The human being is designed from millions of years of natural selection to be function as an interpersonal animal. Two news stories caught my eye this week and point out the biological foundations of our spiritual and technological advancement. One is the news that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's policy change for employees to be at work with each other, and the other is from Sheila M. Eldred's blog regarding love and the paranormal (http://news.discovery.com/human/life/love-telepathy-is-it-real-120212.htm).
Now you find yourself as an average person and you have probably experienced some ESP type of event, maybe deja vu, some synchronicity, seen a ghost, had a precognitive dream, the list could go on of events that mainstream science dismisses as some illusion or imagination. And more than likely, these strange occurrences involved people close to you, a good friend, a family member. They involved a relationship, someone important in your life.
Many people debating Marissa Mayer's decision to change the Yahoo policy point out how valuable interpersonal interaction is to successful enterprises. We have to agree that its a fact that human beings are interpersonal animals. There is no human being alone, we evolved and currently flourish in a world that requires one-on-relationships, its a one-on-one universe we live in. Our economy, our society exist because our subconscious minds are working on relationships. The very definition of human, of economy, of society, is about relationships. How you think, what you think about, how you measure yourself and your world, is done amidst an environment that requires relationships. So your brain and your mind are designed for relationships, for one-in-one co-creation of civilization and your survival with it. The human mind has evolved in the environment of relationships.
So of course we can expect actual interaction to help creativity, work dynamics, and initiative. All the cues, all the environmental variables that humans have adapted to, are put into action in the interpersonal event. Even in our high tech, information age, most of the talk is about social media. We reach out and try to find new tools to improve our surviving and thriving, but we still have to work with the full set of shared, human traits that brought us here, which is the face-to-face relationship.
Access to PSI information is an evolved trait in animals, just as are the interpersonal social structures in the human subconscious. Your mind is constantly searching for and utilizing subliminal information, some of which are PSI obtained. Normally, your unconscious is picking up on sensory cues and sending out information unconsciously that benefit from and contribute to the interpersonal environment, and some of that information is PSI info.
And of course we would expect love and romance and friendship to receive the bulk of PSI help, they are the primary interpersonal relationship that natural selection has to work with. So if the human, interpersonal environment has evolved in humans, then we would expect PSI information would first show up to improve and involve those most instrumental to our survival. The literature is chocked full of examples of the importance of relationships in PSI events. The experimenter effect, sheep/goats effect, the decline of success in PSI testing, and many other phenomenon show the importance of the interpersonal in PSI events. Even Dr. Bem's recent studies that found that sexual content of the targets had a strong effect on successful PSI make this clear. This is just what you'd expect to see if PSI perception is about relationships, as sexual interaction is quite interpersonal and often factors strongly in the process of natural selection.
Both news stories bring us back to the recognition that we are not just social animals, but interpersonal, relationship animals, and that is how our minds work. Whether we are running a successful organization, or working to scientifically understand the functioning of the unconscious mind processes that allow our human lives to exist, we are doing it with the strongly evolved traits of a human, relationship based creature.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Friday, February 1, 2013
Function and processing of ESP data in the brain
In an earlier blog I discussed the importance of carefully discerning the elements of "parapsychological" events so they can more clearly be understood and studied. I have recently been using evolutionary psychology to take a new (for me anyway) perspective on parapsychological events, and it has been helpful in teasing out aspects of certain phenomena that could be accounted for as brain mechanics, so that the anomalous cognition parts can be more clearly described. I do not see this new viewpoint as clearing up the mystery, nor is it necessarily superior to other perspectives, but to the extent Charles Darwin has some contribution to make to science, I think it can find some place in the study of parapsychology.
One of the many wonderful things about evolutionary parapsychology is that you are bound by the rules inherent in natural selection. That means I cannot make up brain processes that make perfect sense and would work great, but aren't part of the available range of variables present in the current structure. For example, wheels are great mechanical devices for locomotion but you just don't see any animals with them. This is why we can run into such trouble when trying to develop a model for understanding PSI processes. Like in other areas of reasoning, we are helped when we create a model that has some explaining power for our present mystery. Parapsychology has tried to explain what is going on by saying it is like radio, or electromagnetism, or atomic rays, or quantum mechanics, and today we encouraged that we will soon discover that the brain is like a computer. This comparison bothers people, and should to the extent the model overtakes the facts. A computer is not a mind and a mind is not a computer.
