. This is the source of the Amazon River, so named for the National Geographic photographer, writer, and prolific explorer who made the discovery. “Amazing is the word heard most often at National Geographic headquarters to describe Loren McIntyre, who surmounts all obstacles with ease,” read a 1987 editor’s note marking his 70th birthday.
But there was one adventure McIntyre rarely spoke about. In the late 1960s, he went to Brazil in search of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon rain forest called the Mayoruna. McIntyre was dropped off on a riverbank, and followed the tribe into the forest. Before long he was unable to find his way back and ended up missing his return flight. McIntyre lived with the tribe for two months. Although they shared no common language, he discovered he could communicate with the chief via telepathy, in a manner he began to call “beaming.” This skill, he later learned, was known to the tribe as the “other language,” a way of communicating possessed only by the elders.
The Mayoruna were on the run, moving deeper into the forest to escape encroaching developers and settlers. As McIntyre followed them, they began to destroy their possessions in a quest to return to “the beginning,” a time before outside civilization intruded into their lands. One night, in the midst of these preparations, a tributary flooded their camp, and McIntyre grabbed onto a drifting balsa raft. He floated down the river and was rescued by a pilot.
If it sounds too good to be true, the New York Times thought so as well. In 1991 McIntyre’s story was published in a book called Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu. They’d met on a trip to the basin, where McIntyre confided in him, telling him about his strange experience 16 years earlier. It was, McIntyre later said, the first time he’d told anyone. The Times book reviewer skeptically lists the events that left McIntyre stumbling out of the jungle with one ruined roll of film and no notebooks, but a conviction that he’d communicated with his mind.
The writer says he was “tempted to dismiss this story as the work of somebody angling for a contract with Steven Spielberg.” Then he observes: “But Loren McIntyre, a veteran National Geographic photographer and journalist widely respected for his eye, his prose, and his careful observation, is not one to tell tall tales; and truth can be stranger than fiction.”
McIntyre moved to Latin America after a stint in the Navy during World War II, working for the U.S. Agency for International Development and as a filmmaker, until he started to write for National Geographic in the 1960s. For years, McIntyre, who considered himself as much scientist as journalist, kept his unusual experience secret. “I’m pretty reluctant to voice very much about the beaming experience because I didn’t want my friends to think I’d gone around the bend. ‘What is this? The guy’s hallucinating?’” he later told the Los Angeles Times.
This fall, Popescu’s book debuted in its newest form, a one-man Broadway play called The Encounter. Simon McBurney, a Brit who’s made his name in pushing the boundaries of traditional theater, wrote, directed, and stars in it. In his quest to understand consciousness, he’d read Popescu’s book in the ’90s, and he felt drawn again and again to McIntyre’s story. “It’s the last great unsolved mystery—the one we carry inside our heads,” McBurney says in an interview. He was fascinated by the white Western explorer who became so immersed in another culture that he began to experience something that so defied logic.
In the play, McBurney is both himself and McIntyre. Despite the bare stage and lone actor, the audio-centric show develops so many layers it becomes hard to differentiate past and present, reality and illusion. Headphones provide full immersion into the sounds of the Amazon rain forest, and, as McBurney describes it, “You begin to see things that are not there.”
http://sorendreier.com/a-forgotten-adve ... hic-tribe/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016 ... tographer/
Psychic Talents
I have commented on human energy fields and how I believe that we can sense what others are like in other posts. This is another piece of the puzzle and I believe that this article belongs both on the Psychic Talents thread and the Electrical Universe thread.
Scientists Discover that Humans Have a ‘Magnetic 6th Sense’ to Detect Something We Can’t Even See
It’s called magnetoreception, and it refers to the ability to perceive magnetic fields. Several animals use it to find their way over long distances by aligning themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field. Sea turtles. honeybees, spiny lobsters, dolphins, migratory birds, and more all have a magnetic compass which allows them to use the information that’s coded into magnetic fields. We know little beyond that, however. How they use them, how they sense them, and what information they are getting from them remains up for speculation. For all we know, these magnetic fields could be used for much more than navigation for certain species.
According to Joe Kirschvink, the geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology who is currently testing humans for a magnetic sense, “it’s part of our evolutionary history. Magnetoreception may be the primal sense.” (source)
A recent study published by Kirschvink in the journal Nature Communications suggests that a protein in the human retina, when placed into fruit flies, has the ability to detect magnetic fields. The research claims that it can serve as a magneto sensor, but whether or not humans actually use it in this way is unknown.
“It poses the question, ‘maybe we should rethink about this sixth sense,’” University of Massachusetts Medical School researcher Steven Reppert told LiveScience. “It is thought to be very important for how animals migrate. Perhaps this protein is also fulfilling an important function for sensing magnetic fields in humans.”
In one of Kirschvink’s recent experiment, a rotating magnetic field was passed through study participants while their brainwaves were measured. He discovered that when the magnetic field was rotated counterclockwise, certain neutrons responded to this change which, in turn, generated a spike in electrical activity. This suggests a possible magnetic sense in humans.
Yet multiple questions still remain. For example, was this neural activity evidence of a magnetic sense or something else? Even if the human brain responds to these fields in some way, that doesn’t mean that information is being processed by the brain. There is still the question of what mechanisms are in place within the brain or body that receive these signals. If the body does indeed have magneto receptors, where are they? The next step for researchers is to identify them.
Kirschvink’s study is one of many publications delving into the mysteries of magnetic fields and what impact they have on human beings. The leaders in this area of research will most likely be found at the HeartMath institute. An internationally recognized nonprofit research and education organization dedicated to helping people reduce stress, self-regulate emotions, and build energy and resilience for healthy, happy lives, HeartMath tools, technology, and training teach people to rely on the intelligence of their hearts in concert with that of their minds at home, school, work, and play.
Researchers at HeartMath have begun what’s called the The Global Coherence Initiative (GCI), an international cooperative effort to help activate the heart of humanity and facilitate a shift in global consciousness. It aims primarily to invite people to participate by actively adding more heart-coherent love, care, and compassion into the planetary field. The second focus is scientific research into how we are all energetically connected with each other and the planet, and how we can utilize this interconnectivity to raise our personal vibration and thereby help create a better world.
The hypotheses of the researchers and scientists behind this project are as follows:
•The Earth’s magnetic field is a carrier of biologically relevant information that connects all living systems.
•Every person affects this global information field.
•Collective human consciousness affects the global information field. Therefore, large numbers of people creating heart-centered states of care, love and compassion will generate a more coherent field environment that can benefit others and help offset the current planetary discord and incoherence.
•There is a feedback loop between human beings and Earth’s energetic/magnetic systems
•The Earth has several sources of magnetic fields that affect us all. Two of them are the geomagnetic field that emanates from the core of the Earth and the fields that exist between Earth and the ionosphere. These fields surround the entire planet and act as protective shields blocking out the harmful effects of solar radiation, cosmic rays, sand, and other forms of space weather. Without these fields, ice as we know it could not exist on Earth. They are part of the dynamic ecosystem of our planet.
Other Evidence That Humans Can Sense These Fields
These energetic fields are known to scientists, and the notion that solar activity and the rhythms taking place on Earth’s magnetic fields have an impact on health and behaviour has been firmly established in scientific literature. (source)(source)
Scientific literature is also clear on the fact that several physiological rhythms and global collective behaviours are not only synchronized with solar and geomagnetic activity, but also that disruptions in these fields can create adverse effects on human health and behaviour.
When the Earth’s magnetic field environment is distributed it can cause sleep problems, mental confusion, usual lack of energy or a feeling of being on edge or overwhelmed for no apparent reason. At other times, when the Earth’s fields are stable and certain measures of solar activity are increased, people report increased positive feelings and more creativity and inspiration. This is likely due to a coupling between the human brain, cardiovascular and nervous system with resonating geomagnetic frequencies. (source)(source)(source)
The Earth and ionosphere generate frequencies that range from 0.01 hertz to 300 hertz, some of which are in the exact same frequency range as the one happening in our brain, cardiovascular system, and autonomic nervous system. This offers one way to explain how fluctuations in the Earth’s and Sun’s magnetic fields can influence us. Changes in these fields have also been shown to affect our brainwaves, heart rhythms, memory, athletics performance, and overall health.
Changes in the Earth’s fields from extreme solar activity have been linked to some of humanity’s greatest creations of art, as well as some of its most tragic events. (source)
We know how these fields affect us, but what about how we affect these fields? That’s the real question here. GCI scientists believe that because brain wave and heart rhythm frequencies overlap the Earth’s field resonance, we are not just receivers of biologically relevant information, but also senders of it. We feed information into the global field, thus creating a feedback loop with the Earth’s magnetic fields.
Human emotions and consciousness interact with and encode information into the geomagnetic field and this information is distributed globally. . . . We are suggesting in essence that this encoded information is communicated nonlocally between people at a subconscious level, in effect linking all living systems. Magnetic fields act as carrier waves for this information, which can influence all living systems – positively or negatively – within the field environment as well as our collective consciousness.
If we look at the heart, for example, it emits electromagnetic fields which change according to our emotions, and these can actually be measured up to several feet away from the human body.
These fields have been shown to affect not only ourselves, but those around us. You can read more about that here.
