cognition

Media imprints its information onto the brain directly, complete with its hidden levels of meaning representing values, ethics, esthetics, etc.

The audio/visual senses are the two most impactful senses on the brain. Correspondingly, audio/video media is the most developed area of delivery.

Brains need to be trained to receive media. A normal brain creates a mental model of reality based on events that are witnessed by the senses. This mental model is built up by the sense data, again audio/visual in large part, and given a high degree of belief by virtue of the first-hand experience.

I liked the movie, but this blog post is about my pet theory of sleep from an information-theoretic standpoint.

During wakefulness, the brain keeps receiving input from all its senses. It is busy recognizing the input and responding to it. Presumably, this input (and the results of the brain's early processing of it to generate a response) get stored in a memory dedicated to sense data.

To me, we are severely under-utilizing our mind/brain/body apparatus.

The honing pigeon possesses the ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field, and to orient itself accordingly. It's called Magnetoception. It may exist in humans too!

Ayn Rand's demise started when she was unable to uphold her own philosophy, collapsing in front of her lover Nathaniel Branden and accusing him of immorality for leaving her for a younger woman. Wasn't he acting out of "rational" self-interest?

Masaru Emoto has photographed water crystals that result when persons focus their emotions on the water. The result is evocative. There is a lot of art in these photographs, so bear in mind this is not a scientific experiment.

This documentary examines the question whether dreams are meaningful or not, from a scientific point of view.

It turns out that sleep is a process that proceeds in stages from wakefulness to the deepest level of sleep, level 4. Sleep cycles among those stages:

* Dreams occur during all stages, but they differ in quality. REM dreams are the longest, and the most complex.

or is it biopsychological?

The psychological self arises from the interactions between the neocortex and the older allocortex. The constant interplay between these two systems creates what we perceive as behaviour.