But... (and you knew there was going to be a "but") when it comes to information processing, in that regard both computers and minds are constrained by the rules of natural selection. The act of "recognizing a thing" requires a process that is trying to achieve the same thing in the same environment, so you can expect convergent evolution with the animal brain and the computer brain. This is wonderfully explored in the book I am currently reading, "How to Create a Mind" by Ray Kurzweil. In this book he is describing how AI in machines and the human brain can be better understood by noting how they both go about their functions. This book is talking about how information is processed, and along with Dr. Carpenter's recent book "First Sight" and an older book by Dr. Christine Hardy "Networks of Meaning", you start to get a pretty solid picture of how PSI data is processed.
Stir into that mix the ideas presented in earlier blogs here, that natural selection demands PSI not be consciously controlled, then you can start to see that the PSI dampening structures are probably built into the neural networks, and evolved by necessity as perception and memory was evolving in animals, long before homo sapiens came along. The brain is processing PSI data, as Dr. Carpenter's book describes, though unconsciously. It is probably the case that PSI data is processed at the level that basic sensory input would be, but the input is by design shut off as soon as that data is moved to the next level of perceptual and functional processing (as Kurzweil describes so well). We see this phenomenon in Remote Viewing, where the act of "naming" or "recognizing" breaks the flow of PSI data. The basic sensory level of the data provided by PSI is well described by the telepathy drawing experiments done by Ingo Swann, Mary Craig Sinclair and Rene Warcollier. It looks like PSI is feeding data into the perceptual process but at a level not accessible directly by consciousness.
Again, the laws of natural selection require that the PSI data, or any sensory data, is not too successful, it is only to give a slight advantage to the organism in the current environmental situation. If the natural neural process is to shut off PSI data once a slight survival advantage is given, what would happen the little bit of PSI data does NOT fix the problem? Along with PSI, the human mind has lots of processes to keep us safe. These include memory, sensory data, reflexes, social mores, emotional attachments and others. We are complex. All those things work together, and evolved in our species, to keep us alive and reproduce our DNA. We know in other processes, that when one survival mechanism breaks down, others usually on the back burner are by necessity pushed to the fore. So we would expect to see PSI phenomenon such as poltergeist activity in households where the social and interpersonal processes that are supposed create security are not working. Likewise we see more PSI in folks who had rough family situations as kids, and we see more reports of PSI events in individuals who have dissociative episodes, again, the normal processes are not working, so PSI data keeps coming until the required result is reached. And in cases where DNA survival seems unlikely, brain processes would throw out all the stops and PSI data would likewise be unchained, and this is what you see in a near death experience so well cataloged in the literature.
Again, trends in parapsychology research are toward unconscious behaviors, and this makes sense when seen through the eyes of evolutionary parapsychology. I am looking forward to seeing how research results reflect on the natural processes of which PSI data access is an evolved part. I am finding as I read book after book on current research on the mind and other biological processes, how PSI events fit right in.
The content of these blog entries I have been posting is not necessarily the view of the RRC, but instead that of a humble board member. I am emphasizing the the important and impressive work done by the Rhine Research Center scientists and staff by noting where it fits into more widely publicized and less "controversial" science going on out there (as described by Kurzweil) or foundational as in the case of Darwin's ideas. The website www.rhinecenter.org is chocked full of great information on the research they are doing, and I hope these few blog entries show how the phenomena studied by parapsychology are an integrated part of our evolving understanding of the human experience.
-Benton R. Bogle
2/1/13
One of the many wonderful things about evolutionary parapsychology is that you are bound by the rules inherent in natural selection. That means I cannot make up brain processes that make perfect sense and would work great, but aren't part of the available range of variables present in the current structure. For example, wheels are great mechanical devices for locomotion but you just don't see any animals with them. This is why we can run into such trouble when trying to develop a model for understanding PSI processes. Like in other areas of reasoning, we are helped when we create a model that has some explaining power for our present mystery. Parapsychology has tried to explain what is going on by saying it is like radio, or electromagnetism, or atomic rays, or quantum mechanics, and today we encouraged that we will soon discover that the brain is like a computer. This comparison bothers people, and should to the extent the model overtakes the facts. A computer is not a mind and a mind is not a computer.
But... (and you knew there was going to be a "but") when it comes to information processing, in that regard both computers and minds are constrained by the rules of natural selection. The act of "recognizing a thing" requires a process that is trying to achieve the same thing in the same environment, so you can expect convergent evolution with the animal brain and the computer brain. This is wonderfully explored in the book I am currently reading, "How to Create a Mind" by Ray Kurzweil. In this book he is describing how AI in machines and the human brain can be better understood by noting how they both go about their functions. This book is talking about how information is processed, and along with Dr. Carpenter's recent book "First Sight" and an older book by Dr. Christine Hardy "Networks of Meaning", you start to get a pretty solid picture of how PSI data is processed.
