All Blog Posts Tagged 'brain' (17)

Drongo is Australian slang for an absolute idiot, twit, braindead fool, which derived it's name after a useless racehorse that never won a race from 37 starts. Of course a group of such useless idiots would be termed Drongos.

1: Flat Earth Society: http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/

Promoters of the concept that the Earth is flat and that all modern science is a conspiracy against them and all science not supporting a…

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Firstly and excerpt from the Catholic Dictionary on the visions/hallucinations of Thomas Aquinas:

"To Father Reginald he declared that he had learned more in prayer and contemplation than he had acquired from men or books (Prümmer, op. cit., p. 36). These same authors tell of mysterious visitors who came to encourage and enlighten him. The Blessed Virgin appeared, to assure him that his life and his writings were acceptable to God, and that he would persevere in his holy vocation.…

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Religious indoctrination doesn't give individual children a sense of warmth and comfort in having a supernatural big daddy caring for them.

In many cases it creates added irrational fears and stresses to the individual children's lives, such as I experienced as a youngster when told I was being watched by such a being, the sense of lack of privacy, fear of sinning, fear of evil things and people.

The clinical name for this stress is Religious Trauma Syndrome or…

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proof of heaven, I'm mounting an epic retort in the discussion after this ABC News story.  FEELS GREAT to give the answers they don't want to hear

The Internet is amazing. It hosts media of all kinds. Anybody can communicate with anybody. And you can find out anything you want to know. It's huge and complex but we don't need to understand how it works to know that it does. In the same way, we don't need to understand how the brain works to know that it does. Its electro-chemical machinations, while interesting, aren't necessary to understand in order to know that the brain deliberates. That's what it does.

Neuroscience can't yet…

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Dancing with Causality: Purposeful Steps

Free will, in the form of self-determinism, is only a big mystery if you allow your thinking to be governed by the centuries of philosophers who have never managed to figure it out. They've been arguing in circles because they've defined "free will" to fit their premises. This is because they…

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The cells in our cortex are essentially machines ready to be influenced by the world as we are born. A blank slate, if you will. While there is some genetically programmed organization there from embryological development, all areas in the cortex pretty much do the same thing as far as pattern recognition (see YT video of Jeff Hawkins’ (On Intelligence, Hierarchical Temporal Memory)). What makes certain areas of our cortex perform different functions has more to do with which sense organs…

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An imaginary interaction with my mother in which she poses the point "I'm at the end of my life when I must look forward to meeting my maker and going to heaven, and you want to take that away from me?". In my mind I feel her agony at the thought of it all being a lie. I know this pain because I've felt it myself. It's not all that dissimilar from the feeling I had when my father came clean about Santa Claus. It's a let down to know it was just a big scam.

In my mind I attempt to… Continue

When it takes you forever to try to reason things out? My brain is just taking its sweet ass time to process even simple things. I've been stuggling to comprehend stuff since Monday.

After all the fuss about Twilight I finally decided to read it. Originally, I pushed it off as nothing more than a fad book, that is mediocre at best, my expectations were not quashed as I read through this book.

Myers had other motives for this book, obviously and her Christian faith had a strong influence on the behavior of her characters.

The basic plot of the story is, Bella, a 17 year old girl, falls "in love" (more like becomes infatuated with) Edward Cullen a 104… Continue

I just had an amazing experience!



I was standing in my bedroom, about to go to bed, and I had just set my alarm clock. All the nights in the house were off and everything was dark. I had an itch so I closed my eyes tight and started to rub them. BAM! I saw a glaring bright white light, like polished gold, in the form of three large circles, one in the center of my vision with two copies on either side (possibly in the form of a double helix?) all of equal size, made up of many… Continue

This blog post stems from another discussion (elsewhere) that segued into the topic of mind versus brain. In order to illustrate that the mind is more than just the brain, I described the following scenario . . .

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What would it be like if you were born completely paralyzed, with a normal brain but without a sensory nervous system to deliver stimuli to your brain from your sensory organs? Would it be possible to think or to have memories? In what ways could you be considered… Continue

How does the idea of a “Catholic child” not make you sick? The child isn’t being given a choice whatsoever in their religion. Their parents have already made a decision for them before they can even make a good decision. Young children are very impressionable and you scare the shit out of them with fear of eternal damnation, that will stick with them. Indoctrinating children is easily equivalent to brainwashing. I think its truly a form of child abuse.



“Isn’t it enough to see that a… Continue

I became an atheist one year ago. Wow, so much has happened in that time. I've reevaluated my stance on practically everything. I've re-mourned my lost ones who have died. I've purged my home of garbage. I've changed the language I use. I've begun to have pride in myself and in my brain. I've started to think critically and rationally. I've been exploring the world of science, without tons of "you're persecuting me" resentment getting in the way. I've laughed my head off at blasphemy. And I've… Continue

I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The short description of this condition is having obsessive thoughts that get looped in my brain and won't go away, unless I perform a compulsive act, called a ritual. One well-known form of OCD is germophobia. The affected person has obsessive thoughts about germs, about being sick, about contaminating others, etc. and has to wash hands in a ritualistic way. For me this means using lotion soap, followed by foaming soap (gets under the nails better) and if… Continue

This section is gonna focus on a quintessential aspect of British culture but one that strangely but completely shares the same principles and creates the exact same negative sociological effects as…well, i’ll get to that later, but this blog is all about that Great British Icon…The Sun…that’s the newspaper, not the really hot planet…just so you know…good.



The Sun is quite an enigma really. It has the highest circulation of any Daily English language newspaper in the world. It has… Continue

I wanted to share this with you. A new study shows that the brain shuts down when someone experiences transcendence. Well, the right parietal lobe, to be exact. That part of the brain also helps with the ability to do math. So that might explain why religious folks have trouble with the difference between 4.5 Billion years and 6,000 years. LOL!



EDIT: the study that shows that… Continue