Cosmic Connectivity: Toward a Scientific Foundation for Transpersonal Consciousness

The principal aim of this paper is to overview some of the salient existing empirical data supporting the possibility of an interconnectivity of consciousness that extends beyond the conventionally recognized confines of body and mind. Thereafter, the article provides possible explanations of this apparent interconnectivity drawn from the work of Jung and recent developments in physics

The Evolution of the Culture of Enterprise

At the top echelons of contemporary business, managers are becoming concerned with the unsustainability of the way companies now operate. A transformation of basic business strategies appears more and more indicated. For such transformation to be effective, the culture of the enterprise--the goals it pursues and the vision of these goals entertained by managers and collaborators--needs to change. Consequently there is a growing questioning of the viability of the typical culture of today\u27s enterprise, and a search for more functional and timely concepts for creating anew and more timely cultural pattern

Healing Our Planet

In the last few years, and especially since the economic-financial crisis of the fall of 2008, it has become painfully clear that there is something seriously wrong with our world. The media is full of reports of crises, and various experts offer suggestions on what to do about them. But for the most part the diagnosis and the cure are highly sectoral and partial. There is talk about the financial crisis, and the overall economic crisis. Then of the environmental crisis and various resource-crises: energy, food, water, among others. There is also talk about consumerism, power-hunger, and greed. There is no integral, encompassing overview of what’s wrong, and what’s needed to correct it. This study attempts a systemic analysis of the world’s health problem. It reviews the factors that make the planet sick, and suggests the nature of the treatment that would heal it

Premises of a Natural Science of Consciousness

According to the mainstream of modern science, there cannot be a natural science of consciousness because consciousness does not actually exist in nature. It is a product or by-product of the workings of the brain. There is a natural science of brain and the nervous system, for these are bona fide elements of the world, but there cannot be a natural science of a phenomenon of which the very existence is in question. In the prevalent view con2sciousness is something that happens when neurons fire in the brain. This is said to be confirmed by experience. There is no consciousness in the absence of brain function. However, there is increasing evidence that this is not true: some forms of experience seem to occur even when the brain is not functioning. Evidence on this score comes from a variety of sources: from people who arrived at the portals of death and returned, from spiritual masters, and from ordinary people who enter a meditative, prayerful, deeply loving or otherwise non-ordinary state of consciousness. It also comes from psychic mediums who claim to “channel” the consciousness of people who have already died. Some strands of the evidence have been confirmed by physicists and psychiatrists, consciousness researchers, and other serious and otherwise unbiased observers.3 If the evidence is cogent, there is a need to expand the prevalent theory of consciousness. We need to account for the possibility that consciousness can exist independently of brain function

Design and Performance of the Data Acquisition System for the NA61/SHINE Experiment at CERN

This paper describes the hardware, firmware and software systems used in data acquisition for the NA61/SHINE experiment at the CERN SPS accelerator. Special emphasis is given to the design parameters of the readout electronics for the 40m^3 volume Time Projection Chamber detectors, as these give the largest contribution to event data among all the subdetectors: events consisting of 8bit ADC values from 256 timeslices of 200k electronic channels are to be read out with ~100Hz rate. The data acquisition system is organized in "push-data mode", i.e. local systems transmit data asynchronously. Techniques of solving subevent synchronization are also discussed.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure

Evolution of the Aging Brain Transcriptome and Synaptic Regulation

Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders of aging are characterized by clinical and pathological features that are relatively specific to humans. To obtain greater insight into how brain aging has evolved, we compared age-related gene expression changes in the cortex of humans, rhesus macaques, and mice on a genome-wide scale. A small subset of gene expression changes are conserved in all three species, including robust age-dependent upregulation of the neuroprotective gene apolipoprotein D (APOD) and downregulation of the synaptic cAMP signaling gene calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase IV (CAMK4). However, analysis of gene ontology and cell type localization shows that humans and rhesus macaques have diverged from mice due to a dramatic increase in age-dependent repression of neuronal genes. Many of these age-regulated neuronal genes are associated with synaptic function. Notably, genes associated with GABA-ergic inhibitory function are robustly age-downregulated in humans but not in mice at the level of both mRNA and protein. Gene downregulation was not associated with overall neuronal or synaptic loss. Thus, repression of neuronal gene expression is a prominent and recently evolved feature of brain aging in humans and rhesus macaques that may alter neural networks and contribute to age-related cognitive changes