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posted by LaminatorX on Friday July 03 2015, @01:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the actually-old-theory dept.

Consciousness — the internal dialogue that seems to govern one's thoughts and actions — is far less powerful than people believe, serving as a passive conduit rather than an active force that exerts control, according to a new theory proposed by an SF State researcher. Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella.

Morsella and his coauthors' groundbreaking theory, published online on June 22 by the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, contradicts intuitive beliefs about human consciousness and the notion of self.

According to Morsella's framework, the "free will" that people typically attribute to their conscious mind — the idea that our consciousness, as a "decider," guides us to a course of action — does not exist. Instead, consciousness only relays information to control "voluntary" action, or goal-oriented movement involving the skeletal muscle system.

http://scienceblog.com/79096/theory-consciousness-free/

Wonder if Edward Bernays would agree with this assessment. Enjoyed watching the very intriguing documentary, The Century of the Self a 2002 British television documentary series by Adam Curtis. It focuses on how the work of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Edward Bernays influenced the way corporations and governments have analyzed, dealt with, and controlled people.

You can see the documentary: The Century of the Self | Happiness Machines | Episode 1


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2015, @02:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2015, @02:42AM (#204526)

    Sounds like a bad acid trip, but it might have taken you much longer to come down? Once I was convinced (for an hour or so) that everything I'd read about well known LSD experimenters like Leary & Kesey was all invented in my imagination...

  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 03 2015, @07:44AM

    A UC Santa Cruz Psychobiology undergrad by the name of Timothy Dreszer once pointed out to me that there are no "drug analogs" for mental illness.

    That is, one cannot take a pill to experience Schizophrenia or what have you.

    In my own experience, the very closest drug analog that I am aware of is Nitrous Oxide. In many respects that's much like bipolar mania.

    Mania is the result of excess norepinephrine in the brain, loosely speaking it makes it "too easy to think". Nitrous isn't exactly the same, but the reason nitrous makes us laugh is that Nitrous Oxide is a neurotransmitter as well.

    There are over 130 neurontransmitters, not so much because there is a good reason for us to have so many, but that it's not hard at all to initiate a nerve impulse.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 03 2015, @01:28PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Friday July 03 2015, @01:28PM (#204696) Journal

      Any chance to synthesize those other 130 neuron transmitters? And do you have an source that states there are 130 of them?

      Perhaps one could make a cocktail that will give the same neuron transmitter spectra as people with mania has?
      (or even more daring, connect blood streams together with one that has mania?)

      • (Score: 2) by tathra on Friday July 03 2015, @03:32PM

        by tathra (3367) on Friday July 03 2015, @03:32PM (#204752)

        few neurotransmitters, at least none of the major ones, can cross the blood-brain barrier. many or most of them are produced in the brain. some of the important ones are dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, gaba, glutamate, anandamide, dmt, nmda, opioid peptides (endorphins, enkephalins, dynorphins, etc), and many others. i'm skeptical of the number 130, but maybe if you counted all the individual peptides and hormones such you might get that high. there are a fuck-ton of different receptors, but not every receptor has a neurotransmitter unique to it.

        oh, and nitrous oxide (N2O), the dissociative known as "laughing gas", is not a neurotransmitter, he's confusing it with nitric oxide (NO).