This research on this topic, which is still in its infancy, has immense ramifications for our world. It will further prove and highlight the great extent to which our attitudes, emotions, and intentions matter, and that these factors within the realm of non-material science can affect all life on Earth. Coherent, cooperative intention could impact global events and improve the quality of life on Earth. Practicing love, gratitude, and appreciation, as well as bettering ourselves as individuals, are some of the many crucial action steps towards changing our planet for the better.
http://wakingtimesmedia.com/scientists- ... ven-see-2/
Scientists Discover that Humans Have a ‘Magnetic 6th Sense’ to Detect Something We Can’t Even See
It’s called magnetoreception, and it refers to the ability to perceive magnetic fields. Several animals use it to find their way over long distances by aligning themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field. Sea turtles. honeybees, spiny lobsters, dolphins, migratory birds, and more all have a magnetic compass which allows them to use the information that’s coded into magnetic fields. We know little beyond that, however. How they use them, how they sense them, and what information they are getting from them remains up for speculation. For all we know, these magnetic fields could be used for much more than navigation for certain species.
According to Joe Kirschvink, the geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology who is currently testing humans for a magnetic sense, “it’s part of our evolutionary history. Magnetoreception may be the primal sense.” (source)
A recent study published by Kirschvink in the journal Nature Communications suggests that a protein in the human retina, when placed into fruit flies, has the ability to detect magnetic fields. The research claims that it can serve as a magneto sensor, but whether or not humans actually use it in this way is unknown.
“It poses the question, ‘maybe we should rethink about this sixth sense,’” University of Massachusetts Medical School researcher Steven Reppert told LiveScience. “It is thought to be very important for how animals migrate. Perhaps this protein is also fulfilling an important function for sensing magnetic fields in humans.”
In one of Kirschvink’s recent experiment, a rotating magnetic field was passed through study participants while their brainwaves were measured. He discovered that when the magnetic field was rotated counterclockwise, certain neutrons responded to this change which, in turn, generated a spike in electrical activity. This suggests a possible magnetic sense in humans.
Yet multiple questions still remain. For example, was this neural activity evidence of a magnetic sense or something else? Even if the human brain responds to these fields in some way, that doesn’t mean that information is being processed by the brain. There is still the question of what mechanisms are in place within the brain or body that receive these signals. If the body does indeed have magneto receptors, where are they? The next step for researchers is to identify them.
Kirschvink’s study is one of many publications delving into the mysteries of magnetic fields and what impact they have on human beings. The leaders in this area of research will most likely be found at the HeartMath institute. An internationally recognized nonprofit research and education organization dedicated to helping people reduce stress, self-regulate emotions, and build energy and resilience for healthy, happy lives, HeartMath tools, technology, and training teach people to rely on the intelligence of their hearts in concert with that of their minds at home, school, work, and play.
Researchers at HeartMath have begun what’s called the The Global Coherence Initiative (GCI), an international cooperative effort to help activate the heart of humanity and facilitate a shift in global consciousness. It aims primarily to invite people to participate by actively adding more heart-coherent love, care, and compassion into the planetary field. The second focus is scientific research into how we are all energetically connected with each other and the planet, and how we can utilize this interconnectivity to raise our personal vibration and thereby help create a better world.
The hypotheses of the researchers and scientists behind this project are as follows:
•The Earth’s magnetic field is a carrier of biologically relevant information that connects all living systems.
•Every person affects this global information field.
•Collective human consciousness affects the global information field. Therefore, large numbers of people creating heart-centered states of care, love and compassion will generate a more coherent field environment that can benefit others and help offset the current planetary discord and incoherence.
•There is a feedback loop between human beings and Earth’s energetic/magnetic systems
•The Earth has several sources of magnetic fields that affect us all. Two of them are the geomagnetic field that emanates from the core of the Earth and the fields that exist between Earth and the ionosphere. These fields surround the entire planet and act as protective shields blocking out the harmful effects of solar radiation, cosmic rays, sand, and other forms of space weather. Without these fields, ice as we know it could not exist on Earth. They are part of the dynamic ecosystem of our planet.
Other Evidence That Humans Can Sense These Fields
These energetic fields are known to scientists, and the notion that solar activity and the rhythms taking place on Earth’s magnetic fields have an impact on health and behaviour has been firmly established in scientific literature. (source)(source)
Scientific literature is also clear on the fact that several physiological rhythms and global collective behaviours are not only synchronized with solar and geomagnetic activity, but also that disruptions in these fields can create adverse effects on human health and behaviour.
When the Earth’s magnetic field environment is distributed it can cause sleep problems, mental confusion, usual lack of energy or a feeling of being on edge or overwhelmed for no apparent reason. At other times, when the Earth’s fields are stable and certain measures of solar activity are increased, people report increased positive feelings and more creativity and inspiration. This is likely due to a coupling between the human brain, cardiovascular and nervous system with resonating geomagnetic frequencies. (source)(source)(source)
The Earth and ionosphere generate frequencies that range from 0.01 hertz to 300 hertz, some of which are in the exact same frequency range as the one happening in our brain, cardiovascular system, and autonomic nervous system. This offers one way to explain how fluctuations in the Earth’s and Sun’s magnetic fields can influence us. Changes in these fields have also been shown to affect our brainwaves, heart rhythms, memory, athletics performance, and overall health.
Changes in the Earth’s fields from extreme solar activity have been linked to some of humanity’s greatest creations of art, as well as some of its most tragic events. (source)
We know how these fields affect us, but what about how we affect these fields? That’s the real question here. GCI scientists believe that because brain wave and heart rhythm frequencies overlap the Earth’s field resonance, we are not just receivers of biologically relevant information, but also senders of it. We feed information into the global field, thus creating a feedback loop with the Earth’s magnetic fields.
Human emotions and consciousness interact with and encode information into the geomagnetic field and this information is distributed globally. . . . We are suggesting in essence that this encoded information is communicated nonlocally between people at a subconscious level, in effect linking all living systems. Magnetic fields act as carrier waves for this information, which can influence all living systems – positively or negatively – within the field environment as well as our collective consciousness.
If we look at the heart, for example, it emits electromagnetic fields which change according to our emotions, and these can actually be measured up to several feet away from the human body.
These fields have been shown to affect not only ourselves, but those around us. You can read more about that here.
This research on this topic, which is still in its infancy, has immense ramifications for our world. It will further prove and highlight the great extent to which our attitudes, emotions, and intentions matter, and that these factors within the realm of non-material science can affect all life on Earth. Coherent, cooperative intention could impact global events and improve the quality of life on Earth. Practicing love, gratitude, and appreciation, as well as bettering ourselves as individuals, are some of the many crucial action steps towards changing our planet for the better.
http://wakingtimesmedia.com/scientists- ... ven-see-2/
Psychic Talents
I do believe that dogs probably can sense energies far better than humans can similiarly as they can smell and hear so much better than humans can. It has been found that you can wake up your dog by looking at him, ones dog can feel when it's owner is returning from work, dogs can sense where a pain in etc... Do humans also have these powers to varying much smaller degrees I wonder ?
Can Dogs Predict Seizures?
When Angel the yellow Labrador starts barking in Sarah Specht’s house, the countdown begins. She must find her 7-year-old son Hunter and then run a small magnet over the vagal nerve stimulator implanted in his chest. Time is of the essence—she has mere minutes to block one of Hunter’s incoming seizures.
Hunter was 3 years old when he was diagnosed with epilepsy in 2013. He had episodes 95% of the day—and constantly in his sleep—with a mixed bag of seizures that momentarily gave him blank stares, arm jerks, and muscles that either stiffened so much that he would fall to the ground like a plank or loosened to the point where Specht says he “goes into a noodle.”
Because of the vagal nerve stimulator, the boy now has most of his seizures automatically blocked by electrical pulses from the device. It won’t catch everything, however, with ten seizures on average a day slipping through the cracks for Hunter. But seizures that do occur can be stopped in their tracks or at least made less severe with manual intervention—a magnet swiped over the implant—and that’s where Angel’s usefulness comes in for Specht.
Many epilepsy patients swear by dogs like Angel. Special trained behaviors such as barking and licking are an apparent warning against risky activities like taking baths, climbing stairs, or driving a car. And cases like Specht’s, they may offer advance warning that could help stave off a seizure altogether.
But despite such anecdotal accounts, there is no proof that dogs can be trained to detect seizures, let alone predict their onset far enough in advance to tell humans about it. What’s more, even the dog trainers themselves don’t guarantee that their dogs can detect every seizure, and there is no regulation to ensure that the dogs were trained properly in the first place.
“Any good detector has positive value,” says Dr. Gary Mathern, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA. “But as a physician, a key unanswered question is whether the dogs really work.”
Expensive Training
Demand for the dogs is strong, even with the unanswered questions regarding their effectiveness. Over the course of a year, 4 Paws for Ability, the organization that trained Angel, will place 100 dogs with children, about 40% of which will be seizure alert dogs.
For many, the idea that dogs can recognize seizures is based on the idea that they’ll be able to detect seizures using their sense of smell. Some organizations believe that dogs can be trained to pick up a signal, others think they must be born with the skill. One, Canine Partners For Life, thinks only certain dogs are fit for duty. Susann Guy, COO of organization, says that dogs’ talent seems to be innate—whether the ability to detect a seizure signal is utterly untrainable, she says.
