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Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 1:11 am
by Diane
Sensory data from one side of the body is processed mostly in the opposite half of the brain. Language is understood in the left side brain. People trying to "hear" the future with their left ears (and right brains), are not normal, and should declare themselves at once, describe the future, and lead us all down a better path! Either that or they did not read the question properly, too busy pulling off some transcendental moment.
Diane
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 1:54 am
by lazariuk
Diane wrote:Sensory data from one side of the body is processed mostly in the opposite half of the brain. Language is understood in the left side brain.
If you are expecting sensory data then it wouldn't really be the future. Do you not think your body would know this?
I think it is said that Intuition is processed in the right side of the brain. Some people say that there is no such thing as intuition.
Oops I guess I missed your point. Forgot how funny you are.
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 3:03 am
by Diane
Funny haha, or funny peculiar? Don't answer that.
If you had only a 'right brain' or only a 'left brain' you would probably be deemed as being in a pathological state. So it naturally follows that there is no such thing as intuition, and no such thing as logic either.
Interesting experiment, Jack. Leonard said he had 'seen' the future. I wonder what different results you would have got if you had asked people to turn one eye towards the future?
Diane
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 3:11 am
by lizzytysh
I wonder what different results you would have got if you had asked people to turn one eye towards the future?
For one thing, it would have required three options.
The right eye, the left eye, or the blind eye. I could provide a list of some already using the third.
~ Lizzy
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 4:37 am
by lazariuk
Diane wrote:
Interesting experiment, Jack. Leonard said he had 'seen' the future. I wonder what different results you would have got if you had asked people to turn one eye towards the future?
Diane
To describe something that happened in the past (seen) he uses a word dealing with the eyes. To talk about the future which he has yet to know he uses the word ear.
Things about this that I find interesting is:
Light travels faster than sound
Whatever you experience through sound it a lot closer than what you experince with light.
I also had it demonstrated to me through some experiments that I can respond amazingly faster to sound than I can to light. The experiment suggested that it seems to be true for everyone.
As a side note,
Martin Buber, Who Leonard seemed to appreciate, who Herman Hesse spoke of as being one of the few truly wise men who has ever walked the face of the earth, who I think of as being the man who has spoken deeper to me of spiritual matters through his books than any other I have read, wrote a book called "Between Man and Man"
The book's focus is that all real life is in encounter and he explores the possibilities of meeting and dialogue.
For some strange reason that he doesn't explain he begins the book with a small tale of the one time that he experienced himself waiting to hear something. He said that if he had to report with what he heard it he would have to say "With every pore in my body"
I just can't help but feel that this is related to Leonard saying "I'm all ears"
The book is available from Amazon and those first pages can be read online.
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 6:17 pm
by Steven
Jack,
My understanding has been that people will cock their heads unconsciously
to bring the more dominant ear forward when they want to hear something.
The reason given by those that say that this is so, is that sound is
moving air and it will be received a bit faster and maybe
clearer/louder (even if imperceptibly so) by the ear that is closest to the sound emanation and the "best ear" forward will further enhance the auditory perception. I have no reasearch on this and I'm not an audiologist.
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 6:50 pm
by lazariuk
Steven wrote:Jack,
My understanding has been that people will cock their heads unconsciously
to bring the more dominant ear forward when they want to hear something.
I usually speak in a low voice and so if I ever notice that someone has done that uncounsciously I think that I will try my little experiment and see if they use the same ear to listen for the future.
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 8:12 pm
by Diane
Hi Jack,
I haven't read Martin Buber. There are many books I haven't read which I would no doubt find fascinating. But, as you quote him as saying:
The book's focus is that all real life is in encounter and he explores the possibilities of meeting and dialogue.
I must say that all the important things I have ever learned have been from personal contact with people and not through books. That is not to say that books don't tell me important things, but I don't "believe" them, other than on an intellectual level.
And yet again, as you say:
I also had it demonstrated to me through some experiments that I can respond amazingly faster to sound than I can to light.
I also had something demonstrated to me in an experiment. And by a machine! I had not thought of that for some years; thanks for causing me to remember it. It was as a young student. In the class the lecturer asked for volunteers to be hooked up to a machine that measures your skin response; one of those machines they use as lie detectors that is sensitive to the changes in your skin's electrical conductivity. Another thing that reminded me of this experiment was that you said about Buber:
He said that if he had to report with what he heard it he would have to say "With every pore in my body"
I was connected to the machine by some detector thing taped to my finger. I imagine it could have been taped to measure the reaction of any skin pores anywhere else.
The experiment involved being shown words, many of which were 'neutral' words like apple or tree, and some of which were more highly charged words like death or longing (I don't actually recall what the words were, but that is beside the point). And I sat there helplessly watching the dial shoot up, as my body reacted to the second type of words and had no response to the neutral ones. Friends took pleasure in saying the most outrageous things to see what happened to my dial.
