Dreamwatchers

Scientists 'read dreams' using brain scans
Rebecca Morelle, BBC World, 4 April 2013

glow in the dark transparent brain_Kwanghun Chung et al

Brain activity correlated with the images that people saw in their dreams
60% accuracy

The team used MRI scans to monitor three people as they slept.

Just as the volunteers started to fall asleep inside the scanners, they were woken up and asked to recount what they had seen.

Each image mentioned, from bronze statues to keys and ice picks, was noted, no matter how surreal.

This was repeated more than 200 times for each participant.

The researchers used the results to build a database, where they grouped together objects into similar visual categories. For example, hotel, house and building were grouped together as "structures".

The scientists then scanned the volunteers again, but this time, while they were awake and looking at images on a computer screen.

With this, they were able to see the specific patterns of brain activity that correlated with the visual imagery.

Quantum Thought and Quantum Smearing

AKA Superposition

Schwenk Theodor (1962) Sensitive Chaos. Rudolf Steiner Press, London

Gutzwiller, M.C. (1992). Quantum chaos. Sci. Am. 266, 78 - 84

Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts?
Mark Anderson, Discover Magazine, January 13, 2009

Science's weirdest realm may be responsible for photosynthesis, our sense of smell, and even consciousness itself.

Graham Fleming and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and at Washington University in St. Louis

...photosynthesis [more energy-conversion efficient than anything created by man] appears to derive its ferocious efficiency not from the familiar physical laws that govern the visible world but from the seemingly exotic rules of quantum mechanics, the physics of the subatomic world. Somehow, in every green plant or photosynthetic bacterium, the two disparate realms of physics not only meet but mesh harmoniously. Welcome to the strange new world of quantum biology.

Quantum mechanics holds that any given particle has a chance of being in a whole range of locations and, in a sense, occupies all those places at once. Until a scientist measures the system, a particle exists in its multitude of locations. But at the time of measurement, the particle has to “choose” just a single spot. At that point, quantum physicists say, probability narrows to a single outcome and the wave function “collapses,” sending ripples of certainty through space-time. Imposing certainty on one particle could alter the characteristics of any others it has been connected with, even if those particles are now light-years away.

...new experiments keep finding quan­­tum processes at play in biological systems, says Christopher Altman, a researcher at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands. With the advent of powerful new tools like femtosecond (10-15 second) lasers and nanoscale-precision positioning, life’s quantum dance is finally coming into view.

[...]

Hydrogen Atom Orbitals

To unearth the [photosynthesizing] bacteria’s inner workings, the researchers [Fleming et. al.] zapped the connective proteins with multiple ultrafast laser pulses. Over a span of femto­seconds, they followed the light energy through the scaffolding to the cellular reaction centers where energy conversion takes place.

Then came the revelation: Instead of haphazardly moving from one connective channel to the next, as might be seen in classical physics, energy traveled in several directions at the same time. The researchers theorized that only when the energy had reached the end of the series of connections could an efficient pathway retroactively be found. At that point, the quantum process collapsed, and the electrons’ energy followed that single, most effective path.

Electrons moving through a leaf or a green sulfur bacterial bloom are effectively performing a quantum “random walk”—a sort of primitive quantum computation—to seek out the optimum transmission route for the solar energy they carry. “We have shown that this quantum random-walk stuff really exists,” Fleming says.

---

...just throwing this out there; how many people haven't repeatedly experienced the phenomenon of precognitive dreams? Could your brain really be running quantum smear simulations of every possible reality, and sometimes finding a real good match that pushes itself to dream-awareness enough to remember it upon waking? Because when you think of typical precog-dreams, they actually could have been predicted if given enough time to run lots of possible simulations...time...



POST SCRIPT

Uncovering quantum secret in photosynthesis

phys.org, 20 Jun 2013

Watch the process of photosynthesis closely enough – at the femto-scale – and it appears there are little packets of energy simultaneously "trying" all of the possible paths to get where they need to go, and then settling on the most efficient.

In an article published in the journal Science, researchers from ICFO- Institute of Photonic Sciences, in collaboration with biochemists from the University of Glasgow, have been able to show for the first time at ambient conditions that the quantum mechanisms of energy transfer make photosynthesis more robust in the face of environmental influences.

Primitive Dreams

Just some notes from Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s Primitive Mentality (1923)

1966 Beacon Press edition, eng. trans.

[For the Primitive Mind] “What is seen in dreams is, theoretically, true. To minds which have but slight perception of the law of contradiction, and which the presence of the same thing in various places at one and the same time does not perturb in the least, what reason is there for doubting these data more than any others. …Since nothing seems more natural to him than the communication between the seen and the unseen worlds, why should he mistrust what he sees in dreams any more than what he sees with his eyes wide open?” (And these things are even more valuable to him because of their mystic origin.) (p101)

It may happen that what the primitive sees in dreams are circumstances which are to occur later; these circumstances are both prospective, because he foresees their happening, and they are also retrospective, because he has seen them take place. Such a thing is an impossibility to minds governed, as ours are, by the law of contradiction, for they have a clear representation of time unfolding in a unilinear series of successive moments. How can the same event occupy two different places in this series, at a distance from each other, and thus belong to the past and the future? Such an impossibility, however, puts no strain upon the prelogical mentality…. …Their simultaneity of data, as well as their ‘multi-presence of a person’ cannot coexist in time and space with us… (p105)

Regarding a native’s dream about the theft of some of his pumpkins by a white man, and even though the white man had never even been to this native man’s property, the native says, “If you had been there, you would have taken them”. And so the character of the white man in the dream was actually the will of that person. It doesn’t matter what you do… (p106-107)

Also see “Consciousness and Dreams”, by Marcel Kuijsten in The Jaynesian: Newlsetter of the Julian Jaynes Society, 2010, volume 4, issue 1

www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/jaynesian_volume4_issue1.pdf