Canine Partners for Life receives more than 2,000 applications per year for service dogs. Located in rural Cochranville, in southern Pennsylvania, the facility overlooks acres of vast open space. Her dogs enjoy a good life here before they’re put to work. Two canines share each indoor pen, which contain dog beds and a play area. To acclimate them to a home environment, volunteers play with the dogs in the “cuddle room,” complete with a sofa, books, a rug, and a TV. Next to the vet’s office is the “zen room,” a dimly lit space where the canines can regularly relax to classical music.
When trainers spot a puppy that seems to have a particularly good nose, they give it a low-tech test: A local man with epilepsy takes the dog and observes it over a weekend, Guy says. In the comfort of his own home, he’s able to see if the dog changes its behavior in the minutes leading up to one of his seizures. If it does, it’s a candidate for special training after its initial fostering period.
Before the dog graduates from seizure alert school, it is matched to a potential new owner. In Specht’s case, she mailed in a shirt that Hunter wore during a seizure to another organization, 4 Paws For Ability, where Angel was trained. Its founder, Karen Shirk, says that her dogs are trained to detect seizures by a scent. Shirk says she matched Angel with Hunter based on his personality, a video of his daily life, and his needs, which were documented in a questionnaire that his mom filled out.
Preparing a service dog is time consuming and labor intensive, and Shirk says that each of her canines costs $26,000 to train, feed, and house over the course of a year.
Depending on the trainer and the patient’s eligibility for financial aid, seizure alert dogs can range in price from free to upwards of $20,000. The IRS considers service dogs to be “medical durable equipment” and therefore deductible medical expenses, though they aren’t covered by health insurance and Medicare. Patients often resort to private fundraising with the help of friends and family.
Canine Partners for Life charges between $1,000 and $3,000 for a seizure alert dog that has been raised for one year in a foster home and has passed one year of specialized training. Because the organization has cultivated a strong donor base—65% of its revenue comes from individual donors across the country—Guy’s organization is able to sell the dogs for a relatively low price.
And even if patients can raise funds, Canine Partners for Life will not sell its service dogs to anyone—namely, children under the age of 12, much less a kid Hunter’s age. The reasoning, Guy says, is to make sure that each dog recipient is ready for a working bond between human and service dog. Young children may treat their dogs as pets, not as partners, which can degrade a dog’s skills and motivation.
In those cases, some parents turn to other organizations. Specht tried and was rejected by many organizations like Canine Partners For Life before coming upon one that would give her a canine helper for Hunter. Two months after her son was diagnosed with epilepsy, Specht learned that 4 Paws For Ability would provide Hunter with a seizure alert dog. Shirk’s team agreed to start training a dog as soon as Specht delivered the $15,000 fee.
Founded in 1998, the organization now owns hundreds of dogs that are fostered across local homes and colleges. In addition to seizure alert dogs, the company also provides dogs that are specialized for diabetes and autism. “We don’t [just] look at what their diagnosis is,” says Shirk, who explains that dogs are trained to the specific problem and temperament of each child. Once families provide the $15,000 fee, there’s no waiting list: they are matched with a dog that is expected to graduate training 18 months later, she says.
Unanswered Questions
Those dogs’ training regimens aren’t necessarily backed by scientific studies. The few studies done on alert dogs in the 1990s and 2000s did not find conclusive evidence for the dogs’ seizure detecting abilities. “My experience is that they are not very accurate and they have not been tested in a proper randomized trial,” Dr. Mathern says.
One study was published in 2004. In it, two patients’ brains were continuous monitored via electroencephalogram, also known as EEG, while their trained dogs sat nearby. Neither of their dogs could predict seizures accurately. Still, the study’s very small sample size makes it hard to apply its conclusions universally. Other studies claim that dogs can alert their owners up to an hour before a seizure, but those have relied on patient-reported surveys, which are not always reliable, or were written by dog-training organizations, which have an interest in the matter.
Researchers have been stumped by how, precisely, some dogs might be able to detect seizures minutes or even hours in advance. “There’s almost no research on it. It’s actually close to zero research so we have no idea,” says Nathaniel Hall, director of the Canine Olfaction Research and Education Laboratory at Texas Tech University.
Some say that the dogs might be picking up on electrical signals, such as irregular brain waves, or subtle movements that are unnoticeable by humans. The most common explanation given by canine trainers, though, is that their dogs can smell trace chemical signals released by people who are about to experience a seizure. “The olfactory hypothesis would make sense if biochemical changes were producing an odor that a dog could detect,” Hall says. “As far as I know, that’s no more than a guess.”
“If we knew what the odors were, that would be ground-breaking,” he says. Such information could give researchers something that they could measure in a scientific study. Hall has searched for funding to launch studies on seizure-related olfactory cues, but he hasn’t had much luck. Those studies never got off the ground because of the expense—training the dogs and controlling for myriad variables proved too costly. In the end, he says, “what we think of as the dog’s amazing sense of smell is backed by scant evidence. It’s an exciting area, since there’s so little to go off of.”
“The olfactory hypothesis is no more than a guess.”
Michael Sapp, CEO of Michigan-based service dog organization Paws With A Cause, is also wary of claims that dogs can alert people to seizures. He estimates that there are fewer than 100 dogs that truly have these developed capabilities in the entire U.S.
“Many times people with epilepsy cannot be left alone because their seizures could be life threatening. To give someone a false hope that they can now rely on this dog to tell him or her when a seizure is coming is at best unethical,” Sapp says, whose organization doesn’t claim to provide seizure alert dogs.
They may even cause harm: Researchers reported one case in which a patient’s dog supposedly alerted him seven minutes before his seizures, but those turned out to be psychosomatic, non-epileptic episodes that were reinforced by the alerts.
Lack of Regulation
Despite the lack of evidence and potential for harm, Dr. Mathern says he has witnessed an increase in interest in seizure alert dogs by patients and their families.
The service dog industry is lightly regulated. There is an accrediting agency, though—Assistance Dog International, a nonprofit—that sets voluntary standards for service dog training and processes and approves increasingly more service dog centers every year.
To become accredited by ADI, an organization like Canine Partners for Life undergoes a campus assessment every five years and complies with certain standards in ethics and training. But ADI’s standards for dog training are “minimal,” Sapp says, adding that it is by no means a regulatory body.
Even then, there’s no rule that service dog providers need to be ADI-approved. In fact, U.S. laws don’t even require that service animals be professionally trained. People with disabilities are free to train their dogs themselves or use an outside trainer, as long as the result is to their liking. Desperate patients or parents may opt for non-ADI certified organizations like 4 Paws For Ability. These organizations may not have gone through the ADI approval process, but they still claim to produce high-quality service dogs.
Once the dog is delivered, it is ultimately up to patients to determine how a service dog will fit into their home and daily routine. In contrast with traditional service pairings, Angel doesn’t necessarily stay by Hunter’s side at every moment. Detecting many seizures over a short period of time makes Angel upset, Specht says, so she takes the dog to another room to unwind.
Though this can leave Hunter unmonitored for periods of time, Specht says that she is willing to separate the pair for Angel’s benefit on occasion. “Dogs can develop PTSD. Rather than have her keep alerting, she’s given the free command,” she says. She doesn’t want Angel’s anxiety to be forced her to stop working, “so I give her breaks when I see that she’s nervous.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/ ... lert-dogs/
Can Dogs Predict Seizures?
When Angel the yellow Labrador starts barking in Sarah Specht’s house, the countdown begins. She must find her 7-year-old son Hunter and then run a small magnet over the vagal nerve stimulator implanted in his chest. Time is of the essence—she has mere minutes to block one of Hunter’s incoming seizures.
Hunter was 3 years old when he was diagnosed with epilepsy in 2013. He had episodes 95% of the day—and constantly in his sleep—with a mixed bag of seizures that momentarily gave him blank stares, arm jerks, and muscles that either stiffened so much that he would fall to the ground like a plank or loosened to the point where Specht says he “goes into a noodle.”
Because of the vagal nerve stimulator, the boy now has most of his seizures automatically blocked by electrical pulses from the device. It won’t catch everything, however, with ten seizures on average a day slipping through the cracks for Hunter. But seizures that do occur can be stopped in their tracks or at least made less severe with manual intervention—a magnet swiped over the implant—and that’s where Angel’s usefulness comes in for Specht.
Many epilepsy patients swear by dogs like Angel. Special trained behaviors such as barking and licking are an apparent warning against risky activities like taking baths, climbing stairs, or driving a car. And cases like Specht’s, they may offer advance warning that could help stave off a seizure altogether.
But despite such anecdotal accounts, there is no proof that dogs can be trained to detect seizures, let alone predict their onset far enough in advance to tell humans about it. What’s more, even the dog trainers themselves don’t guarantee that their dogs can detect every seizure, and there is no regulation to ensure that the dogs were trained properly in the first place.
“Any good detector has positive value,” says Dr. Gary Mathern, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA. “But as a physician, a key unanswered question is whether the dogs really work.”
