Written by Lee Schneider
Bruce Lipton was telling me about Newtonian and quantum worldviews. Yeah, you can stop reading now. You have better things to do than know why self-help books won’t always help you or the real reason you think you need glasses. You can keep thinking of yourself as a victim of your hereditary fate and go get coffee. Really. See you here next week, but then you won’t know what the behavior of iron filings in a magnetic field has to do with anybody getting cancer.
Dr. Lipton is a biologist who got into quantum mechanics. That kind of thing is sometimes seen as a sign of instability, but I assure you that Dr. Lipton is quite lucid. Start with his take on Isaac Newton, who described gravity and the rules we use to understand the physical world. Newtonian thought holds that the material world is essentially everything there is. Nothing else matters. Now think about Charles Darwin and “survival of the fittest.” In Dr. Lipton’s view, put those two dominant thinkers together and we get a world where only physical stuff matters, and survival of the fittest means becoming the person who controls most of the physical world. But wait – life is also about the unseen, energy like electromagnetism and mental energy. “While you see and respond to the physical world, it’s the invisible world that is actually the shaper,” Dr. Lipton says. This is the quantum world.
Look at what happens when people read self-help books but never change. The reason, says Dr. Lipton, is because of the function of the conscious vs. the subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is associated with the authentic self and the spirit. The subconscious mind is about habituation. “You learn something and then it’s a habit so you don’t need to relearn it,” Dr. Lipton says. The conscious mind can read the book, take a test on the contents, and pass. But unless you change the habits of the subconscious mind, knowing the contents of the book won’t create change.
Scientists believe the habit-mind is running our everyday life, and according to Dr. Lipton, it is also determining our genetics. At Stanford University School of Medicine his research revealed how environment controlled the behavior and physiology of a cell, changing its genetic structure. That’s the reverse of the established view, which holds that our genetics are “locked” and unchanging. Put it another way, your dad wore glasses, your mom wore glasses, you will wear glasses. Genetics, right? Well, Dr. Lipton says genetics aren’t “fate” – they occur because your cells got the information that that’s the way life is: Everybody in our family wears glasses. If your cells received different information there’d be a different result.
This is getting kind of deep, so here’s a picture of how you can use a cat to prop up your iPad. 
Dr. Lipton wants us to know that we are not victims of our “hereditary fate” but can actually make lasting changes to cellular structure. That’s how our health is shaped by invisible forces.
Remember the high school experiment when you sprinkled iron filings on a piece of paper and put a magnet under the paper? Is the pattern you saw in the filings themselves or in the invisible magnetic field? What’s happening is a physical structure is reflecting an invisible force.
In pharmaceutical medicine, if cells get cancer we try to change their chemistry. But in Dr. Lipton’s view, optimum health means changing your belief system, not just adding chemicals to the body. Your cells, like iron filings, make physical changes when acted upon by unseen forces. Those forces can include environmental toxins, heredity, and consciousness. It means that the science of the physical world doesn’t tell the whole story. You have to consider the quantum world, where the universe starts looking less like a great machine and more like a great thought.
Dr. Lipton will be speaking at the Hay House “I Can Do it” Conference, which begins in San Diego on May 14th and goes on to other cities.
iPad photo courtesy Veronica Belmont via Creative Commons license.
Creative Commons license courtesy of Robbert van der Steeg
We humans are learning that our pets are pretty smart creatures. Not only have they managed to negotiate free room and board for life, they also help people heal and have learned how to communicate with us using our own language.
There’s a border collie who, according to one researcher, can recognize 1500 English words. Research has shown that even reasonably bright poodles, retrievers, Labradors and shepherds can learn as many as 250 words, signs and signals. (“Muffin, would you bring me the Arts section of the Sunday Times?”)
How many of you have been out for a drive with your pet and noticed that Miss Kitty Cat or Mister Woofie might know when you are getting close to home? There are rational explanations for this, some offered by biologist Rupert Sheldrake. In order for your pet to perk up when your drive is ending the animal is likely recognizing patterns of behavior, sensory stimuli, and other less-obvious cues.
