Every day you hear at least some utterances you’ve never heard before. That you can understand them is partly due to the fact that they are structured according to grammatical rules. Scientists have found that the human brain may use the relative timing of brainwaves to encode and decode the structures in a sentence.
Grammar is a way of structuring information that makes language an efficient way to communicate. Knowing the grammatical rules of our language allows us to say pretty much anything we want, including things we have never heard before by combining words to (new) sentences. Being able to learn and use grammar is unique to humans. But it also creates a challenge for the science of how the brain processes human language—how do our brains, essentially a bunch of cells in a network, represent something as abstract as grammatical rules?
Scientists at the University of Edinburgh and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics study this question with the help of computer-based models. They constructed an artificial neural network that simulates key features of the brain, such as densely connected populations of neurons that show neural oscillations. Neural oscillations are wave-like patterns of activity that happen at different frequencies, some very fast and some slow. The relative timing of these neural oscillations can help the brain encode grammatical relationships between words in a sentence, as Andrea Martin and Leonidas Doumas report in a paper in PLOS Biology.
By encoding words in one oscillation, and phrases in another, the brain can keep track of words and phrases at the same time. This demonstrates how something as complex as a sentence can be encoded in the neural currency of oscillations. A key finding of the new study is that these artificial neural networks, when fed example sentences, give off patterns of energy that mimic what the brain does when it processes a sentence. Martin, lead author of the study, says: “This work helps us understand how the brain solves a complex puzzle and why it gives off the activity patterns that it does when processing language.”
In this exciting age of the brain, where we know more about our brains than ever before, being able to link basic experiences like speaking and understanding language directly to brain function is especially important. Linking our brains to our behaviors holds the key to understanding not only what it means to be human, but also to understanding how the (arguably) most complex computing device in the universe, the human brain, gives rise to our daily experiences. Such knowledge may also lead to biologically inspired advances in human-like artificial intelligence and computation.
This article was originally published by Max Planck Neuroscience on March 6, 2017. The relevant study can be retrieved here.
I am posting the entire article because it’s a good summary and I do not want it to be lost. It has been taken down from Max Planck Neuroscience. The study: A mechanism for the cortical computation of hierarchical linguistic structure. This makes good sense and seems to describe something that is really happening in the brain. Being in the zone while performing complex tasks in sports or other endeavors also seems to entail brainwave patterns like these. ABN
The details of the destruction of the underground bunker of Kirill Budanov, the head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence Services (GUR) of the Ministry of Defense
of Ukraine, have become known. A video of a Russian rocket falling into the water next to the GUR building on Fisherman’s Island in Kyiv was followed by sour comments on Ukrainian social networks – allegedly, the Russians missed.
The basic reason no self or soul is reborn is neither exists independently of the mental universe that gave rise to our illusion of selfhood.
The mental universe within which we all exist is dynamic and so are we. In Buddhist terms, this dynamism is action or karma.
Buddhism does not say we do not exists. It only says that our selves are empty, that they do not ultimately exist. When we die our karma, the mental activity of this life, reconstitutes as a new being ensconced within the larger mental universe.
No one explains this better in modern terms than Bernardo Kastrup. In his essay Making Sense of the Mental Universe, he does not write about rebirth but rather about the conditions of our existence within the mental universe.
Nonetheless, his explanation of a “mental universe” shows precisely how rebirth can occur without there being any soul or pudgala or anything else that flies from the body upon death to transmigrate to another one.
I highly recommend reading the essay linked above. I have no idea if Kastrup is a Buddhist thinker. It’s even better if he is not, if his thinking arrived independently at a place consonant with original Buddhist thought.
Most Buddhists know that even Buddhists have trouble understanding how someone can be reborn without having a soul, self, or pudgala. What did the Buddha even mean by that? I know more than one university professor of Buddhist studies who explains Buddhist rebirth by saying, there is no such thing and neither is there such a thing as karma.
Those professors explain away karma and rebirth by claiming those fundamentals of Buddhist thought are nothing more than the Buddha “using the concepts of his day” to teach his moral doctrines and what amounts to his “atheistic Stoic” philosophy.
I mean no disrespect for the professors. It is hard to understand how something can be reborn and yet be empty of any perduring self or soul.
The essay linked above provides an excellent explanation of how that happens. I strongly encourage Buddhists or people who teach Buddhism or are interested in it to read Kastrup’s essay when you are in a good mood and want to learn something new and really interesting.
For the past two years I have been collecting data and analyzing it from many different sources. This is my opinion on what this major operation is really about.
There has been much speculation of what is going on. From the “Replacement Theory” to a new source of Democrat voters. The real reason is so much worse.