Expensive Training
Demand for the dogs is strong, even with the unanswered questions regarding their effectiveness. Over the course of a year, 4 Paws for Ability, the organization that trained Angel, will place 100 dogs with children, about 40% of which will be seizure alert dogs.
For many, the idea that dogs can recognize seizures is based on the idea that they’ll be able to detect seizures using their sense of smell. Some organizations believe that dogs can be trained to pick up a signal, others think they must be born with the skill. One, Canine Partners For Life, thinks only certain dogs are fit for duty. Susann Guy, COO of organization, says that dogs’ talent seems to be innate—whether the ability to detect a seizure signal is utterly untrainable, she says.
Canine Partners for Life receives more than 2,000 applications per year for service dogs. Located in rural Cochranville, in southern Pennsylvania, the facility overlooks acres of vast open space. Her dogs enjoy a good life here before they’re put to work. Two canines share each indoor pen, which contain dog beds and a play area. To acclimate them to a home environment, volunteers play with the dogs in the “cuddle room,” complete with a sofa, books, a rug, and a TV. Next to the vet’s office is the “zen room,” a dimly lit space where the canines can regularly relax to classical music.
When trainers spot a puppy that seems to have a particularly good nose, they give it a low-tech test: A local man with epilepsy takes the dog and observes it over a weekend, Guy says. In the comfort of his own home, he’s able to see if the dog changes its behavior in the minutes leading up to one of his seizures. If it does, it’s a candidate for special training after its initial fostering period.
Before the dog graduates from seizure alert school, it is matched to a potential new owner. In Specht’s case, she mailed in a shirt that Hunter wore during a seizure to another organization, 4 Paws For Ability, where Angel was trained. Its founder, Karen Shirk, says that her dogs are trained to detect seizures by a scent. Shirk says she matched Angel with Hunter based on his personality, a video of his daily life, and his needs, which were documented in a questionnaire that his mom filled out.
Preparing a service dog is time consuming and labor intensive, and Shirk says that each of her canines costs $26,000 to train, feed, and house over the course of a year.
Depending on the trainer and the patient’s eligibility for financial aid, seizure alert dogs can range in price from free to upwards of $20,000. The IRS considers service dogs to be “medical durable equipment” and therefore deductible medical expenses, though they aren’t covered by health insurance and Medicare. Patients often resort to private fundraising with the help of friends and family.
Canine Partners for Life charges between $1,000 and $3,000 for a seizure alert dog that has been raised for one year in a foster home and has passed one year of specialized training. Because the organization has cultivated a strong donor base—65% of its revenue comes from individual donors across the country—Guy’s organization is able to sell the dogs for a relatively low price.
And even if patients can raise funds, Canine Partners for Life will not sell its service dogs to anyone—namely, children under the age of 12, much less a kid Hunter’s age. The reasoning, Guy says, is to make sure that each dog recipient is ready for a working bond between human and service dog. Young children may treat their dogs as pets, not as partners, which can degrade a dog’s skills and motivation.
In those cases, some parents turn to other organizations. Specht tried and was rejected by many organizations like Canine Partners For Life before coming upon one that would give her a canine helper for Hunter. Two months after her son was diagnosed with epilepsy, Specht learned that 4 Paws For Ability would provide Hunter with a seizure alert dog. Shirk’s team agreed to start training a dog as soon as Specht delivered the $15,000 fee.
Founded in 1998, the organization now owns hundreds of dogs that are fostered across local homes and colleges. In addition to seizure alert dogs, the company also provides dogs that are specialized for diabetes and autism. “We don’t [just] look at what their diagnosis is,” says Shirk, who explains that dogs are trained to the specific problem and temperament of each child. Once families provide the $15,000 fee, there’s no waiting list: they are matched with a dog that is expected to graduate training 18 months later, she says.
Unanswered Questions
Those dogs’ training regimens aren’t necessarily backed by scientific studies. The few studies done on alert dogs in the 1990s and 2000s did not find conclusive evidence for the dogs’ seizure detecting abilities. “My experience is that they are not very accurate and they have not been tested in a proper randomized trial,” Dr. Mathern says.
One study was published in 2004. In it, two patients’ brains were continuous monitored via electroencephalogram, also known as EEG, while their trained dogs sat nearby. Neither of their dogs could predict seizures accurately. Still, the study’s very small sample size makes it hard to apply its conclusions universally. Other studies claim that dogs can alert their owners up to an hour before a seizure, but those have relied on patient-reported surveys, which are not always reliable, or were written by dog-training organizations, which have an interest in the matter.
Researchers have been stumped by how, precisely, some dogs might be able to detect seizures minutes or even hours in advance. “There’s almost no research on it. It’s actually close to zero research so we have no idea,” says Nathaniel Hall, director of the Canine Olfaction Research and Education Laboratory at Texas Tech University.
Some say that the dogs might be picking up on electrical signals, such as irregular brain waves, or subtle movements that are unnoticeable by humans. The most common explanation given by canine trainers, though, is that their dogs can smell trace chemical signals released by people who are about to experience a seizure. “The olfactory hypothesis would make sense if biochemical changes were producing an odor that a dog could detect,” Hall says. “As far as I know, that’s no more than a guess.”
“If we knew what the odors were, that would be ground-breaking,” he says. Such information could give researchers something that they could measure in a scientific study. Hall has searched for funding to launch studies on seizure-related olfactory cues, but he hasn’t had much luck. Those studies never got off the ground because of the expense—training the dogs and controlling for myriad variables proved too costly. In the end, he says, “what we think of as the dog’s amazing sense of smell is backed by scant evidence. It’s an exciting area, since there’s so little to go off of.”
“The olfactory hypothesis is no more than a guess.”
Michael Sapp, CEO of Michigan-based service dog organization Paws With A Cause, is also wary of claims that dogs can alert people to seizures. He estimates that there are fewer than 100 dogs that truly have these developed capabilities in the entire U.S.
“Many times people with epilepsy cannot be left alone because their seizures could be life threatening. To give someone a false hope that they can now rely on this dog to tell him or her when a seizure is coming is at best unethical,” Sapp says, whose organization doesn’t claim to provide seizure alert dogs.
They may even cause harm: Researchers reported one case in which a patient’s dog supposedly alerted him seven minutes before his seizures, but those turned out to be psychosomatic, non-epileptic episodes that were reinforced by the alerts.
Lack of Regulation
Despite the lack of evidence and potential for harm, Dr. Mathern says he has witnessed an increase in interest in seizure alert dogs by patients and their families.
The service dog industry is lightly regulated. There is an accrediting agency, though—Assistance Dog International, a nonprofit—that sets voluntary standards for service dog training and processes and approves increasingly more service dog centers every year.
To become accredited by ADI, an organization like Canine Partners for Life undergoes a campus assessment every five years and complies with certain standards in ethics and training. But ADI’s standards for dog training are “minimal,” Sapp says, adding that it is by no means a regulatory body.
Even then, there’s no rule that service dog providers need to be ADI-approved. In fact, U.S. laws don’t even require that service animals be professionally trained. People with disabilities are free to train their dogs themselves or use an outside trainer, as long as the result is to their liking. Desperate patients or parents may opt for non-ADI certified organizations like 4 Paws For Ability. These organizations may not have gone through the ADI approval process, but they still claim to produce high-quality service dogs.
Once the dog is delivered, it is ultimately up to patients to determine how a service dog will fit into their home and daily routine. In contrast with traditional service pairings, Angel doesn’t necessarily stay by Hunter’s side at every moment. Detecting many seizures over a short period of time makes Angel upset, Specht says, so she takes the dog to another room to unwind.
Though this can leave Hunter unmonitored for periods of time, Specht says that she is willing to separate the pair for Angel’s benefit on occasion. “Dogs can develop PTSD. Rather than have her keep alerting, she’s given the free command,” she says. She doesn’t want Angel’s anxiety to be forced her to stop working, “so I give her breaks when I see that she’s nervous.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/ ... lert-dogs/
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Psychic Talents
Dogs can smell us, and our emotions come out in smell, they also smell changes in us so they can find we have cancer sometimes.
Dogs are special to us, we don't take care of them good enough as a whole.
Dogs are special to us, we don't take care of them good enough as a whole.
"Being alone isn't what hurts. It's when the people around you make you feel alone" ~ Naruto Uzumaki, an Anime Character
Psychic Talents
Many believe that dogs are Gods friend for mankind. It's no wonder the muslims hate them as they do Christians and Jews.
Psychic Talents
Could it be that we all have this psychic talent but that it has weakened away ? Dogs seem to notice or sense a lot of things and I suspect that their psychic talents are equally stronger as their senses of smell and hearing are.
I WENT BLIND AND STARTED HEARING COLOURS
Out of the blue, Vanessa Potter lost her sight. As she recovered, her senses mingled – hearing and touch changed the way she saw colours. Her quest to understand why introduced her to new technology that uses sound to help blind people see.
It took just 72 hours for me to lose my sight entirely, and for my hands and feet to feel like they were encased in ice. Just before my blindness hit, I had been laid up with an unknown virus that had left me suffering severe headaches and sweats. My body’s immune system had gone haywire, responding to the virus by attacking my own nerves, causing my loss of sight and mobility – you could say I had been struck down by biological friendly fire.
