Beneath the Surface

“Below Shiva’s right foot is a hideous demonic creatarure called Apasmara, or “the illusion of ignorance”, which Shiva is crushing. What is this illusion? It’s the illusion that all of us scientific types suffer from, that there is nothing more to the Universe than the mindless gyrations of atoms and molecules, that there is no deeper reality behind appearances. It is also the delusion of some religions that each of us has a private soul who is watching the phenomena of life from his or her own special vantage point. It is the logical delusion that after death there is nothing but a timeless void. Shiva is telling us that if you destroy this illusion and seek solace under his raised left foot (which he points to with one of his left hands), you will realize that behind external appearances (Maya), there is a deeper truth. And once you realize this, you see that, far from being an aloof spectator, here to briefly watch the show until you die, you are in fact part of the ebb and flow of the cosmos - part of the cosmic dance of Shiva himself. There is, in my mind, no greater instantiation of the abstract idea of god - as opposed to a personal God - than the Shiva/Nataraja. As the art critic Coomaraswamy says, “This is poetry, but it is science nonetheless.”“

- V. S. Ramachandran (2011). The Tell-Tale Brain, pg. 240. W.W. Norton & Co.: New York.

gillespetersonslosttapes:

Philadelphia - The mecca for the soul side of black music. Back in 2002 I discovered what makes this place tick and why the music that’s made there turns out so special. Enjoyyy! 

“In the frontal lobes of a monkey’s brain, there are certain cells that fire when the monkey performs a very specific action. For instance, one cell fires during the pulling of a lever, a second for grabbing a peanut, a third for putting a peanut in the mouth, and yet a fourth for pushing something. (Bear in mind, these neurons are part of a small circuit performing a highly specific task; a single neuron by itself doesn’t move a hand, but its response allows you to eavesdrop on their circuit.) Nothing new so far. Such motor-command neurons were discovered by the renowned Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle several decades ago.

While studying these motor-command neurons in the late 1990s, another neuroscientist, Giacomo Rizzolatti, and his colleagues Giuseppe Di Pellegrino, Luciano Fadiga, and Vittorio Gallese, from the University of Parma in Italy, noticed something very peculiar. Some of the neurons fired not only when the monkey performed the same action! When I heard Rizzolatti deliver this news during a lecture one day, I nearly jumped off my seat. These were not motor-command neurons; they were adopting the other animal’s point of view. These neurons (again, actually the neural circuit to which they belong; from now on I’ll use the word “neuron” for “the circuit”) were for all intents and purposes reading the other monkey’s mind, figuring out what it was up to. This is an indispensable trait for intensely social creatures like primates. 

It isn’t clear how exactly the mirror neuron is wired up to allow this predictive power. It is as if higher brain regions are reading the output from it and saying (in effect), “The same neuron is now firing in my brain as would be firing if I were reaching out for a banana; so the other monkey must be intending to reach for that banana now.” It is as if mirror neurons are nature’s own virtual-reality simulations of the intentions of other beings.”

- V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain (2011), pgs. 120-121. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.