Sleights of Mind

[Max_Kolbe]

This is a very interesting book.

http://www.sleightsofmind.com/

In the book the authors point out that ouija boards don't work if the users are blind folded.

[Faith No More]

Looks very interesting.

[Angrboda]

I've got a set of Natgeo videos on mind stuff. One of the neat things shown was where a neuroscientist was doing experiments with the Stroop test. The Stroop test involves showing images of colored words and asking the subject to name the color. If the word is the name of the color in the image, the response is fairly quick. However, if the word is the name of a different color than used in the word in the image (e.g. the word 'blue' spelled in green letters), then performance slows considerably. The theory is that the part of the brain responsible for attending to the meaning of words ends up competing with the part trying to attend to the visual color, and the arbitration takes time. The neuroscientist hypnotized subjects and implanted the suggestion that the words they would be seeing were in a language they weren't familiar with, say Chinese. Under the hypnotic suggestion, even though they were presented with the second set of stimuli in which the name and color do not match, their response times resembled those in the first condition. Apparently the hypnotic suggestion resulted in suppressing activation of the second attentional center, thus preventing its destructive interference in resolving the nature of the target.

The video suggested that meditation might be a method for teaching us to gain conscious control of which parts of our brain are actively attending to stimuli. I don't know where that might lead, but it's prompting me to consider giving some more time and thought to the physiology and such of meditational states.