Going blind was devastating. I hadn’t just lost my primary sense – I had lost my livelihood too. As a television producer, my vision was my job, so I was desperate to see again. After a few weeks, I regained some movement and normal sensation in my legs and feet, but my vision was another matter entirely.
The morning my sight finally started to return, I opened my eyes to a strange, supernatural view. At first I could only make out subtle light shifts; everything was just a swirling grey fog with no perceptible shapes. I was momentarily elated that the world was no longer a suffocating black cloak wrapped around my head – but I realised quickly that I did not recognise anything around me. Over time, black lines started to appear, crudely constructing my visual landscape. These lines delineated windows and doorframes, but little else.
Slowly the grey mist dissolved into a brown muddy haze that obscured anything more than a few feet away. Colour eluded me, and my family, padding softly around me at home, were hollow ghosts: skeletal figures with no solidity or humanness. Nothing looked like it should, and my children’s faces hovered agonisingly somewhere behind an opaque screen. I often had no idea where I was, and much of the time my heart was beating wildly in my chest. I wondered over and over if I would ever feel normal again.
As I recovered at home, colour started slowly creeping back into my life, whispering around corners. This was a very perplexing time, for often I only felt I was seeing a colour but was unable to identify it. I would stare endlessly at trees and lamp posts, desperate to match the colour I believed was there with the strange sensory experience I was having. Bright primary colours were the first I could identify with any conviction. Red led the way, followed by blues and yellows – but cloudy and faded. I struggled enormously with greens, greys and any pale or muted colours. This was not the vibrant rainbow world I was used to.
Even though my visual world was still predominantly black and white, it felt like colours were talking to me – not literally, but as if my senses were communicating in ways I didn’t understand. Attempting to explain my new relationship with colour only provoked confused silences around me. It made no sense to my family, as they all had fully functioning sensory systems. And when I described it to the neurologists treating me, I was told that nobody knew what was causing this visual disturbance, but that perhaps my sensory system had become cross-wired.
I still had some channels of information transmitting the colours around me to my brain, but I was receiving only part of the message. My lifelong emotional associations with colours were still intact, even if my sight was not. I tried to use language to help myself recover. “You are green,” I would tell the grass. I believed the more I stimulated my brain by observing the world around me and reminding myself what colour was, the more the damaged circuitry in my brain would reconnect and bring my normal vision back online. I found the more I did this, the more it worked.
I began documenting my recovery daily and started using an audio recorder. I also experimented further with using language, when looking at an object whose colour I didn’t know. First of all I would stare hard and guess what colour I felt it might be. Then, if I was wrong, my husband Ed would tell me the correct colour. If I looked back at the object again and repeated that colour out loud myself, I would often temporarily see it, albeit muted.
On one occasion I was able to see a row of different-coloured cable ties holding a gate together by repeating the colours Ed told me were there. Without hearing each colour expressed verbally, I had been unable to see them at all.
It was in this way that my home and neighbourhood became my own personal vision laboratory. My experiences were so outlandish that there were times when I couldn’t believe my eyes. Yet my eyes were undamaged – all of these strange occurrences were happening inside my brain.
http://sorendreier.com/i-went-blind-and ... g-colours/
I WENT BLIND AND STARTED HEARING COLOURS
Out of the blue, Vanessa Potter lost her sight. As she recovered, her senses mingled – hearing and touch changed the way she saw colours. Her quest to understand why introduced her to new technology that uses sound to help blind people see.
It took just 72 hours for me to lose my sight entirely, and for my hands and feet to feel like they were encased in ice. Just before my blindness hit, I had been laid up with an unknown virus that had left me suffering severe headaches and sweats. My body’s immune system had gone haywire, responding to the virus by attacking my own nerves, causing my loss of sight and mobility – you could say I had been struck down by biological friendly fire.
Going blind was devastating. I hadn’t just lost my primary sense – I had lost my livelihood too. As a television producer, my vision was my job, so I was desperate to see again. After a few weeks, I regained some movement and normal sensation in my legs and feet, but my vision was another matter entirely.
The morning my sight finally started to return, I opened my eyes to a strange, supernatural view. At first I could only make out subtle light shifts; everything was just a swirling grey fog with no perceptible shapes. I was momentarily elated that the world was no longer a suffocating black cloak wrapped around my head – but I realised quickly that I did not recognise anything around me. Over time, black lines started to appear, crudely constructing my visual landscape. These lines delineated windows and doorframes, but little else.
Slowly the grey mist dissolved into a brown muddy haze that obscured anything more than a few feet away. Colour eluded me, and my family, padding softly around me at home, were hollow ghosts: skeletal figures with no solidity or humanness. Nothing looked like it should, and my children’s faces hovered agonisingly somewhere behind an opaque screen. I often had no idea where I was, and much of the time my heart was beating wildly in my chest. I wondered over and over if I would ever feel normal again.
As I recovered at home, colour started slowly creeping back into my life, whispering around corners. This was a very perplexing time, for often I only felt I was seeing a colour but was unable to identify it. I would stare endlessly at trees and lamp posts, desperate to match the colour I believed was there with the strange sensory experience I was having. Bright primary colours were the first I could identify with any conviction. Red led the way, followed by blues and yellows – but cloudy and faded. I struggled enormously with greens, greys and any pale or muted colours. This was not the vibrant rainbow world I was used to.
Even though my visual world was still predominantly black and white, it felt like colours were talking to me – not literally, but as if my senses were communicating in ways I didn’t understand. Attempting to explain my new relationship with colour only provoked confused silences around me. It made no sense to my family, as they all had fully functioning sensory systems. And when I described it to the neurologists treating me, I was told that nobody knew what was causing this visual disturbance, but that perhaps my sensory system had become cross-wired.
I still had some channels of information transmitting the colours around me to my brain, but I was receiving only part of the message. My lifelong emotional associations with colours were still intact, even if my sight was not. I tried to use language to help myself recover. “You are green,” I would tell the grass. I believed the more I stimulated my brain by observing the world around me and reminding myself what colour was, the more the damaged circuitry in my brain would reconnect and bring my normal vision back online. I found the more I did this, the more it worked.
I began documenting my recovery daily and started using an audio recorder. I also experimented further with using language, when looking at an object whose colour I didn’t know. First of all I would stare hard and guess what colour I felt it might be. Then, if I was wrong, my husband Ed would tell me the correct colour. If I looked back at the object again and repeated that colour out loud myself, I would often temporarily see it, albeit muted.
On one occasion I was able to see a row of different-coloured cable ties holding a gate together by repeating the colours Ed told me were there. Without hearing each colour expressed verbally, I had been unable to see them at all.
It was in this way that my home and neighbourhood became my own personal vision laboratory. My experiences were so outlandish that there were times when I couldn’t believe my eyes. Yet my eyes were undamaged – all of these strange occurrences were happening inside my brain.
http://sorendreier.com/i-went-blind-and ... g-colours/
Psychic Talents
I have believed for some time now that there may be many psychic powers that our minds have the potential for. I wonder if any Tibetan lamas have accessed this ability as they experiment with their minds from early childhood many hours every day. Some may be very talented and over the many hundreds of years I do believe that they have found many effective ways of accessing these talents.
Some people can feel it on their own bodies when others are touched, hit, or stroked — and researchers are trying to figure out why
Agustín Ruiz / Flickr Agustín Ruiz / Flickr
People who experience the physical sensations of others have "mirror-touch synesthesia."
It means they can feel a sensation on the same part of the body where they see someone else being hit, stroked, kissed, or injected.
Researchers have been studying their brains to work out what makes them different to everyone else.
But they can be difficult to find as perception is so subjective - many people don't realise their experience of the world is any different to everyone else's.
As for whether it's a gift or a curse, nobody is really sure.
Pau can't watch films very often. When she does, everything that physically happens to characters on screen she feels to a certain extent on her own body.
"Films for me, or trailers, or whatever, are just a continuous chain of violence, punching, slapping, shooting, falling and, worse still, kissing or touching people's faces," she said. "I've always hated screen kisses (or never been able to watch them) because… well I don't want to kiss them, do I?"
Pau has something called mirror-touch synesthesia, which is a brain condition that seems to amplify people's sensation of touch so much they can essentially physically feel what others feel. When she sees people being hit, punched, stroked, prodded, or injected, she experiences a similar sensation on the same part of her own body.
For example, once when she was watching a group of boys playing paddleball in a swimming pool, she would almost feel like she was batting the ball herself.
"I got this really pleasant feeling in [my] hand and down my arm as if I was hitting the ball myself, but without making any effort," she said. "I enjoyed it so much that every morning as I went past I would stand and watch him for a while enjoying this fabulous sensation - although I had to clear off after a while in case he thought there was something odd about me staring at him like that or thought I fancied him or something."
Some people can feel it on their own bodies when others are touched, hit, or stroked — and researchers are trying to figure out why
Tiko Aramyan / Shutterstock Tiko Aramyan / Shutterstock
Isabella, who is 14, also has mirror-touch synesthesia, which she said can be extremely helpful for helping other people with injuries, but also a huge annoyance at the same time.
"Mirror-touch synesthesia, in my opinion, is simply an exaggerated physical connection with any other human being," she said. "Things like holding a dog will evoke me to feel a somewhat fluffy weight in my arms. An open cut or a bruise will cause me to feel the same pain in the same area. However, things like back pain or soreness are not visible, therefore I cannot feel them."