Stir into that mix the ideas presented in earlier blogs here, that natural selection demands PSI not be consciously controlled, then you can start to see that the PSI dampening structures are probably built into the neural networks, and evolved by necessity as perception and memory was evolving in animals, long before homo sapiens came along. The brain is processing PSI data, as Dr. Carpenter's book describes, though unconsciously. It is probably the case that PSI data is processed at the level that basic sensory input would be, but the input is by design shut off as soon as that data is moved to the next level of perceptual and functional processing (as Kurzweil describes so well). We see this phenomenon in Remote Viewing, where the act of "naming" or "recognizing" breaks the flow of PSI data. The basic sensory level of the data provided by PSI is well described by the telepathy drawing experiments done by Ingo Swann, Mary Craig Sinclair and Rene Warcollier. It looks like PSI is feeding data into the perceptual process but at a level not accessible directly by consciousness.
Again, the laws of natural selection require that the PSI data, or any sensory data, is not too successful, it is only to give a slight advantage to the organism in the current environmental situation. If the natural neural process is to shut off PSI data once a slight survival advantage is given, what would happen the little bit of PSI data does NOT fix the problem? Along with PSI, the human mind has lots of processes to keep us safe. These include memory, sensory data, reflexes, social mores, emotional attachments and others. We are complex. All those things work together, and evolved in our species, to keep us alive and reproduce our DNA. We know in other processes, that when one survival mechanism breaks down, others usually on the back burner are by necessity pushed to the fore. So we would expect to see PSI phenomenon such as poltergeist activity in households where the social and interpersonal processes that are supposed create security are not working. Likewise we see more PSI in folks who had rough family situations as kids, and we see more reports of PSI events in individuals who have dissociative episodes, again, the normal processes are not working, so PSI data keeps coming until the required result is reached. And in cases where DNA survival seems unlikely, brain processes would throw out all the stops and PSI data would likewise be unchained, and this is what you see in a near death experience so well cataloged in the literature.
Again, trends in parapsychology research are toward unconscious behaviors, and this makes sense when seen through the eyes of evolutionary parapsychology. I am looking forward to seeing how research results reflect on the natural processes of which PSI data access is an evolved part. I am finding as I read book after book on current research on the mind and other biological processes, how PSI events fit right in.
The content of these blog entries I have been posting is not necessarily the view of the RRC, but instead that of a humble board member. I am emphasizing the the important and impressive work done by the Rhine Research Center scientists and staff by noting where it fits into more widely publicized and less "controversial" science going on out there (as described by Kurzweil) or foundational as in the case of Darwin's ideas. The website www.rhinecenter.org is chocked full of great information on the research they are doing, and I hope these few blog entries show how the phenomena studied by parapsychology are an integrated part of our evolving understanding of the human experience.
-Benton R. Bogle
2/1/13
Thursday, December 20, 2012
PSI events and evolutionary psychology
In an earlier blog I asked the reader to consider the idea that we can better understand the PSI event by putting it in the context of natural selection. I am not dismissing the research on PSI that looks at the phenomenon as it relates to question of physics, pharmacology, religion or psychology. Those disciplines bring to the study their individual tool bags of studied and documented structures and processes that can be applied to similar traits found in parapsychological events. My point is that biological processes can also shine some new light on examples of PK, telepathy or precognition. It would be very enlightening to thoughtfully apply an evolutionary psychology perspective to anomalous cognition events.
I believe anomalous cognition occurs, that ESP is happening. I am not here to debunk or explain away parapsychological phenomenon. I do want to understand it better, and examining some of the strange events with the light of biological processes can be very helpful. For example, when the mind disassociates, and local sensory and memory data is not longer getting the job done, PSI data becomes much more valuable and will be perceived. Other mental processes also occur, these are evolved adaptations that occur along side the increased perception of PSI data, and because they are both unusual, and are occurring at the same time, they are commonly thought of as one thing. Experientially, because the weird event has no other associations (that's why we say its weird) then in the mind all the stuff happening gets lumped together. Unfortunately, when I go to examine the processes involved in the PSI perception it gets all mixed together with the dissociation processes of the brain, and that is a problem. I want to see the PSI process more clearly, and to do that, I need to see the basic biological, natural selection processes of the human mind more clearly.