What’s most interesting about all this are those less-obvious cues. A research group following the same path as Dr. Sheldrake has made a video showing how pets seem to know when you are about to walk in the door – even if you come at random times of the day. We’ve all seen this occur and maybe wondered about it. Turns out it happens more than 80 percent of the time. Rover just seems to know when you return.
Can animals be tapping into some kind of deep consciousness? There’s some evidence for that.
Helper animals, usually dogs, can be trained to offer comfort to hospitalized humans. These animals can also function as an early warning system for humans who suffer from seizures. The New York Times recently reported that dogs are able to anticipate a human seizure, panic attack or even variations in blood sugar levels. The animals can be trained to alert their owner to what’s happening by starting intently or dropping a toy in her lap. If the human has a seizure, a helper dog can be taught to position himself to cushion a fall.
Nobody knows why a dog might be able to anticipate a human’s emergency before it happens, but those abilities are being taken seriously – by the military. The Times says that the US Army is spending $300,000 to study how psychiatric service dogs might be paired with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army wants to know if dogs placed with veterans could help them cope with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Studies have also established that people who own pets live longer. If you want to look at research that is farther out on the edge, know that the metro government of Tokyo has sponsored research to find out if catfish might be able to warn us of earthquakes. Seems that the fish might sense electromagnetic activity and start swimming strangely before the tremors start.
I don’t think we’ll see a Labradoodle performing surgery anytime soon, but there is ample evidence that our pets have skills far beyond the talent needed to beg for table scraps.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
What’s the best way to choose a mate? Here’s some good advice.
“Look over a sample of males and go for the one with the longest tail.”
Actually, that advice works really well for birds. Not so well for people. Scientists speculate that female birds might have had a preference for longer tailed males because those males could fly better. Long-tailed males then got a better deal. They were perceived as more attractive, therefore more able to find a mate and reproduce; therefore there were more of them around. It’s called a runaway process, as described eloquently by Gerd Gigerenzer in his book Gut Feelings. He points out that in decision-making one good reason can be enough. (“Does this milk smell bad?”)
What’s the best way to make a career choice?
Counting summer and college jobs, I have worked as a chef, a professional stapler in a pamphlet factory, a veterinarian’s assistant, a boat scraper, a mental hospital attendant, a newspaper reporter, a news producer and currently, a film director and blog writer.
How did I make those choices? Uh, it’s complicated. Important decisions are made not logically but from the gut.
by lightmatter, via Flickr
When you “decide” on a particular career path or to take a job, you often are following a series of chance events. (“I went to high school with this guy, and then he knew this guy, and then we met this guy at Burning Man and that guy hired me.”) In a study of 772 college and university students, nearly 70 percent reported that chance events influenced their career decisions. What we call “luck” is a big factor in how life and work unfold.
But what is luck, really? It breaks down to the ability to see opportunities when others don’t. Colleen Seifert, a psych professor at the University of Michigan, calls this predictive encoding. You imagine scenarios where intentions and desires might be fulfilled and in so doing encode your mind to recognize the opportunity when it comes up.
When opportunity knocks, you’re listening. You program yourself to receive the good stuff, and sure enough you do.
That means that you can grab on to the power of serendipity to make things go your way.
Changing your usual patterns also leads to opportunity. Richard Wiseman, a researcher who studies the psychology of chance, has shown that even taking a different way to work can change your perceptions and widen your horizons. This, I think, is what makes somebody like Keith Ferrazzi, author of “Never Eat Alone,” an effective networker. By becoming a professional extrovert and talking up everyone you meet, you see opportunity everywhere. Opportunity therefore is created.
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
-Seneca, Roman philosopher
Some folks are trying to take the idea of a “hunch” and make it into a science – check out the addictive decision-making website hunch.com.
I still like to believe that I got my first job because I knew a guy who knew a guy who talked about the place with the thing and his sister, who was hot, recommended me.
But it would seem that luck is no accident and career paths are not random.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
I’m in New York City spending time in hospital rooms. I have learned two things so far. It’s an outrage that there’s no 72nd Street stop on the Lex Ave line. The closest is 69 Street, which is more of a vague sexual joke than a useful location. The other thing I’ve learned is about the incredible lightness of being.
