The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (Null)
by Norman Doidge
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Book Summary Information
Author: Norman DoidgeBrand: PBS
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-12-18
ISBN: 0143113100
Number of pages: 427
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780143113102
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (Null)
Book Review: "The Brain ..." is one small step that will help us discover that the human potential is almost unimaginably fantastic
Summary: 5 Stars
Your book "The Brain That Changes Itself" really fascinated me. I was rather surprised that you never mentioned David Bohm or holographic ideas about the brain. These ideas do at first sound as though they're divorced from reality, but maybe they're only divorced from our extremely limited understanding of reality. I had absolutely no interest in holographic ideas of the brain and universe until 10 or more years ago. Now I believe they could play a role in revealing many of the universe's mysteries, and help us discover that the human potential is almost unimaginably fantastic. Below is a brief summary (which has been described as "nonsense" - to be honest, that hurts but I can imagine myself calling it nonsense when I was younger - now I totally believe in this summary and cannot stop promoting it).
To convince myself I'm not crazy, I spent years (decades, actually) preparing for this summary by writing a detailed essay showing how those paragraphs are consistent with the plausible nature of the universe and are therefore not science fiction. Topics include Einstein, computers, holograms, unification, brains, Darwin, God, ESP, and life.
Summary
In July 2009, electrical engineer Hong Tang and his team at Yale University in the USA demonstrated that, on silicon chip- and transistor- scales, light can attract and repel itself like electric charges/magnets (this is the "optical force", a phenomenon that theorists first predicted in 2005 {I find this "time delay" rather confusing since James Clerk Maxwell showed that light is an electromagnetic disturbance approx. 140 years ago}). In the event of the universe having an underlying electronic foundation, it would be composed of "silicon chip- and transistor- scales" and the Optical Force would not be restricted to microscopic scales but could operate universally. Tang proposes that the optical force could be exploited in telecommunications. For example, switches based on the optical force could be used to speed up the routing of light signals in fibre-optic cables, and optical oscillators could improve cell phone signal processing.
If all forms of EM (electromagnetic) radiation can attract/repel, radio waves will also cause communication revolution e.g. with the Internet and mobile (cell) phones. I anticipate that there may be no more overexposure to ultraviolet or X-rays.
In agreement with the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics, EM waves have particle-like properties (more noticeable at high frequencies) so cosmic rays (actually particles) are sometimes listed on the EM spectrum beyond its highest frequency of gamma rays.
If cosmic rays are made to repel, astronauts going to Mars or another star or galaxy would be safe from potentially deadly radiation.
And if all particles in the body can be made to attract or repel as necessary, doctors will have new ways of restoring patients to health.
From 1929 til his death in 1955, Einstein worked on his Unified Field Theory with the aim of uniting electromagnetism and gravitation. Future achievement of this means warps of space (gravity, according to General Relativity) between spaceships/stars could be attracted together, thereby eliminating distance.
Since Relativity says space and time can never exist separately, warps in space are actually warps in space-time. Eliminating distances in space also means "distances" between both future and past times are eliminated - and time travel becomes reality. Doing away with distances in space and time also opens the door to Star Trek-like teleportation. Teleportation wouldn't involve reproducing the original and there would be no need to destroy the original body - we would "simply" be here one moment, and there the next (wherever and whenever our destination is).
The universe's underlying electronic foundation (which makes our cosmos into a partially-complete unification, similar to 2 objects which appear billions of years or billions of light-years apart on a huge computer screen actually being unified by the strings of ones and zeros making up the computer code which is all in one small place) would make our cosmos into a complete unification if it enabled not only elimination of all distances in space and time, but also elimination of distance between (and including) the different sides of objects and particles. This last point requires the universe to not merely be a vast collection of the countless photons, electrons and other quantum particles within it; but to be a unified whole that has "particles" and "waves" built into its union of digital 1's and 0's (or its union of qubits - quantum binary digits). If we use the example of CGH (computer generated holography), these "particles" and "waves" would either be elements in a Touchable Hologram - demonstrated by Japanese researchers in August 2009 (search for "Touchable Holography" in Google or You Tube) - or elements produced by the interaction of electromagnetic and presently undiscovered gravitational waves, producing what we know as mass (in September 2008, renowned British astrophysicist Professor Stephen Hawking bet US$100 that the Large Hadron Collider would not find the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle supposed to explain how other particles acquire mass) and forming what we know as space-time. Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, and measurements on the Hulse-Taylor binary-star system resulted in Russell Hulse and Joe Taylor being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993 for their work, which was the first indirect evidence for gravitational waves. The feedback of the past and future universes into the unified cosmos's electronic foundation would ensure that both past and future could not be altered. (I'm disagreeing with Einstein's view of weights [mass] causing indentations in a malleable "rubber sheet" called space-time, but the system I'm proposing can yield exactly the same measurements as his and I think Einstein would welcome the chance to consider a different interpretation.)
Elimination of diseased matter and/or eliminating the distance in time between a patient and recovery from any adverse medical condition - even death - would also be a valuable way of restoring health (with literal time travel, people who have long since died could have their minds downloaded into reproductions of their bodies and "recover" from death [establishing colonies throughout space and time would prevent overpopulation]). Or if the distance between recovery and a patient is reduced to zero before illness or accident occurs (we might call this "eVaccination" - electronic vaccination); prevention of any adverse medical condition, including that of a second death for those resurrected, can occur.
These paragraphs imply the possibility of humans time-travelling to the distant past and using electronics to create this particular subuniverse's computer-generated Big Bang (but there's still room for God because God would be a pantheistic union of the megauniverse's material and mental parts, forming a union with humans in a cosmic unification).
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