My overall goal is answer the big questions, but I am happy if I simply get some discussion going regarding what Natural Selection can tell us about how PSI works. I am not a trained biologist so I am happy to hear from anyone if my ideas about Natural Selection are wrong. The statements I make about biological processes are very simple and basic biology 101 stuff, not controversial. The basic rules of Natural selection are simple. The process of natural selection needs 1) Gene heritability, 2) Reproduction that passes on genes, and 3) Gene variability.
Your experiences are mediated by your physical parts, and those physical parts with their sensory structures got here via natural selection. It is known that there are psychological processes that you are born with, that are built into your DNA such as the ability to use language or walking. One such evolved trait in humans is a mental world where you create a virtual simulation of life. This allows you to make plans, to remember events, to solve problems and practice real-world activities in a virtual setting. The process of natural selection also takes place in this virtual world. The mind is constantly taking in new pieces of information and testing them against problems that you can expect to encounter. This seems to be the primary evolved function of dreaming. Because we have these adapted structures, just like our physical adaptations, our mental adaptations also have a structure in place through learning. Your mental landscape is not a tabula rasa when you enter it every time, there are default frameworks in place to work with, just as your hands and fingers are there when you wake up each day.
Another built in brain trait is self-identification. For obvious survival reasons, its useful to be able to identify what in your sensory environment is you and what is not you. The brain is constantly filtering for this. It mainly uses local incoming sensory data and compares it with stored identity info. This is why you often hear people describe how sensory deprivation or drug induced brain changes also make them feel "expanded" or disassociated from their normal identification of self. Strong self-identity is correlated to environmental stability.
As humans have evolved a social environment along with their material one, many brain adaptations have developed along with it. We seem to have built in mental processes for identifying other entities, such as our specialized brain functions for perceiving faces. We have evolved a reflex to anthropomorphize, just like we evolved a reflex to self identify, its a built-in, default setting for our mind. Its easy to see how adapting strong social skills would benefit an organism's reproductive potential. Again, it makes sense that a basic perceptual structure exists in our minds, in our brains, to allow us to quickly identify a set of environmental stimuli as a person, and work from there. As much as I dislike the use of the simplified model "human brain is like a computer", it does make sense that using basic frameworks, as is done in computer virtualization software, would make sense for mind processing as well. It's a good example of convergent evolution.
These are just two mental processes that shed some light on some parapsychological phenomena. There seems to be default experiential frameworks the mind uses to form experience, and they are in basic framework shared as humans, just as our environment that shapes them is shared, but are individualized by individual experience. Jung's archetypes can be seen as evolved conceptual structures. The "others" that Jacques Vallee discusses in his book Dimensions are probably basic mind frameworks, default settings for "other" that the normal waking mind use as a basic framework of perception. This basic framework has evolved along with people's social environment. As the range variety of what makes up "other entity" has expanded, the default setting in the brain has had to regress to include the new variety. When some disassociating event occurs, when things can't "make sense", the mind defaults back to the most basic framework, and people see little gray people, or floating bodies, or religious icons. Now these default perceptual entities may start providing PSI information, just like people in my dreams tell me how to fly, the default mental environment will take information and try it out. Sometimes the information available to be worked into dreams or dissociated states is PSI information.
It is logical to assume that solutions to problems are more likely to be found if a basic framework is presented to consciousness, instead of no experience of anything. We can say dreamers do better than non-dreamers just like we understand memory priming improves performance, so we would expect human minds with a basic virtual landscape to survive better than those without. Priming exists. Dreams exist.
So by examining paranormal phenomenon within the constraints of biology/natural selection we can perhaps more clearly discern what is happening in some disassociative events. My point here is that the experience of entities, such as aliens or ghosts or saints, can be separated from anomalous cognition for study. And if you add in, from my previous blog, the requirement that PSI be capricious and unavailable for intentional use, then it may be true that PSI events are biologically programmed to be connected with associative events to make sure they stay out of reach of conscious application. If that is the case, we would do well to look for PSI correlations in behaviors that are not consciously controlled such as autonomic events. Fortunately, that is exactly the direction much of parapsychological research is going.
I believe anomalous cognition occurs, that ESP is happening. I am not here to debunk or explain away parapsychological phenomenon. I do want to understand it better, and examining some of the strange events with the light of biological processes can be very helpful. For example, when the mind disassociates, and local sensory and memory data is not longer getting the job done, PSI data becomes much more valuable and will be perceived. Other mental processes also occur, these are evolved adaptations that occur along side the increased perception of PSI data, and because they are both unusual, and are occurring at the same time, they are commonly thought of as one thing. Experientially, because the weird event has no other associations (that's why we say its weird) then in the mind all the stuff happening gets lumped together. Unfortunately, when I go to examine the processes involved in the PSI perception it gets all mixed together with the dissociation processes of the brain, and that is a problem. I want to see the PSI process more clearly, and to do that, I need to see the basic biological, natural selection processes of the human mind more clearly.