From time to time reports mention the high number of “young military age males” coming across the border. This has really disturbed myself and others I have talked to.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Many more have been flown in on charter flights. I have proven this with Flight Tracker data and on the ground intel by Independent journalists like Antonio Aguero filming these men arriving at airports along the border. Note that the Government claims these charters are used for deportation, but it is the opposite they are bringing them into the country.
Leftist NGO’s working with the CIA are recruiting these young men. They promise a fast track to citizenship via joining our military. They are taking these men to numerous military bases across the country. They are being trained as a shadow Army for deployment in the USA for “population control” maybe as UN Troops. Their plans are for our military to be very busy with deployments to Europe and the Pacific because of Russian/Chinese aggression.
Growing human babies from scratch in a lab could be possible in just five years thanks to a new breakthrough.
Researchers in Japan are on the cusp of being able to create human eggs and sperm in the lab from scratch, which would then develop in an artificial womb.
Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi, a Japanese scientist at Kyushu University who has already figured out the process in mice, believes he is just five years away from replicating the results in humans.
This is the other boom in super intelligence coming soon. Manipulating gametes will boost human IQs and other desirable traits above any human who has ever lived. This is a form of eugenics that does not involve killing people or depriving them of the right to produce offspring. People will be able to choose to breed the old way and produce offspring by Darwinian chance, or the new way and have their best genes mingled in a laboratory. It will also be possible to build even better outcomes by multigenerational manipulation of gametes. There is no way to stop technology like this and no reason to want to. Many social problems will cease to exist due to tech like this. ABN
To put it very simply—we’re going to be living among digital minds of all shapes and sizes. So how do you determine who gets a vote? How do you deal with the fact that to reproduce, it takes a human 9 months to make 1 copy of itself, while it takes a digital mind 1 second to make 100,000 copies of itself? Can we have a democracy when the AI population grows to 300 𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑜𝑛 while the human population stagnates at 300 𝑚𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑜𝑛?
Moreover, how do you deal with 10000x intelligence differences? We don’t give frogs a vote over human affairs; are we supposed to give 100 IQ beings a vote when it affects those with 1000 IQ’s? What if a single mind ends up with 99% of the intelligence/compute (which seems likely)?
Above all, everyone is failing to think about the downstream consequences of this new world we are entering and just how weird and different it’ll be.
A new pre-print paper at bioRxiv reveals that spike proteins from mRNA jabs infest the brain tissue of vaccinated people.
Researchers in Germany and Denmark evaluated brain tissue samples both in mouse models and post-mortem humans, looking for the presence and distribution of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. They looked in detail at the skull-meninges-brain axis.
Naturalnews.com reports: They found that spike protein from the shots accumulates in the skull marrow, brain meninges, and brain parenchyma, further explaining that the “injection of the spike protein alone caused cell death in the brain, highlighting a direct effect on brain tissue.”
This video is from late October of 2022 but it is well-worth watching. Couey makes a clear presentation of his theory and the others discuss and comment on it. ABN
Over the last couple of years I’d begun seeing our growing conflict with China described as an inevitable consequence of “the Thucydides trap” but hadn’t been entirely sure of the source of that idea. Decades ago, I’d had a very strong interest in Classical Greek history, so the reference was obvious to me: the bitter rivalry between a dominant Sparta and a rising Athens that had led to the decades long Peloponnesian War that devastated Greece. But only recently did I discover that the term had been popularized in Destined for War, a 2017 national bestseller by Harvard’s Graham Allison, which had followed his earlier 2015 Atlantic article on the same subject.
This is an excellent overview of the geopolitical situation US neocons have created for USA and how bad it is, though maybe some good will come of it because even US neocons may fear full-blown war with China. Good read and best not to skip it even if you already sense the core problem. ABN
1) The testimony from Radcliffe talking about the “overwhelming” body of evidence supporting the lab-leak origins is going viral.
Obviously I agree with him, but the widely shared video cuts off before @JohnRatcliffe starts blaming the CCP.
Here’s the full statement.
2) What if the Chinese MIL were responding to a biological attack?
Ratcliffe asserts that they “destroyed tests, samples and data”.
If we found a rogue lab creating bioweapons in the US, wouldn’t you expect our military to destroy the pathogens and confiscate/destroy the data?
3) Ratcliffe also asserts that China had the audacity to produce “propaganda” that the US created Covid-19.
I wonder what gave them that idea. Maybe it was the fact that the US have the largest global biolab network and have been doing gain of function research for decades…
4) It was the US government and their controlled media, who published and distributed more propaganda about Covid, than the rest of the world combined.
[I tend to like Ratcliffe due to his demeanor and clear deliveries of information, so I have a conscious bias. That said, he needs to directly and fully address the many indications that US actors not only created covid-19 in a lab but also released it into the world, with a special release in Wuhan that makes it look like China did it. ABN]
American Buddhist Net 