D A N G E R Burroughs
Man Ray | Laboratory of the Future
1935. Gelatin silver print, 9 1/16 x 7” (23.1 x 17.8 cm). Gift of James Johnson Sweeney. © 2009 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris/MoMA
Thanks to billyjane and i12Bent for keeping the dash full of Man Ray
The Cream of the Crop
“A time of testing has come for us all. We must believe everything or deny everything. And who among you, I ask, would dare to deny everything?” — Albert Camus, The Plague
“I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still there. Do I believe the world’s still there? Is it still out there? … Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I’m no different.” — Memento (2000)
“What if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?
In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.
“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”
Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking.
“I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses,” said Dr. Llinás, who makes the case in the book “I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self” (M.I.T., 2001). Once people are awake, he argued, their brain essentially revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels — the dreams are “corrected” by the senses.
These novel ideas about dreaming are based partly on basic findings about REM sleep. In evolutionary terms, REM appears to be a recent development; it is detectable in humans and other warm-blooded mammals and birds. And studies suggest that REM makes its appearance very early in life — in the third trimester for humans, well before a developing child has experience or imagery to fill out a dream.
In studies, scientists have found evidence that REM activity helps the brain build neural connections, particularly in its visual areas. The developing fetus may be “seeing” something, in terms of brain activity, long before the eyes ever open — the developing brain drawing on innate, biological models of space and time, like an internal virtual-reality machine.
Researchers have a way to go before they can confirm or fill out this working hypothesis. But the payoffs could extend beyond a deeper understanding of the sleeping brain. People who struggle with schizophrenia suffer delusions of unknown origin. Dr. Hobson suggests that these flights of imagination may be related to an abnormal activation of a dreaming consciousness.”
(more at NYtimes)
From my experience there is much more to dreams, however, this is wonderful
(via astroinquiry)
“The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” — Terence McKenna
“The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” — Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums) (via shynessisnice)
Lucien Freud stop to wonder
“Thinking … is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas” — Johann Wolfgang Goethe
“Addicted to the flux, addicted to the acceptance and subsequent rejection of powerful ideas.”
Belief that the universe is governed is a form of faith… therefore science is not free of faith