I wasn’t in the room when it happened, but I have it on good authority that you can stop a man’s heart, cut out a malfunctioning aortic valve, pop in a new one, bypass years of accumulated disease and then start up the system like a reliable old car. And I know for certain – I was in the room – that a man might lie in a twilight state among machines, seeming like a machine himself. But no, not like a machine: There was a glimmer of consciousness. It was a paradox to be witnessed with awe, this man-machine breathing slowly, leaking consciousness.
Funny thing, when people hold heavy objects they think they are more important than lighter ones. A big book, say a Bible, seems more important than the slim volume of famous left-handed athletes. The idea resounds in the languages we speak. You have your heavy issues and light entertainment. There’s research on this:
A research team found that they could alter people’s judgment of importance just by getting them to answer questions using a heavier clipboard. In a series of short elegant experiments, a research team led by psychologist Nils Jostmann found that people holding a heavy clipboard would, for example, value foreign currencies more highly than those using a lighter clipboard.
That’s good science, because the experiment was simple and the measurement clear. Science works because it measures things and assigns values. Sounds good, till you look at a guy in a hospital bed and ask what weight do you assign to consciousness? What weight do you put to love? As Lotta Alsen has written in her blog, everybody knows that love is good, but what measure can we assign it to prove that it exists? Do you look at the number of Valentine’s Day cards sent? Quarts of chicken soup consumed? Love exists, but there is no measure for it.
In the hospital room the next day the human machine does something amazing. It wakes up. It starts talking. It wants things. “I want you to call Milton.” “Get me some water.”
Miracle? No. This was the work of a heroic guy in green surgical scrubs going seven hours straight in order to take a man apart and then reassemble him. That’s great training and expertise and amazing science. But still, there was something else. The human machine has consciousness. There is a soul, and spirit, stuff for which no measurement exists and therefore no science.
What happened in the hospital has affirmed my trust in scientific work, rattled my position as person who takes nothing on faith, and made me wonder if science, in order to fully understand the world, will need to stretch outside itself.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
The robots might have taken over already. There’s enough artificial intelligence out there to write this blog without human intervention. Computers can already beat chess masters by brute computational force. And look! Google Translate can change this into Norwegian: Google oversetter kan oversette denne bloggen. Vel, I kan probably måken thaten up mysefen withouten any programvare. But anyway …
For a ReelzChannel segment we did recently, we interviewed Dan Burrus, the author of Technotrends. He made this somewhat scary point about texting: When we text on our phones we have adopted a machine language, behaving more like tippy-tappy automatons than talky, expressive people. Maybe, click by click, we’re edging closer to world robotic domination. But maybe not. Machines need us to type because they’re still too dumb to understand us when we talk – try saying “radio on” to the voice-actuated thingie in your car and it will likely respond “ejector seat ready – prepare to exit.”
Voice recognition glitches aside, robots are trying to do more than ever. Dr. Monika Hagen thinks robots should be able to heal us. She’s been researching robotic surgery at the University of California, San Diego.
“The field is exploding. More and more robots are being sold and more and more procedures are being performed with these robots.” — Dr. Monika Hagen.
Dr. Hagen is developing procedures like minimally invasive abdominal surgery. You move controllers that look suspiciously like a video game and the robot makes the cuts. Don’t try this at home – you do need training.
If you want to worry about something, try this: Robots are already learning how to build themselves. How long before they build very sophisticated versions of themselves – enough to become self aware? When a computer becomes aware of itself you could say it achieves consciousness. After that happens, what’s the only difference between you and your laptop? A soul. When machines become self aware it will likely push us toward forging a new definition of the soul and a new quest for scientific proof that it exists uniquely in humans.
Remember the movie “21 Grams?” The title comes from the belief that the body loses 21 grams as the soul leaves the body. The number comes from research conducted in 1907 by Dr. Duncan MacDougall. He made a special bed built upon scales. He placed patients who were dying on it and measured what happened when they expired. Unfortunately, his results were wildly inconsistent – only one of his six test subjects lost 21 grams at death. But people want to believe in the soul – so much so that they want to believe it has an actual, measurable weight. It’s not very scientific, but it is poetic and intensely human. It will be a long time before any machine comes up with a belief system like that.
Or as we say in Norwegian, Det vil være en lang tid før maskinen kommer opp med en tro systemet sånn. (Thanks, Google Translator.)
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