Cosmic Blog

Taking my daily bike ride across town, I see a family of ducks gliding peacefully across a river as I bike over the bridge.  It is around 11:00pm and getting dark, the streets are empty, I can see just the dark sillouettes of the ducks and a slight dark ripple on the water.  What a beautiful sight I think to myself as I imagine my being is that of one of the ducks and imagine life from that perspective.  Such a peaceful and beautiful moment in the ducks life, yet on the other hand, a daily struggle to find food and survive is inescapable.  Not very different from any life, including my own.  But for this moment at least, thanks to our interaction, I am in tune with the peacefullness of the ducks, and I am overwhelmed with an appreciation for life far beyond my ability to articulate.  It is impossible to express my full thankfullness for my being, my life, and for the life around me that I love so dearly to observe, interact with, experience, and to be a part of.  It is nice to give my brain a moment of relaxation and to strictly experience as I take a break from my relentless analytical processing trying to gain a greater understanding of the deepest nature and meaning of life, being, and the universe.  I have been criticized as being too analytical, that I need to take more time to just experience.  But I find that with every development of my understanding, with every revelation, the experience becomes more and more beautiful.  I cannot help it regardless, that is just the nature of my analytical “male brain”.  How great it is though to have a female influence to touch me with the “other side”, the female perspective.  That is one of the most beautiful aspects of life, the incompleteness of a single man, or a single woman, which is transcended into a “complete” experience with the union of male and female.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried have successfully created a “BrainChip”!  They have been able to connect a cultured hippocampus slice to a semi-conductor chip making direct connections between the hippocampus neural network and the chips transistors.  The electrical signals produced in the hippocampus travel onto the semi-conductor chip and can be read and examined.  I am assuming that using this same principal, one could send electrical signals from the chip into the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the region of the brain responsible for short-term storage of memory.  These scientists actually have been doing this kind of work now for the last 15 years and it is not the first time they have connected a neuron to a transistor, but Im assuming this is the largest scale to date. Check the slashdot article here.

Alright, I'm going to tell you something, but you must understand the context in which it is said.  This is an element of conversation that is extremely important to the exchange of ideas, but is something that we are not always consciously aware of.  That is, people sometimes forget that the way someone phrases a sentence is just as important as the actual words themselves, in terms of communicating an idea. The actual words in a sentence provide the framework or the "nuts & bolts" to the sentence, but there is a huge portion of a conversation that relies on the accentuations provided by the speaker that aid the message.  The body language of a speaker, and the voice inflections they use, all help the receiver better understand the speakers message.  This makes it easier for the listener in a conversation; they do not have to think about the sentence as much, in terms of trying to understand what the speaker meant by an ambiguous statement.  They are also consequently more certain, or sure of what the speakers message really was.  People generally prefer this type of communication.  *An example of this principle can be seen in the general behavior of people with chronic depression.  The "flat affect" that depressed individuals generally display is a major reason for the cyclical nature of their depression: as a defense mechanism to avoid being ridiculed and ostracized for a belief or opinion, depressed individuals generally attempt to minimize the expression of their own view-points and opinions.  They tend to use more general, ambiguous words when speaking, and will not show much, if any, facial expressions or voice inflections during a conversation.  This provides less information for others to use against them, but it also makes the listener have to think more carefully (spend more energy) about what was said in order to formulate some sort of interpretation of the message.  Therefore, most people do not enjoy conversing with depressed people as much as those who use facial expressions and inflections, and might even avoid interacting with certain individuals.  This will have the negative effect of reinforcing the depressed individual depressive beliefs, and the cyclical nature of depression continues. *Another example can be seen in how some people do not like to use the now common MSN Messenger, feeling it is too "mechanical" or impersonal.  It can be seen as analogous to conversing with a depressed individual, with flat affect.  All you get is the words; no voice inflections, or facial expressions.  Although the smiley faces/winks attempt to correct for this drawback, I'm not sure that it is entirely sufficient.