What happens to the brain without oxygen?
Category: neuroscience – Page 865
You may be familiar with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. Did you know there’s a lesser-known—but similar—illness that affects deer, moose, and elk? It’s called chronic wasting disease, and like mad cow, it is also a brain disease, thought to be caused by a malformed, twisted protein called a prion. CWD leads to unusual behavior, and often results in the animals becoming gruesomely thin before they die. First discovered in 1967, CWD now has been detected in at least 26 states, three Canadian provinces, Norway, Sweden, and South Korea.
Rae Ellen Bichell, a reporter with the Mountain West News Bureau and KUNC, explored chronic wasting disease in a multipart series titled “ Bent Out Of Shape.” She joins Ira to talk about the disease, research into its origin and spread, and what’s known about the possible effects of human exposure to CWD.
Check out the full series.
This review article extends previous scientific definitions of the biofield (endogenous energy fields of the body) to include nonclassical and quantum energy fields. The biofield is defined further in terms of its functional property to act as a resonance target for external forms of energy used as treatment modalities in energy medicine. The functional role of the biofield in the body’s innate self-healing mechanisms is hypothesized, based on the concept of bioinformation which, mediated by consciousness, functions globally at the quantum level to supply coherence, phase, spin, and pattern information to regulate and heal all physiologic processes. This model is used to explain a wide variety of anomalies reported in the scientific literature, which can not be explained by traditional biophysics and bioelectromagnetics.
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An intriguing experimental result, known as “the phantom leaf effect,” if fully verified, may be an example of some or even all of these biofield processes. In these experiments, coronal discharge or the Kirlian photographic effect reveals a field effect in the morphological form of an intact living leaf even after part of the leaf is severed. This suggests an analogy to the subjective experience of a phantom limb reported by patients after the limb has been amputated. There might be a persisting biofield that represents the amputatedlimb. First described by Adamenko and reported by Tiller and by Ostrander and Schroeder, more recent validating experiments have been performed with detection methods of greater precision; these are summarized in Hubacher. In his most recent publication, Hubacher performed the experiment with highest definition photographic samples using the largest number of samples to date. Of 137 leaves severed and imaged, 96 (70%) demonstrated clear phantoms.
This article briefly reviews the biofield hypothesis and its scientific literature. Evidence for the existence of the biofield now exists, and current theoretical foundations are now being developed. A review of the biofield and related topics from the perspective of physical science is needed to identify a common body of knowledge and evaluate possible underlying principles of origin of the biofield. The properties of such a field could be based on electromagnetic fields, coherent states, biophotons, quantum and quantum-like processes, and ultimately the quantum vacuum. Given this evidence, we intend to inquire and discuss how the existence of the biofield challenges reductionist approaches and presents its own challenges regarding the origin and source of the biofield, the specific evidence for its existence, its relation to biology, and last but not least, how it may inform an integrated understanding of consciousness and the living universe.
Key Words: Biofield, quantum mechanics, physics.
Conventional biology is based on molecular processes—ie, biochemical interactions that ultimately reduce to macromolecules such as DNA and RNA. Even organismal biology, which concerns itself with addressing organisms as wholes, still relies on the reductionist approach of understanding the whole by analyzing how the parts fit together. These approaches, although very successful in specific scientific and medical applications, fail to address phenomena that by their nature are holistic—ie, they may need to be explained from a whole organism context, crossing boundaries of scale, and thereby including quantum and conventional fields, mind, and relationship to environment. It seems that biology, despite the great successes it has achieved and the multitude of applications in theory as well as in practice, has still not undergone the types of revolutions that shook physics over the last 100 years.
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Today, we want to point out a new publication that recently appeared in the Science Translational Medicine journal, as its authors have discovered a new mechanism by which the brain protects itself from the harmful α-synuclein protein aggregates associated with Parkinson’s and that may open the door to new therapies against these conditions.
To understand where these harmful protein aggregates come from, we should take a look at how proteins are created and what goes wrong during the process of proteostasis.
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This fantastic project will involve sharing visual images between two brains. It will read the vision of a sighted person and transfer the images this person sees into the brain of a blind person “telepathically” in less than 1/20th of a second.
A team of neuroengineers has begun working on a headset or a helmet that directly links the human brain to machines without the need for surgery. This headset and the technologies that power it will enable this telepathic visual sharing.
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