Report on Consciousness from NYU (June 2)
(c) Robert Neil Boyd

[Dr. S. Grenard]

I am afraid I tend to look at the empirical evidence for a separate mind and body, for genuine mediumship, for "life" after death and after death communication and am still finding my way on the quantum physics basis for these beliefs. Personally, having evaluated over 500 pages of transcripts of mediumistic readings and validated near 98%, the empirical tends to work for me. The readings evaluated occurred non-locally, anonymously (neither reader nor sitter knew who each other were), in the absence of verbal or visual feedback or cues, and in some cases using experimenters as proxy sitters. In short they have met every close minded skeptic test against chicanery. Readings of a single consciousness, by 12 different mediums, resulted in 200 verifiable validations and a 100% hit rate. The hit rate was ascribed to the consciousness rather than the mediums as not one of these mediums in other tests achieved such a perfect score. This in turn has led me to replicate the findings of Prof A.S. Berger (Aristocracy of the Dead-New Findings in Post Mortem Survival) wherein he determined that some consciousnesses (sic: spirits) are robust communicators whereas others are poor or non-communicative. He concluded dying in the physical sense was therefore no guarantee of being able to communicate or to be a robust communicator. I am also still trying to understand how this fits with a universal quantum mind theory. Some critics say that if its physics that dictates survival and ability to communicate memories, then it should be universal. Since that has not tended to be the case, one tends to hold the medium or channel responsible for failure and this is clearly not always the case. The abstract fwded here (not by me) was a journal review by Prof John at NYU. In that piece the author suggested that the consciousness operates in a quantum-like fashion (if you read it). I pointed that out above in a question mark as I was uncertain of exactly what "quantum-like" meant in that context myself, as I am still groping myself to define this. There are so many plausible theories and hypotheses out there. I suggest some readers might like to, for example, read Schwartz and Russek's Living Energy Universe. I have also been recently exposed to the work of Ron Pearson in the U.K. which was published in Frontier Sciences Vol 6, No 2. I am still fathoming these theories. Dr. Donald Watson's TES theory also deserves serious consideration. These can all be found buried somewhere in ongoing links at: http://survivalscience.50megs.com

Finally its a curious thing that a mainstream neuroscientist like John at a mainstream institution such as NYU should even consider using the quantum-like analogy in this abstract (I need to read the full paper which I haven't received yet). It reminds me of what Radin wrote in The Conscious Universe: The 4 Stages in review: In stage 1, the idea is flat out impossible; in stage 2 it is possible but weak and uninteresting, in stage 3 the idea is important and the effects are strong and pervasive and stage 4, everyone thinks that he or she thought of it first. Later on no one remembers how contentious the whole affair.

[Russ Jones]:

Perhaps Dr. Grenard would participate in discussions with our Quantum Theorists and Physicists to help us all better understand the "quantum like" processes associated with our consciousness? Are these processes properties of our consciousness, or is our consciousness a property of the many quantum like processes created by our physical "hardware"?

Our human history is filled with evidence that suggests we have latent abilities to manifest, alter and destroy matter with only our will. Levitations of bodies and objects have been recorded in our history. Although we may be a long way from understanding the hows and whys of these reported events, perhaps we are closer now to understanding if we, in fact, do possess the basic faculties to not only interactively communicate on a quantum level but also to manipulate matter on that level as well.


Subject: A report on Consciousness from N.Y.U. June, 2001
From: sgrenard
Department of Psychiatry, Brain Research Laboratories, New York University
School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue, New York, New York, 10016

This article summarizes a variety of current as well as previous research in support of a new theory of consciousness. Evidence has been steadily accumulating that information about a stimulus complex is distributed to many neuronal populations dispersed throughout the brain and is represented by the departure from randomness of the temporal pattern of neural discharges within these large ensembles. Zero phase lag synchronization occurs between discharges of neurons in different brain regions and is enhanced by presentation of stimuli. This evidence further suggests that spatiotemporal patterns of coherence, which have been identified by spatial principal component analysis, may encode a multidimensional representation of a present or past event. How such distributed information is integrated into a holistic percept constitutes the binding problem. How a percept defined by a spatial distribution of nonrandomness can be subjectively experienced constitutes the problem of consciousness.

Explanations based on a discrete connectionistic network cannot be reconciled with the relevant facts. Evidence is presented herein of invariant features of brain electrical activity found to change reversibly with loss and return of consciousness in a study of 176 patients anesthetized during surgical procedures. A review of relevant research areas, as well as the anesthesia data, leads to a postulation that consciousness is a property of quantum like processes, within a brain field resonating within a core of structures, which may be the neural substrate of consciousness. This core includes regions of the prefrontal cortex, the frontal cortex, the pre- and paracentral cortex, thalamus, limbic system, and basal ganglia. .