This is your brain on neuroscience

Friday, February 22, 2013 by: Jon Rappoport
Tags: brain map, neuroscience, research

(NaturalNews) The Obama administration has just announced a far-reaching 10-year program to map the human brain down to the last neuron of activity.

So let's begin with this:

"The mind is not a material object at all. The mind is not the brain."

If you made that statement to a modern neuroscientist, the odds are overwhelming he would look at you as if you were visiting from the Stone Age.

"The brain emits the electrical consequences of what the mind originally produced." Same response from the neuroscientist: you're crazy.

Backing up still further, you could say that mind is a series of spaces the person himself creates, in order to think, in much the same way a canvas is a space on which the painter imagines and creates.

From at least the time of the classic Bhagavad Gita (written perhaps 2000 years ago), and in ancient Egyptian texts, writers and philosophers have been describing the soul, the spirit, the psyche in various terms.

In the Gita, as Krishna engages Arjuna in their famous debate about war and duty, Krishna moves back and forth between depicting the individual as distinctly and separately and powerfully immortal---and then as part of a greater spiritual Whole.

In either case, the individual is not physical, but inhabits a physical form, and after the body passes away, the individual survives and usually returns for another incarnation.

The soul or spirit or mind are not explainable in physical terms. This is the basic view expressed over and over by philosophies and religions from the dawn of time on this planet.

In the 20th century, that view was subjected to the bulldozer of science.

The chief implication of scientism is: freedom is an illusion.

If you assert that all of life's processes are ultimately reducible to tiny particles in motion, you are saying this is true of the brain and the mind as well. And that means everything we believe and experience about our own freedom and choice is nothing more than an absurd dream.

And how is that delusional dream produced? It is somehow fired up by these tiny cause-and-effect particles that swim through the universe. The particles are not free. Therefore, neither is the brain, which is made up of such particles.

It gets worse. The tiny particles that compose rocks and concrete and plastic and stars and galaxies have nothing in them that could be called alive.

No research discovers anything in the electron or quark or wavicle that can be identified as Life.

These are the same particles that constitute our brains and our DNA.

The rarely expressed neuro-scientific conclusion? We are all robots made out of flesh with no freedom and no "extra quality" called life.

People profoundly fail to understand this conclusion of neuroscientists and others who tinker with the brain, who now intend to map the brain and its activity down to the last neuron. These scientists don't care what changes they make in the brain, to render it more "normal and healthy."

There is, as far as conventional science is concerned, nothing inviolable about the brain.

I'm not talking science fiction. This is the way most neuroscientists, if forced to admit it, see us.

And they are the ones steering the ship of research. They are the ones who will guide the newly announced government Manhattan Project of the brain for the next 10 years. It's called Brain Activity Map (BAM).

Under the banner of "improved mental health," BAM looks benign. But it isn't. It looks like the way to stop the next James Holmes or Adam Lanza, but it isn't.

It is a far-reaching State program to create The Neurological Society. This is the goal. It now has a major jolt of funding and the blessing/mandate of the federal government.

Think about this. We have a problem posed by the Constitution versus the underlying premises of modern brain science.

On the one hand, we have the founding document which guarantees freedoms. On the other hand, we have the assumptions of science, which cannot affirm the existence of those freedoms.

Well, I can tell you with certainty that the government has just taken a giant step toward Brave New World, and again, this isn't science fiction. It's real. BAM is unconstitutional, of course. The notion of the central government using monies to fund a program that will map the brain is so far outside the powers granted to it, it's absurd.

But why should federal neurological scientists care? They don't really believe the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution exist or could exist or might exist. As far as they're concerned, freedom is a dead issue. It was just a story we told ourselves to feel stronger, better, happier.

Now they have drugs for that. They can change the brain. They will develop new drugs and new electromagnetic strategies for brain alteration. They will develop the ability to remotely observe the brain in much, much greater detail. And from this will spring the means to tweak and change what they observe, on the level of neuronal activity.

Their basis for making those changes will remain obscure, hidden in a welter of technical language. But we know what their fundamental premises will be.

They will involve control of behavior. Parameters will be drawn. Any person whose brain registers activity beyond those boundaries will be judged as a danger, a threat. The threat will be curtailed by limiting and diverting neuronal/synaptic processes.

Thus, good citizens of the State will be created and monitored.

But if soul and spirit and psyche and freedom do exist (and they do), they will be beyond control, since they are non-material.

Thus, efforts at control will have to be more radical and destructive, in order to induce deeper levels of physical stress and glue the consciousness of the individual human being to these artificially created brain states.

And that's where the gloves come off and the mask comes off. Then we see the real controllers. Far from being sophisticated and subtle and humane guides into our future, they are just the old tyrants in new costumes.

Their major trump card is this. They have, through sheer propaganda, hypnotized a significant percentage of the population into believing that science and research are always good things.

The mere mention of the word "science" is connected with "help." A better day is coming. More knowledge is always beneficial. People's needs will be met.

Nowhere is this propaganda more successful than in the arena of medical science.

That is why most people will shrug off the federal brain mapping project as a promising development. "Sure, sounds good."

Does it? Does a future, up the road, in which all brains are monitored for "problematic activity" sound like a humanitarian system?

Does it suit your personal view of life, soul, spirit, freedom?

Consider this quote from neurologist VS Ramachandran. Read it carefully:

"How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all."

No, the greater mystery is how a scientist can believe the brain alone is really capable of all these things---the brain that is nothing but atoms in motion.

Here's another statement from a well-known neuroscientist, David Eagleman:

"Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous [spiritual] experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text."

It might be a numinous experience if it were true. But it isn't. The brain, composed of tiny particles, isn't producing our decision- making or our greatest thoughts. It can't. There is nothing about atoms that allows for those grand realities.

For the numinous experience, we need spirit, psyche, mind, soul.

And these two neuroscientists I've just quoted? They're the good guys. They're the people within that community who even try (wrongheadedly) to make something poetic out of the brain. The overwhelming majority of their colleagues are mechanics, obsessed with tinkering and tweaking and derailing and re-channeling brain activity.

Into their hands, the federal government has just dropped the task of mapping everything that goes on inside our skulls---as a prelude to changing it.

These scientists are, despite their education, Luddites of consciousness. Instead of studying the great works of human history, the art and literature and invention, and trying to grasp our greater non-material faculties, neuroscientists jump to the naked assumption that it all proceeds from the brain.

They believe it must be so. They then dedicate themselves to mapping and charting.

Who is the real threat, the real danger?

They are.

If any monitoring should be done, it should be of them.

Coda: To take this even further, were we to acknowledge our own non-material aspects, beyond the physical, it would imply that we have capabilities that exceed the so-called normal range.

We would realize that, beneath the surface of our social relationships, beneath this culture, we are concealing powers that not only make us free and independent, but open out into creative vistas where we invent formidable and awesome realities.

This is still largely unexplored territory, and it makes what the neuroscientists are doing look like child's play in a demented sandbox.

For us to understand what we are actually capable of is the controllers' worst nightmare.

In a subterranean psychic landscape, this is the crossroads where a prime struggle has been taking place for at least 20,000 years of human civilization.

Jon Rappoport
The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com


About the author:
The author of an explosive new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon
was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of
California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an
investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics,
medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine,
Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon
has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic,
and creative power to audiences around the world.
www.nomorefakenews.com