The feeling only occurs when she looks at an injury, she said. But that means that even if the person is no longer experiencing pain, Isabella still will if the cut or graze is still visible. Similarly, Pau only felt the sensation of hitting the ball if she actually saw it make contact.
Our experience of the world is very subjective
There are several different types of synesthesia, according to Jared Medina, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Delaware, such as grapheme-colour and number-colour synesthesia, where people see letters or numbers as having distinct colours.
In research conducted in 2017, Medina recruited undergraduate students from a questionnaire to search for people with mirror-touch synesthesia, which normally affects about 1-2% of the population. They can be tricky to find as our own perception of the world isn't something that often comes up in regular conversation. In fact, people usually assume that the way they are seeing, hearing, or feeling something is exactly how others experience it too - just look at Yanny and Laurel.
Because of our innate inability to comprehend how others may experience the world differently, people with mirror-touch synesthesia often think this is just the way people are. It takes experiments like Medina's, where he conducted a survey and brought in the people to the lab who said they experienced touch on other people's bodies, for them to realise that actually, something is different.
"We bring them in, then at the end of the experiment, we tell them it seems like you have mirror-touch synesthesia... and they kind of stop and say what? This isn't normal?" Medina said. "And we say no, the vast majority of individuals don't experience this. And some of them had no idea, they just assumed this is the way everybody experiences things."
Jamie Ward, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Sussex, said mirror-touch synesthesia just shows there are multiple ways of experiencing the world, we just don't think about it that often.
"People have often debated whether your experience of red is the same as mine, and nobody really cares, because we all call it the same thing," he said. "But these people are saying I really do experience this differently... There's also more than one way of being normal. Not in the statistical sense but normal in pathology, I suppose. I think that's interesting both scientifically and sociologically."
Our brains might all have the potential for synesthesia
Ward leads one of the world-leading centres for studying synesthesia. One explanation he gave for what is happening in the brain is to do with mirror neurons. These are neurons in the brain that respond to actions rather than touch, such as picking up a pencil. This can be extended to feeling things, Ward said, such as when someone pulls a face of disgust, a feeling of disgust is mirrored in the brain.
Some people can feel it on their own bodies when others are touched, hit, or stroked — and researchers are trying to figure out why
Marcelo Hernandez/Getty
In people with mirror-touch synesthesia, their brains may fail to regulate the extent to which these neurons respond. MRI studies have shown there are more neural connections in parts of their brains associated with touch perception. Also, they tend to have less matter in other areas of the brain, which Ward says may be associated with regulating these touch sensations, or figuring out who the touch belongs to.
"Your eyes can't tell if it's your body or not, but your brain can," Ward said. "If we saw a human being touched we would also activate the system but to a lesser extent. Everyone does a mirroring of touch but not everybody experiences it consciously... They are relying on a similar underlying system that we all have."
So our brains may all have the potential to physically feel what other people do, it's just that the ability is amplified in the people who mirror-touch synesthesia. Medina called this the "overactivity hypothesis."
"If I put you into a brain scan, assuming you don't have mirror-touch synesthesia, and I show you videos of a body being touched, you'll actually have some activation in parts of the brain that are typically associated with touch," he said. "It's not going to fill all the areas, but you're going to have some activation - it's just not going to be at this high level."
Like all brain conditions, there are no absolute rules, and people's experiences with mirror-touch synesthesia vary considerably. Isabelle, for example, doesn't feel anything beyond the physical.
"Emotions are also invisible," she said. "mirror-touch isn't mind-reading, and emotions and feelings are not physical in any sort of way."
Pau, however, said she empathises a lot with others, which she doesn't necessarily see as a result of her mirror-touch. She may be right - but there is some evidence that people with mirror-touch are slightly above average at picking up on the emotions of others, Ward said. For example, they are better at noticing a subtle facial cue that others might miss.
He said they also tend to score higher on some measures of empathy, but it's more to do with emotional reactivity than sympathising. They can pick up on someone's pain, pleasure, or distress fairly well, but that doesn't necessarily mean they empathise more. In other words, while they might have more of an idea of what someone is going through, that doesn't mean they are better equipped to deal with the problem.
Some people can feel it on their own bodies when others are touched, hit, or stroked — and researchers are trying to figure out why
ARENA Creative/Shutterstock
"There's something quite self-centered about it," Ward said. "They feel what they feel but that doesn't give them any extra tools for responding."
Gift or curse? Nobody is sure
Researchers are still trying to figure out what's going on in the brains of people with mirror-touch synesthesia, and the possible reasons for why some people develop this way.
There also isn't much evidence that it causes any sort of impairment, although some patients do report discomfort. But either way it's not a condition that seems to require medical intervention, as many go through a lot of their lives without realising there is anything different about them at all.
Pau said mirror-touch is not something she is necessarily glad to have, as she has to be careful when watching videos to avoid experiencing everything she sees. She also said she can't imagine anyone with mirror-touch being a doctor or nurse, or even a hairdresser.
"I've always been quite reactionary to any activities where you have to watch touchy stuff," she said. "A gift I don't think you could call it, although I'd consider other types of synesthesia a gift. A hindrance, yes it could be when I'm going through a time when it's stronger. I can't think of much it's actually useful for."
Others with mirror-touch really enjoy their experiences, which probably hinges on the intensity of experience, how much they actually enjoy being touched, and whether theirs is strongly linked with pain or pleasure. Isabelle put her thoughts another way.
"Whether it is a gift or a curse, I am not sure," she said. "I wouldn't wish it upon anyone, but I certainly wouldn't trade it for anything else."
https://www.businessinsider.es/what-is- ... ?r=US&IR=T
Some people can feel it on their own bodies when others are touched, hit, or stroked — and researchers are trying to figure out why
Agustín Ruiz / Flickr Agustín Ruiz / Flickr
People who experience the physical sensations of others have "mirror-touch synesthesia."
It means they can feel a sensation on the same part of the body where they see someone else being hit, stroked, kissed, or injected.
Researchers have been studying their brains to work out what makes them different to everyone else.
But they can be difficult to find as perception is so subjective - many people don't realise their experience of the world is any different to everyone else's.
As for whether it's a gift or a curse, nobody is really sure.
Pau can't watch films very often. When she does, everything that physically happens to characters on screen she feels to a certain extent on her own body.
"Films for me, or trailers, or whatever, are just a continuous chain of violence, punching, slapping, shooting, falling and, worse still, kissing or touching people's faces," she said. "I've always hated screen kisses (or never been able to watch them) because… well I don't want to kiss them, do I?"
Pau has something called mirror-touch synesthesia, which is a brain condition that seems to amplify people's sensation of touch so much they can essentially physically feel what others feel. When she sees people being hit, punched, stroked, prodded, or injected, she experiences a similar sensation on the same part of her own body.
For example, once when she was watching a group of boys playing paddleball in a swimming pool, she would almost feel like she was batting the ball herself.
"I got this really pleasant feeling in [my] hand and down my arm as if I was hitting the ball myself, but without making any effort," she said. "I enjoyed it so much that every morning as I went past I would stand and watch him for a while enjoying this fabulous sensation - although I had to clear off after a while in case he thought there was something odd about me staring at him like that or thought I fancied him or something."
Some people can feel it on their own bodies when others are touched, hit, or stroked — and researchers are trying to figure out why
Tiko Aramyan / Shutterstock Tiko Aramyan / Shutterstock
Isabella, who is 14, also has mirror-touch synesthesia, which she said can be extremely helpful for helping other people with injuries, but also a huge annoyance at the same time.
"Mirror-touch synesthesia, in my opinion, is simply an exaggerated physical connection with any other human being," she said. "Things like holding a dog will evoke me to feel a somewhat fluffy weight in my arms. An open cut or a bruise will cause me to feel the same pain in the same area. However, things like back pain or soreness are not visible, therefore I cannot feel them."
The feeling only occurs when she looks at an injury, she said. But that means that even if the person is no longer experiencing pain, Isabella still will if the cut or graze is still visible. Similarly, Pau only felt the sensation of hitting the ball if she actually saw it make contact.
Our experience of the world is very subjective
There are several different types of synesthesia, according to Jared Medina, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Delaware, such as grapheme-colour and number-colour synesthesia, where people see letters or numbers as having distinct colours.
In research conducted in 2017, Medina recruited undergraduate students from a questionnaire to search for people with mirror-touch synesthesia, which normally affects about 1-2% of the population. They can be tricky to find as our own perception of the world isn't something that often comes up in regular conversation. In fact, people usually assume that the way they are seeing, hearing, or feeling something is exactly how others experience it too - just look at Yanny and Laurel.
Because of our innate inability to comprehend how others may experience the world differently, people with mirror-touch synesthesia often think this is just the way people are. It takes experiments like Medina's, where he conducted a survey and brought in the people to the lab who said they experienced touch on other people's bodies, for them to realise that actually, something is different.
"We bring them in, then at the end of the experiment, we tell them it seems like you have mirror-touch synesthesia... and they kind of stop and say what? This isn't normal?" Medina said. "And we say no, the vast majority of individuals don't experience this. And some of them had no idea, they just assumed this is the way everybody experiences things."
