Lady Omega : : Design, Art, Music » Science

Human-faced Fish

omega — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:58:16 +0000

This is a type of hybrid carp, featured on a Korean news broadcast. Crazy. Via Inventorspot

Fish you’re never going to catch

omega — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 16:23:09 +0000

Bounty Fishing has a neat list of The 27 Aquatic Lifeforms You Never Caught While Fishing.
Axolotl

Lumpfish

Fangtooth fish

More pictures here!

Most bizarre radio station in the world

omega — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 21:41:20 +0000

The photos below are not from a film set.

They’re genuine photos of the headquarters of rmf fm, a Polish radio station based in Krakow.

More pictures from the source – Deputydog

What is the most unusual kind of hallucination?

omega — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:55:00 +0000

Fatigue, among other things, can cause one of the rarest and most fascinating hallucinations known: that of the doppelganger. A person who has this experience sees his mirror image, usually facing him from three or four feet away. It reproduces the viewer’s facial expressions, posture, and movements as though reflected in a mirror. The image is said to be transparent, like a slide or movie projected on glass. In some cultures these hallucinations have been interpreted as visitations from the person’s soul or as premonitions of death.

This hallucination, which usually occurs early in the morning or late at night and lasts only a matter of seconds, can appear to normal minds under stress or fatigue. However, it is more common among people with serious disorders such as epilepsy, brain lesions, migraine headaches, and states of delirium.

In particularly bizarre cases, the person may see the double standing in an adjacent room. Others have reported seeing this kind of apparition standing behind their own reflection in the mirror.
Source

Scans of Monks’ Brains

omega — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 19:47:01 +0000

All of the Dalai Lama’s guests peered intently at the brain scan projected onto screens at either end of the room, but what different guests they were.
On one side sat five neuroscientists, united in their belief that physical processes in the brain can explain all the wonders of the mind, without appeal to anything spiritual or nonphysical.
Facing them sat dozens of Tibetan Buddhist monks in burgundy-and-saffron robes, convinced that one round-faced young man in their midst is the reincarnation of one of the Dalai Lama’s late teachers, that another is the reincarnation of a 12th-century monk, and that the entity we call “mind” is not, as neuroscience says, just a manifestation of the brain.

It was not, in other words, your typical science meeting.

But although the Buddhists and scientists who met for five days last month in the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India, had different views on the little matters of reincarnation and the relationship of mind to brain, they set them aside in the interest of a shared goal. They had come together in the shadows of the Himalayas to discuss one of the hottest topics in brain science: neuroplasticity.

The term refers to the brain’s recently discovered ability to change its structure and function, in particular by expanding or strengthening circuits that are used and by shrinking or weakening those that are rarely engaged. In its short history, the science of neuroplasticity has mostly documented brain changes that reflect physical experience and input from the outside world. In pianists who play many arpeggios, for instance, brain regions that control the index finger and middle finger become fused, apparently because when one finger hits a key in one of these fast-tempo movements, the other does so almost simultaneously, fooling the brain into thinking the two fingers are one. As a result of the fused brain regions, the pianist can no longer move those fingers independently of one another.

Lately, however, scientists have begun to wonder whether the brain can change in response to purely internal, mental signals. That’s where the Buddhists come in. Their centuries-old tradition of meditation offers a real-life experiment in the power of those will-o’-the-wisps, thoughts, to alter the physical matter of the brain.