My overall goal is answer the big questions, but I am happy if I simply get some discussion going regarding what Natural Selection can tell us about how PSI works. I am not a trained biologist so I am happy to hear from anyone if my ideas about Natural Selection are wrong. The statements I make about biological processes are very simple and basic biology 101 stuff, not controversial. The basic rules of Natural selection are simple. The process of natural selection needs 1) Gene heritability, 2) Reproduction that passes on genes, and 3) Gene variability.
Your experiences are mediated by your physical parts, and those physical parts with their sensory structures got here via natural selection. It is known that there are psychological processes that you are born with, that are built into your DNA such as the ability to use language or walking. One such evolved trait in humans is a mental world where you create a virtual simulation of life. This allows you to make plans, to remember events, to solve problems and practice real-world activities in a virtual setting. The process of natural selection also takes place in this virtual world. The mind is constantly taking in new pieces of information and testing them against problems that you can expect to encounter. This seems to be the primary evolved function of dreaming. Because we have these adapted structures, just like our physical adaptations, our mental adaptations also have a structure in place through learning. Your mental landscape is not a tabula rasa when you enter it every time, there are default frameworks in place to work with, just as your hands and fingers are there when you wake up each day.
Another built in brain trait is self-identification. For obvious survival reasons, its useful to be able to identify what in your sensory environment is you and what is not you. The brain is constantly filtering for this. It mainly uses local incoming sensory data and compares it with stored identity info. This is why you often hear people describe how sensory deprivation or drug induced brain changes also make them feel "expanded" or disassociated from their normal identification of self. Strong self-identity is correlated to environmental stability.
As humans have evolved a social environment along with their material one, many brain adaptations have developed along with it. We seem to have built in mental processes for identifying other entities, such as our specialized brain functions for perceiving faces. We have evolved a reflex to anthropomorphize, just like we evolved a reflex to self identify, its a built-in, default setting for our mind. Its easy to see how adapting strong social skills would benefit an organism's reproductive potential. Again, it makes sense that a basic perceptual structure exists in our minds, in our brains, to allow us to quickly identify a set of environmental stimuli as a person, and work from there. As much as I dislike the use of the simplified model "human brain is like a computer", it does make sense that using basic frameworks, as is done in computer virtualization software, would make sense for mind processing as well. It's a good example of convergent evolution.
These are just two mental processes that shed some light on some parapsychological phenomena. There seems to be default experiential frameworks the mind uses to form experience, and they are in basic framework shared as humans, just as our environment that shapes them is shared, but are individualized by individual experience. Jung's archetypes can be seen as evolved conceptual structures. The "others" that Jacques Vallee discusses in his book Dimensions are probably basic mind frameworks, default settings for "other" that the normal waking mind use as a basic framework of perception. This basic framework has evolved along with people's social environment. As the range variety of what makes up "other entity" has expanded, the default setting in the brain has had to regress to include the new variety. When some disassociating event occurs, when things can't "make sense", the mind defaults back to the most basic framework, and people see little gray people, or floating bodies, or religious icons. Now these default perceptual entities may start providing PSI information, just like people in my dreams tell me how to fly, the default mental environment will take information and try it out. Sometimes the information available to be worked into dreams or dissociated states is PSI information.
It is logical to assume that solutions to problems are more likely to be found if a basic framework is presented to consciousness, instead of no experience of anything. We can say dreamers do better than non-dreamers just like we understand memory priming improves performance, so we would expect human minds with a basic virtual landscape to survive better than those without. Priming exists. Dreams exist.
So by examining paranormal phenomenon within the constraints of biology/natural selection we can perhaps more clearly discern what is happening in some disassociative events. My point here is that the experience of entities, such as aliens or ghosts or saints, can be separated from anomalous cognition for study. And if you add in, from my previous blog, the requirement that PSI be capricious and unavailable for intentional use, then it may be true that PSI events are biologically programmed to be connected with associative events to make sure they stay out of reach of conscious application. If that is the case, we would do well to look for PSI correlations in behaviors that are not consciously controlled such as autonomic events. Fortunately, that is exactly the direction much of parapsychological research is going.
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