Jamie Ward, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Sussex, said mirror-touch synesthesia just shows there are multiple ways of experiencing the world, we just don't think about it that often.
"People have often debated whether your experience of red is the same as mine, and nobody really cares, because we all call it the same thing," he said. "But these people are saying I really do experience this differently... There's also more than one way of being normal. Not in the statistical sense but normal in pathology, I suppose. I think that's interesting both scientifically and sociologically."
Our brains might all have the potential for synesthesia
Ward leads one of the world-leading centres for studying synesthesia. One explanation he gave for what is happening in the brain is to do with mirror neurons. These are neurons in the brain that respond to actions rather than touch, such as picking up a pencil. This can be extended to feeling things, Ward said, such as when someone pulls a face of disgust, a feeling of disgust is mirrored in the brain.
Some people can feel it on their own bodies when others are touched, hit, or stroked — and researchers are trying to figure out why
Marcelo Hernandez/Getty
In people with mirror-touch synesthesia, their brains may fail to regulate the extent to which these neurons respond. MRI studies have shown there are more neural connections in parts of their brains associated with touch perception. Also, they tend to have less matter in other areas of the brain, which Ward says may be associated with regulating these touch sensations, or figuring out who the touch belongs to.
"Your eyes can't tell if it's your body or not, but your brain can," Ward said. "If we saw a human being touched we would also activate the system but to a lesser extent. Everyone does a mirroring of touch but not everybody experiences it consciously... They are relying on a similar underlying system that we all have."
So our brains may all have the potential to physically feel what other people do, it's just that the ability is amplified in the people who mirror-touch synesthesia. Medina called this the "overactivity hypothesis."
"If I put you into a brain scan, assuming you don't have mirror-touch synesthesia, and I show you videos of a body being touched, you'll actually have some activation in parts of the brain that are typically associated with touch," he said. "It's not going to fill all the areas, but you're going to have some activation - it's just not going to be at this high level."
Like all brain conditions, there are no absolute rules, and people's experiences with mirror-touch synesthesia vary considerably. Isabelle, for example, doesn't feel anything beyond the physical.
"Emotions are also invisible," she said. "mirror-touch isn't mind-reading, and emotions and feelings are not physical in any sort of way."
Pau, however, said she empathises a lot with others, which she doesn't necessarily see as a result of her mirror-touch. She may be right - but there is some evidence that people with mirror-touch are slightly above average at picking up on the emotions of others, Ward said. For example, they are better at noticing a subtle facial cue that others might miss.
He said they also tend to score higher on some measures of empathy, but it's more to do with emotional reactivity than sympathising. They can pick up on someone's pain, pleasure, or distress fairly well, but that doesn't necessarily mean they empathise more. In other words, while they might have more of an idea of what someone is going through, that doesn't mean they are better equipped to deal with the problem.
Some people can feel it on their own bodies when others are touched, hit, or stroked — and researchers are trying to figure out why
ARENA Creative/Shutterstock
"There's something quite self-centered about it," Ward said. "They feel what they feel but that doesn't give them any extra tools for responding."
Gift or curse? Nobody is sure
Researchers are still trying to figure out what's going on in the brains of people with mirror-touch synesthesia, and the possible reasons for why some people develop this way.
There also isn't much evidence that it causes any sort of impairment, although some patients do report discomfort. But either way it's not a condition that seems to require medical intervention, as many go through a lot of their lives without realising there is anything different about them at all.
Pau said mirror-touch is not something she is necessarily glad to have, as she has to be careful when watching videos to avoid experiencing everything she sees. She also said she can't imagine anyone with mirror-touch being a doctor or nurse, or even a hairdresser.
"I've always been quite reactionary to any activities where you have to watch touchy stuff," she said. "A gift I don't think you could call it, although I'd consider other types of synesthesia a gift. A hindrance, yes it could be when I'm going through a time when it's stronger. I can't think of much it's actually useful for."
Others with mirror-touch really enjoy their experiences, which probably hinges on the intensity of experience, how much they actually enjoy being touched, and whether theirs is strongly linked with pain or pleasure. Isabelle put her thoughts another way.
"Whether it is a gift or a curse, I am not sure," she said. "I wouldn't wish it upon anyone, but I certainly wouldn't trade it for anything else."
https://www.businessinsider.es/what-is- ... ?r=US&IR=T
Psychic Talents
my gut has been correct many times unfortunately I sometimes don't to listen to it and have paid for this.
Your gut is smarter than you think — and it can help you make better decisions, according to a psychologist
Decisions are often made using the our heads, but our gut instinct can also be a reliable tool.
Not only does this "second brain" influence our decisions , but it can also enhance the process we use to make them.
We develop an emotionally scripted database of information based on past experiences.
Our emotional responses to current situations often recall that information and influence our feelings, and ultimately, our decisions.
How we govern our lives is heavily influenced by that innate motivational system of emotions.
The head-or-gut quandary has been debated forever. Rather than deliberate further on whether one is better than the other, let's take a look at why some people trust their gut — feelings, intuition, hunches, instincts, or sensations — and better understand how it works as a decision-making tool.
Contrary to popular belief, emotions do not interfere with decision-making. Instead, they enhance it .
Our initial evaluation of a situation, also known as an appraisal, happens automatically — without our conscious control — and triggers an involuntary emotional response . Our feelings are designed to motivate us to pay attention to what's important in terms of what is harmful or beneficial to us. Those feelings transform into smarter decisions when guided by conscious thought, which is your individual awareness of unique thoughts, memories, feelings and environment.
Appraisals take into account our well-being, plans, and goals when it processes events or situations and provides them with meaning. Even before we recognize what may be happening, our brains scan incoming sensory information to detect patterns associated with the past. Memory is an essential contributor to our emotional responses to situations, and as such, we both consciously and unconsciously evaluate a situation based on how closely the current circumstance resembles past experiences.
In consciousness, feeling and thinking always arise together. Cognition — thought — assigns meaning to what we feel. At the same time, thoughts that are guided by emotions — feelings and sensations — become better informed. Thus, when we have a decision to make, our thoughts and feelings simultaneously will emerge even though we may be more aware of one over the other. People who make gut decisions tend to seek guidance from what they feel . In contrast, those who rely heavily on their cognitive assessment of situations look for validation for what they think.
Your decision-making style can show how your past can script your behavior in different ways.
For example, due to repeatedly experiencing shame after trusting gut feelings, some people learn to avoid using their intuition rather than risk failure . They rely on empirical data to diminish shame-anxiety — apprehension about the possibility of experiencing shame — and it can buffer shame for the decision-maker if things go wrong; after all, hard data provided the information for the decision.
In contrast, people who make gut decisions use an unconsciously scripted database they acquired from emotional responses that enables them to trust their hunches. But a gut decision is not a fleeting image from out of nowhere: Emotions and emotional memories are responsible for the sensations involved in intuition , and the meaning we give to any gut feeling is a contribution of our cognition. Most people who rely on their gut feelings do not deliberately think about how it works, but they trust the process.
How we govern our lives, including our preferred method of decision-making, is heavily influenced by our innate motivational system of emotions . It is no wonder that many people who favor conscious reasoning tend to consider gut decisions to be risky or groundless.
Along with other factors, this bias may fuel our present data-driven culture, where information gained from quantitative methods — statistics and numbers — is given primacy over qualitative evidence that is based on lived experience, emotions, and motives.
In my experience, a preference for what is quantifiable in decision-making seems to have permeated the business world and many other professions, including medicine and psychology where insurers mandate documented evidence that threatens to eliminate information derived from empathy, intuition, and the human connection.
Mary Lamia, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, professor, and author in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her website is: marylamia.com
https://www.businessinsider.com/decisio ... ist-2018-7
Your gut is smarter than you think — and it can help you make better decisions, according to a psychologist
Decisions are often made using the our heads, but our gut instinct can also be a reliable tool.
Not only does this "second brain" influence our decisions , but it can also enhance the process we use to make them.
We develop an emotionally scripted database of information based on past experiences.
Our emotional responses to current situations often recall that information and influence our feelings, and ultimately, our decisions.
How we govern our lives is heavily influenced by that innate motivational system of emotions.
The head-or-gut quandary has been debated forever. Rather than deliberate further on whether one is better than the other, let's take a look at why some people trust their gut — feelings, intuition, hunches, instincts, or sensations — and better understand how it works as a decision-making tool.
Contrary to popular belief, emotions do not interfere with decision-making. Instead, they enhance it .
Our initial evaluation of a situation, also known as an appraisal, happens automatically — without our conscious control — and triggers an involuntary emotional response . Our feelings are designed to motivate us to pay attention to what's important in terms of what is harmful or beneficial to us. Those feelings transform into smarter decisions when guided by conscious thought, which is your individual awareness of unique thoughts, memories, feelings and environment.
Appraisals take into account our well-being, plans, and goals when it processes events or situations and provides them with meaning. Even before we recognize what may be happening, our brains scan incoming sensory information to detect patterns associated with the past. Memory is an essential contributor to our emotional responses to situations, and as such, we both consciously and unconsciously evaluate a situation based on how closely the current circumstance resembles past experiences.