A very interesting thing was that the machine had a way of measuring how long in milliseconds after the words flashed up it would take your brain to read and understand the word. The skin reaction always happened some time before the conscious understanding of the word.
Being connected to that machine showed me that I know things without being aware of them, and also that I have no conscious control over my 'true' reactions to things. I would like to know myself the way that machine 'knew' me. And then I would like to know someone else who knew themselves in the same way. And then I would like to be connected to that person rather than the machine. Blimey what a thought.
Diane
Some interesting links:
The Galvanic Skin Response Meter:
http://www.trans4mind.com/psychotechnics/gsr.html
Electrophysiological evidence of intuition:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/quer ... t=Abstract
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 8:54 pm
by lazariuk
Diane wrote:
I would like to know myself the way that machine 'knew' me. And then I would like to know someone else who knew themselves in the same way. And then I would like to be connected to that person rather than the machine.
Well it seems that you finally got around to answering a question that I asked you a long time ago, about silence. That was what Buber writes about in the book immediately after what he wrote about hearing with every pore in his body.
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 9:12 pm
by Diane
Nice one! I did finally reply.
That was what Buber writes about in the book immediately after what he wrote about hearing with every pore in his body.
What, he writes about silence?
I was just reading something that backs up your claim that you can listen to the future better than you can detect it with any other sense. Conclusion from a scientific study:
When the senses deliver conflicting information, vision dominates spatial processing, and audition dominates temporal processing.
That is fascinating. That hearing is more important than vision when it comes to the awareness of time. I will have to think about that, because silence is quite often fairly inaudible

.
Cheers Jack,
Diane
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 9:18 pm
by lazariuk
Diane wrote:What, he writes about silence?
With a soft tip pen. He entitles it "Silence which is communication"
Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 12:21 am
by Diane
Can you summarise what he says under that marvellous title?
Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 12:39 am
by lazariuk
Diane wrote:Can you summarise what he says under that marvellous title?
Better than that you can read it yourself on page 3. It is not long
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0415278 ... eader-link
Thumb through to page 3. It is included in what they allow in an excerpt
Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:33 am
by Diane
Hi Jack,
I just read that section through a number of times. I notice that it will unfortunately not copy and paste. He says he is not talking about a lovers' shared silence, and not talking about a "mystical" shared silence (which he reckons still contains the reflection of one in the other). And then says that what he is talking about is the sudden dropping of a "reserve" from a "childhood's spell". It reads a little unclearly to me, not that I am a person given to understanding things clever people say, and I haven't read the rest of the book to gain context..
I sort of follow, or do I? I think communicating in silence follows a lot of communicating in words until the 'childhood's spell' is lifted, and everything that has been denied has been examined, and the machine's dial no longer reacts, and there are no reflections of each person in the other. But it is possible to "jump past" this process, via a "lifting of the spell without (a person's) doing" as Buber describes it. He describes it as 'the word of dialogue happening sacramentally'.
But what is being communicated, sacramentally?
The other day I realised time is motion and today you taught me that time is an auditory illusion. Einstein said that "the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion." So we can realise there is no such thing as time if we are still and silent. If we stop and don't listen. Then the separation between one person and the other in time and space falls away and there is nothing to communicate.
I would prefer to continue with this in the pub, under the influence of a few whiskies.
Diane
Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 4:11 am
by lazariuk
Diane wrote:
I sort of follow, or do I? I think communicating in silence follows a lot of communicating in words until the 'childhood's spell' is lifted, and everything that has been denied has been examined, and the machine's dial no longer reacts, and there are no reflections of each person in the other. But it is possible to "jump past" this process, via a "lifting of the spell without (a person's) doing" as Buber describes it. He describes it as 'the word of dialogue happening sacramentally'.
But what is being communicated, sacramentally?
Actually you got me feeling that I understand it a bit better now with what you wrote about the machine. You wrote about how the machine could bypass a lot of your circuitry to, in a way, know you well. I think that where he is going with this is along the same lines you were and that he thinks that the human can do much more than the machine. That it can communicate the information to you, not just who you are but also who you could be. The example he used is one who, for various reasons, is locked into a position of "with-holding oneself.( He doesn't know any other way.) and another who gives freely of himself. Being next to the other the information of knowing another way is communicated in a closer way than they are capable of being consciously aware has happened. He seems to think that a position of silence can facilitate that. It was one example but I am sure that he had others in mind.
I've been reading that guy for over 30 years and I still feel like I am just scratching the surface but every now and then .....
There is another part of that book that I think I am going to write about soon. He refers to it as his "conversion" The time when he stopped being interested in seeking "spiritual experiences" and the "religious".