INTELLIGENCE AND HIGHER STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY

When William James (1890) introduced the concept of consciousness into American psychology, he argued that beyond the range of normal waking consciousness there is the possibility of exceptional states of consciousness that are completely "discontinuous" with discursive thought. He argued that these heightened states of awareness could be induced under specifiable conditions, could influence thought and behavior profoundly, and could be adaptive for the individual. He challenged psychology to investigate these states scientifically

El impacto de la reducción del estrés en la hipertensión esencial y las enfermedades cardiovasculares. (Impact of stress reduction on essential hypertension and cardiovascular disease).

ResumenSe ha considerado que el estrés contribuye a la patogénesis y la progresión de las enfermedades cardiovasculares (ECV). Se ha demostrado que la reducción del estrés mediante la Meditación Trascendental [Transcendental Meditation (TM)®] ha bajado los niveles de presión arterial (PA) y reducido el riesgo de ECV en adultos y adolescentes. Este artículo repasa los resultados que sugieren el impacto beneficioso de la TM en reducir la PA en adultos hipertensos en reposo y en adolescentes pre-hipertensos en reposo, durante un estrés agudo creado en el laboratorio y durante la actividad diaria normal. Dichos resultados tienen implicaciones importantes para la inclusión de la TM en los esfuerzos que se realizan para prevenir y tratar las ECV y sus consecuencias clínicas.AbstractStress has been thought to contribute to the pathogenesis and progression of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Stress reduction via Trasncendental Meditation (TM)® has been shown to lower blood pressure (BP) levels and reduce CVD risk in adults and adolescents. This article reviews findings suggesting a beneficial BP-lowering impact of TM in hypertensive adults at rest and in pre-hypertensive adolescents at rest, during acute laboratory stress and during normal daily activity. These findings have important implications for inclusion of TM efforts to prevent and treat cardiovascular diseases and their clinical consequences.</p

First-Year Seminars Taxonomy

First-year seminars are designed to assist entering students as they form connections with the IUPUI community, including other students, faculty, and advisors in a prospective major. This First-Year Seminars High-Impact Practice Taxonomy seeks to clearly define the features of First-Year Seminars as a high-impact practice. The taxonomy describes four attributes of First-Year Seminars practice along three dimensions of impact—High-Impact, Higher-Impact, and Highest-Impact

Adjusting Choice Models to Better Predict Market Behavior

The emergence of Bayesian methodology has facilitated respondent-level conjoint models, and deriving utilities from choice experiments has become very popular among those modeling product line decisions or new product introductions. This review begins with a paradox of why experimental choices should mirror market behavior despite clear differences in content, structure and motivation. It then addresses ways to design the choice tasks so that they are more likely to reflect market choices. Finally, it examines ways to model the results of the choice experiments to better mirror both underlying decision processes and potential market choices.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47012/1/11002_2005_Article_5885.pd

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Teaching: Natural or Cultural?

In this chapter I argue that teaching, as we now understand the term, is historically and cross-culturally very rare. It appears to be unnecessary to transmit culture or to socialize children. Children are, on the other hand, primed by evolution to be avid observers, imitators, players and helpers—roles that reveal the profoundly autonomous and self-directed nature of culture acquisition (Lancy in press a). And yet, teaching is ubiquitous throughout the modern world—at least among the middle to upper class segment of the population. This ubiquity has led numerous scholars to argue for the universality and uniqueness of teaching as a characteristically human behavior. The theme of this chapter is that this proposition is unsustainable. Teaching is largely a result of recent cultural changes and the emergence of modern economies, not evolution