In consciousness, feeling and thinking always arise together. Cognition — thought — assigns meaning to what we feel. At the same time, thoughts that are guided by emotions — feelings and sensations — become better informed. Thus, when we have a decision to make, our thoughts and feelings simultaneously will emerge even though we may be more aware of one over the other. People who make gut decisions tend to seek guidance from what they feel . In contrast, those who rely heavily on their cognitive assessment of situations look for validation for what they think.
Your decision-making style can show how your past can script your behavior in different ways.
For example, due to repeatedly experiencing shame after trusting gut feelings, some people learn to avoid using their intuition rather than risk failure . They rely on empirical data to diminish shame-anxiety — apprehension about the possibility of experiencing shame — and it can buffer shame for the decision-maker if things go wrong; after all, hard data provided the information for the decision.
In contrast, people who make gut decisions use an unconsciously scripted database they acquired from emotional responses that enables them to trust their hunches. But a gut decision is not a fleeting image from out of nowhere: Emotions and emotional memories are responsible for the sensations involved in intuition , and the meaning we give to any gut feeling is a contribution of our cognition. Most people who rely on their gut feelings do not deliberately think about how it works, but they trust the process.
How we govern our lives, including our preferred method of decision-making, is heavily influenced by our innate motivational system of emotions . It is no wonder that many people who favor conscious reasoning tend to consider gut decisions to be risky or groundless.
Along with other factors, this bias may fuel our present data-driven culture, where information gained from quantitative methods — statistics and numbers — is given primacy over qualitative evidence that is based on lived experience, emotions, and motives.
In my experience, a preference for what is quantifiable in decision-making seems to have permeated the business world and many other professions, including medicine and psychology where insurers mandate documented evidence that threatens to eliminate information derived from empathy, intuition, and the human connection.
Mary Lamia, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, professor, and author in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her website is: marylamia.com
https://www.businessinsider.com/decisio ... ist-2018-7
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Blue Frost
- SUPER VIP
- Posts: 98099
- Joined: May 14th, 2012, 1:01 am
- Location: Yodenheim
Psychic Talents
Should have could have would have, no matter just do your best. The gut felling can get you into trouble also.
"Being alone isn't what hurts. It's when the people around you make you feel alone" ~ Naruto Uzumaki, an Anime Character
Psychic Talents
If I ever have a lucid dream I am going to conjure up Marilyn Monroe 
New Method For Having Lucid Dreams Discovered
They're incredible. Amazing. Magical. But perhaps the most fantastic thing about lucid dreams – in which the dreamer becomes aware they're dreaming – is how realistic they seem.
Sadly, only about half of us ever experience lucid dreams in our lives, and efforts to trigger the phenomenon have delivered mixed results. But now, new research looks to offer the most effective way of inducing lucid dreaming yet.
Building on their own previous research, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Lucidity Institute in Hawaii wanted to investigate how chemicals called acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEls) might promote lucid dreaming.
The neurotransmitter acetylcholine is thought to help modulate REM sleep, and AChEls help this compound to aggregate in the brain, by inhibiting an enzyme (called acetylcholinesterase) that inactivates acetylcholine.
As it happens, a common drug used to treat memory decline in Alzheimer's disease – known as galantamine – is a fast-acting AChEI with only mild side effects, so researchers recruited 121 participants to see what effect the drug had on their ability to have and recall lucid dreams.
It's worth pointing out these volunteers weren't just everyday people, but enthusiasts with an established interest in lucid dreams, who also had undertaken training with lucid dream induction protocols (including what is known as the MILD technique).
When this cognitive training was combined with galantamine, lucid stuff started to happen.
Over three consecutive nights, participants took increasing doses of the drug, starting with a placebo, then 4 mg, then 8 mg on the final night.
Each night, participants woke 4.5 hours after lights out, practised their dream induction techniques, ingested their capsule, and returned to sleep.
The combination of the induction technique paired with the Alzheimer's medication looks to indeed help trigger lucid dreams, and the higher dosage delivered a stronger result.
While taking the 'active' placebo (0 mg of galantamine but still using the MILD technique), 14 percent of participants reported a lucid dream, but this increased to 27 percent when 4 mg was consumed, and rose to 42 percent with an 8 mg dose.
"This combined protocol resulted in a total of 69 out of 121 participants (57 percent) successfully having a lucid dream on at least one out of two nights on an active dose of galantamine," the researchers write in their paper.
"This protocol is one of the most effective methods for inducing lucid dreams known to-date, and holds promise for making lucid dreaming available to a wider population."
That's important, because in addition to helping people enjoy fantastic dreams where they can help control what happens, the research could also help explain the links between lucid dreams and consciousness, and help people to confront their fears and process trauma while safely asleep.
"This new method finally has the success rate we need to be able to properly do research on lucid dreaming," psychologist Denholm Aspy from the University of Adelaide in Australia, who wasn't involved in the study, explained to New Scientist.
Until more is known about the safety of this technique, nobody should be experimenting with galantamine on their own. But once more research is done, these findings may ultimately beckon an almost limitless world of imaginary fun and adventure.
"As I ran my hand along a brick wall… I could feel the coarse texture and the outline of individual bricks," said one of the team, cognitive neuroscientist Benjamin Baird from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, recalling his own experience of galantamine.
"It's like going into the holodeck in Star Trek where you can have any imaginable experience you choose."
The findings are reported in PLOS One.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists ... mer-s-drug
New Method For Having Lucid Dreams Discovered
They're incredible. Amazing. Magical. But perhaps the most fantastic thing about lucid dreams – in which the dreamer becomes aware they're dreaming – is how realistic they seem.
Sadly, only about half of us ever experience lucid dreams in our lives, and efforts to trigger the phenomenon have delivered mixed results. But now, new research looks to offer the most effective way of inducing lucid dreaming yet.
Building on their own previous research, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Lucidity Institute in Hawaii wanted to investigate how chemicals called acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEls) might promote lucid dreaming.
The neurotransmitter acetylcholine is thought to help modulate REM sleep, and AChEls help this compound to aggregate in the brain, by inhibiting an enzyme (called acetylcholinesterase) that inactivates acetylcholine.
As it happens, a common drug used to treat memory decline in Alzheimer's disease – known as galantamine – is a fast-acting AChEI with only mild side effects, so researchers recruited 121 participants to see what effect the drug had on their ability to have and recall lucid dreams.
It's worth pointing out these volunteers weren't just everyday people, but enthusiasts with an established interest in lucid dreams, who also had undertaken training with lucid dream induction protocols (including what is known as the MILD technique).
When this cognitive training was combined with galantamine, lucid stuff started to happen.
Over three consecutive nights, participants took increasing doses of the drug, starting with a placebo, then 4 mg, then 8 mg on the final night.
Each night, participants woke 4.5 hours after lights out, practised their dream induction techniques, ingested their capsule, and returned to sleep.
The combination of the induction technique paired with the Alzheimer's medication looks to indeed help trigger lucid dreams, and the higher dosage delivered a stronger result.
While taking the 'active' placebo (0 mg of galantamine but still using the MILD technique), 14 percent of participants reported a lucid dream, but this increased to 27 percent when 4 mg was consumed, and rose to 42 percent with an 8 mg dose.
"This combined protocol resulted in a total of 69 out of 121 participants (57 percent) successfully having a lucid dream on at least one out of two nights on an active dose of galantamine," the researchers write in their paper.
"This protocol is one of the most effective methods for inducing lucid dreams known to-date, and holds promise for making lucid dreaming available to a wider population."
That's important, because in addition to helping people enjoy fantastic dreams where they can help control what happens, the research could also help explain the links between lucid dreams and consciousness, and help people to confront their fears and process trauma while safely asleep.
"This new method finally has the success rate we need to be able to properly do research on lucid dreaming," psychologist Denholm Aspy from the University of Adelaide in Australia, who wasn't involved in the study, explained to New Scientist.
Until more is known about the safety of this technique, nobody should be experimenting with galantamine on their own. But once more research is done, these findings may ultimately beckon an almost limitless world of imaginary fun and adventure.
"As I ran my hand along a brick wall… I could feel the coarse texture and the outline of individual bricks," said one of the team, cognitive neuroscientist Benjamin Baird from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, recalling his own experience of galantamine.
"It's like going into the holodeck in Star Trek where you can have any imaginable experience you choose."
The findings are reported in PLOS One.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists ... mer-s-drug
Re: Psychic Talents
Many people have seen this psychic talent of dogs. I also believe that they can recognize good people too.
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Blue Frost
- SUPER VIP
- Posts: 98099
- Joined: May 14th, 2012, 1:01 am
- Location: Yodenheim
Re: Psychic Talents
I don't think they can, I think they smell, and feel intention from our smells, and body language.
I guess the video picked up on some of that, but it's not psychic.
It's funny that dogs will run to me, and especially my niece when in a crowd, they know we love them.
I guess the video picked up on some of that, but it's not psychic.
It's funny that dogs will run to me, and especially my niece when in a crowd, they know we love them.
"Being alone isn't what hurts. It's when the people around you make you feel alone" ~ Naruto Uzumaki, an Anime Character
Re: Psychic Talents
A lot of women are psychics..
They somehow know exactly what I want.
They somehow know exactly what I want.