wow...

[Palmer Eldritch]

this latest TED video is simply amazing
you guys got to check it out


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[g0pher]

My sound cards all fucked up so I have no clue what she's saying - can anybody elaborate for me?

[Zylark]

Nice one. As are most TED talks

It's been known now for some time that religious experiences are the result from micro-seizures. Lastings seconds at most. Though much more serious, her experience was a very vivid tale of what can and do happen when parts of the brain effectively shuts down. Great stuff.

[Palmer Eldritch]

I wish I would have started with a title that was a little more compelling.

Gopher, here's the summary that the TED site gives, but you really got to listen to it from her.

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness -- of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Specifically, she talks about how the result of losing function in the left hemisphere of the brain can or will result in a feeling of total communion with the rest of reality. Because we cannot define ourselves, she said her vision came to her as a unified whole where no atom or pixel could be separated from each other. Her body awareness was as large as the room and remembers herself as a being of pure energy. She experienced a curious euphoria because of this and the combination of having no past or future.

She then pulls it all together with saying that we can choose these different states with practice. That if we wish to silence the chatter of the left brain, we can do so. This is, of course, not news but it does give that much more weight to the effectiveness of meditation to alter our brains in very tangible ways.

That is why I was so moved by this video, its a complete integration of science and spirituality where neither can really be disputed as not real. Because it is my thought that if spiritual states are only experienced by humans, whats the difference if its manifested externally or internally? It'd be all the same experience really. One can't judge the experience itself, but only the actions taken by the individual as a result from said experience.

[blazedandcrazed]

i wanna have a stroke now

fuck my left hemisphere

[Big_Steel]

imma show this to my grandmother and see if this how she felt when she had a stroke!! great vid man!

[Digit]

danka.

[Arnack]

Interesting... now I would ask if this enlightening experience is just somewhat of a placebo or a small seizure that made her think she was somewhere else.. or is this right sided of the brain the truth and the right way?

[Digit]

... your left brain just doesnt get it looking for the linear info bites to build the picture.

truth is better represented with more perspectives, effectively having at least two brains mashed into one head is what this is about. two modes of opperation running simeltaneously.

right brain picks it all up at once.

neither is inherently more of an absolute true way than the other.

one could even just as much argue that the third part of the brain, the motor control and survival basics stuff at the base is "the true way". heh. but thats still just as much a left brained reductionist disection which blinds folk from seeing the forrest by putting loads of trees in the way.




whole brained. thats the way to do it!