Global impact of the Maharishi Effect from 1974 to 2017: theory and research

World peace is the urgent goal of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s revival of the consciousness-based technologies of ancient Vedic India. Towards this end, Maharishi created a worldwide organisation, founded universities in several countries, and trained over 20,000 teachers of the Transcendental Meditation technique who in turn have taught it to approximately ten million people, which for five decades has increasingly created an influence of harmony in the world. Maharishi’s approach to peace is through creating coherence in collective consciousness, which he holds to be the fundamental force governing the quality of life in society. The individual is the unit of collective consciousness, with each individual contributing to all collective levels—family, city, state, national, and world. Reciprocally, each level of collective consciousness influences every individual’s mind and behaviour. Therefore, the quality of consciousness of the individuals in society is the grass roots cause of the quality of collective consciousness. Stressed and sleepy individuals not only have poor judgement, make mistakes, and cause suffering for themselves and family, friends, and associates, they also propagate an influence of stress into collective consciousness that affects everyone in society, inclusive of the entire world. Through Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation technique, the individual mind effortlessly transcends through increasingly subtle levels of thinking to arrive at the completely silent state of pure consciousness at the deepest level of the mind, which is unbounded awareness and infinite peace. Pure consciousness is held to be the direct experience of the transcendental unified field of Natural Law governing all forms and phenomena in the universe. Extensive research shows that regular experience of it through Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation technique and his advanced Transcendental Meditation-Sidhi program, including Yogic Flying, creates an influence of harmony, not only throughout all levels of the individual’s physiology, mind, and social behaviour, but also throughout all levels of collective consciousness with which the individual is associated. The influence of the meditator on his or her family, community, nation, and world enhances lively, creative, and dynamic interactions among the different groups in society. Collective behaviour on every level becomes harmonious and mutually supportive, unifying society into one orderly, evolutionary, balanced structure of natural law. This is called coherence in collective consciousness. Maharishi identifies the basis of war and terrorism as stress in collective consciousness, which is the opposite of coherence. In this view, mistakes, problems, and difficulties within individual lives accumulate as collective stress. When stress in collective consciousness is left to increase unabated, it reaches a phase transition threshold at which point violence breaks out in society, such as in violent crimes, strikes, riots, terrorism, and war. The way to reduce stress in the individual and society and ultimately to end war is to transcend, which is to bring pure consciousness to the awareness of the individual mind and hence into collective consciousness. Not everyone in society needs to meditate to have this effect. A general principle in science is that the coherent elements of a system have a more powerful effect than the incoherent elements. Extensive, well-controlled empirical research demonstrates that when 1% of a local or national population experiences pure consciousness through the practice of Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation technique or when a group of the square root of 1% of a population experiences it through his Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program, greater coherence in collective consciousness is propagated, thereby resolving conflict and improving the quality of life of the city, nation, or world. The phenomenon of 1% of the population practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique improving the quality of life in the larger society is called the Maharishi Effect, whereas the effect created by a group of the square root of 1% of the population practicing the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program is called the Extended Maharishi Effect. Research carried out internationally by multiple research teams to investigate the theory and research on the Maharishi Effect began in the early 1970s and continues to the present day. Of the 700 studies on the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program, more than 50 have investigated its effects on society. These studies have shown such changes as reductions in crime, accidents, mortality, war, and terrorism and improvements in economic indicators and the general quality of life. Moreover, this body of studies is the only truly experimental research in the history of the social sciences to show such holistic improvements in society on the scales of entire cities, states, nations, and the world. Included in these studies are ones that have experimentally created groups practicing the Transcendental Meditation and Transcendental Meditation-Sidhi program in large populations with the predicted outcomes on specific social indicators, lodged in advance with independent project review boards. This research has used state-of-the-art statistical methodologies to control for trends and cycles in the data, indicating that the observed changes were new and unpredicted. These studies have controlled for a wide range of demographic, political, environmental, and other variables, ruling out alternative hypotheses. Some studies have used causal analyses, which indicate the causal role of the Transcendental Meditation and Transcendental Meditation-Sidhi programs in causing the measured improvements in society. These findings have been published in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals and presented and published in the proceedings of professional conferences. The current paper has been written to overview the theory and research on this historic phenomenon that is now improving the destiny of humanity

Transcendental consciousness wakes up in dreaming and deep sleep

Researchers present evidence in support of a model of consciousness that includes lucid dreaming, witnessing/transcendental consciousness during dreaming and witnessing/transcendental consciousness during deep sleep.  Due to the potential for confusion between subjective reports of lucid dreaming and witnessing dreaming or witnessing sleep the authors suggest researchers screen for them all.  The authors review electrophysiological findings in the night sleep of subjects reporting a peaceful inner awareness- witnessing/transcendental consciousness during dreaming and deep sleep and the implications for lucid dreaming research. Findings included EEG tracings of theta alpha (7-9 Hz) simultaneously with delta during deep sleep stages 3 and 4, decreased chin EMG, and highly significant increased theta2 and alpha1 relative power during stage 3 and 4 sleep as compared to controls. The authors discuss alpha synchrony during witnessing deep sleep and gamma during lucid dreaming