Michael Prescott's Blog
Archived blog focusing on the paranormal
Category: Science
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Matt Rouge recently reminded me of a study that came out in 2017, purporting to show that split-brain patients retain a single locus of consciousness. Although I put up a brief post about it at the time, I don’t think I fully appreciated the implications. In a corpus callosotomy, the sheaf of neural fibers connecting…
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Recently there’s been some hype in the media about how the idea of the universe as a computer simulation has been disproved. I was skeptical that such a sweeping hypothesis could be definitively falsified, and according to the good folks at Popular Mechanics, I was right. The researchers cited by news articles were not actually looking…
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Back in 2014 I published three blog posts on a study that showed a surge of electrical activity in the brains of dying rats. (First post, second post, third post.) The surge was suggested as a possible naturalistic explanation of the near-death experience. Some NDE researchers countered that the electrical surge was so extremely minute (too small…
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NDE researcher Titus Rivas posted a link 0n Facebook to an interesting article called "Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness." One of the most popular arguments against the so-called transmission theory (the idea that the brain serves as a receiver, rather than an originator, of consciousness) involves studies of patients who've undergone a…
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A fair amount of parapsychological research involves fieldwork and case studies, in which people's personal memories become an issue. In some cases, a subject recounts an episode that he or she remembers vividly, though it may have happened weeks, months, or even years or decades earlier. Usually this testimony is taken as essentially accurate unless…
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Materialism is a badly flawed philosophy, at least when taken as a comprehensive explanation of reality. As a partial explanation, it fares much better. I've sometimes used an analogy with the history of physics: Newtonian physics was once seen as offering a complete picture of reality, but then was superseded by quantum physics, which subsumes…
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A new development in the study of schizophrenia could possibly be interpreted as providing support for the filter model of consciousness. An NPR report tells us, People with schizophrenia — more than 21 million worldwide — tend to have less gray matter and fewer connections in their brain than healthy peers. But scientists aren't sure…
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Vitor Moura has called my attention to an article by Donald R. Forsdyke of the Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Biological Theory (available online behind a paywall). Its title is "Wittgenstein’s Certainty is Uncertain: Brain Scans of Cured Hydrocephalics Challenge Cherished Assumptions." …
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I don't completely grok this, but it's way cool. Scientists say they have taken the first photo that shows light as both a particle and a wave. Here's the photo: The particles are at the bottom of the image, and the wave is at the top. And here's the article, which includes a cute little…
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Since this is said to be the season of miracles, here's an excerpt from John C. Lennox's God's Undertaker, which neatly summarizes some of the evidence for the apparently miraculous fine-tuning of the cosmos. After briefly discussing the “abundant supply of carbon” made possible by the very specific resonance of helium and beryllium nuclei (“if…