Describing the recent research in his lab and others into human hearing, biophysicist A.J. Hudspeth of Rockefeller University reports (cited in Bushell 2018, link forthcoming),
"Statistics concerning the human ear are astounding. The healthy human cochlea is so sensitive that it can detect vibration with amplitude less than the diameter of an atom, and it can resolve time intervals down to 10µs [i.e., microseconds, or millionths of a second]. It has been calculated that the human ear detects energy levels 10- fold lower than the energy of a single photon in the green wavelength...”
Regarding human tactile and related senses (haptic, proprioceptive), it has recently been determined that “human tactile discrimination extends to the nanoscale [ie, within billionths of a meter],” this research having been published in the journal, Scientific Reports (Skedung et al 2013).William C. Bushell, presentation at Victoria and Albert Museum, October 19, 2018
William C. Bushell, Ph.D. is a biophysical anthropologist affiliated with MIT and co-director of ISHAR (Integrative Studies Historical Archive & Repository), a Chopra Foundation Initiative
Experiments Suggest Humans Can Directly Observe the Quantum
Some of physics' remaining secrets may actually relent through the human senses.
Posted Dec 05, 2018
New Beginnings: Evidence That the Meditational Regimen Can Lead to Optimization of Perception, Attention, Cognition, and Other Functions
First published: 28 August 2009
William C. Bushell, Ph.D., Anthropology Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Bldg. 16‐267, Cambridge, MA 02139. wbushell@mit.eduenable meditators to realize the innate human potential to perceive light “at the limits imposed by quantum mechanics,” on the level of individual photons.
fascinating - I was just wondering the "amperage" of the brain if it is at a standard 25 watts....
WILLIAM C. BUSHELL PhD The Integrative Science Basis for Considering Claims of Super-longevity in Virtuoso Practitioners of Yoga and Related Practices
May 30, 2017 a pop-up conference was held at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY
William Bushell, Ph.D.
William Bushell, PhD, has been researching and lecturing on the health-enhancing and anti-aging effects of meditation and yoga for many years at Harvard, MIT, and Columbia, as a Fulbright Scholar and at the Salk Institute. He has collaborated with Robert Thurman and His Holiness the Dalai Lama on conferences and research projects.Dr. William Bushell is at the forefront of research into the mental and physical effects of advanced yogic practice of the Indo-Tibetan and other traditions. His wide-ranging work seeks to integrate western scientific models with traditional Tibetan tantric systems, and has been presented at many venues and institutions, including recently at the Meetings of the Society for Neuroscience, MIT & the Salk Institute.
Other websites:
http://www.infinityfoundation.com/Bushell.htm
Publications:
Longevity and Optimal Health : Integrating Eastern and Western Perspectives
Dr. William Bushell’s Research Trip on Yogic Sciences in India at the Kumbha Mela festival
Both the Infinity Foundation and ECIT are interested in bringing to
light the numerous Indic contributions to the civilizations of the
world, many of which are not commonly recognized. In particular, we are
particularly interested in projects which shed light and bring
credibility to the often dismissed field of “Yogic Sciences”. We use the
term “science” here because, contrary to popular belief, Indian
traditions of contemplation, introspection and mediations are not
universally “mystical” and “irrational”, but are often based upon
empirical exploration of the psycho-physical complex, and their
mediation techniques often have a very real and measurable effect on the
mind and body. For this reason, we have made the decision to support
the following research project, which will lay groundwork for a more
thorough research in this field.
Brief Trip to India for the Kumbha Mela Festival:
Survey, Subject Recruitment, Interviewing, Observation, and Institutional Networking in Preparation for A Research Project on the Indic Science of Yoga – A Proposal
Introduction
Fewer than two dozen clinical studies of advanced, long-term virtuoso yogis have been performed over the past 70 years, yet these few studies have shown that the yogic science of India possesses an extraordinary storehouse of scientific knowledge concerning the potential for enhanced functioning of the human body and brain. Although, incredibly, these studies have been practically ignored in the West — despite an apparently increasing if often undiscerning openness to the consideration of Asian medical thinking – a mere perusal of their results reveals revolutionary implications. For this small body of studies demonstrates – albeit in an initial, preliminary fashion – a full spectrum of powerful potential enhancements of health, and physiological and psychological functioning, including:
One of the first steps in such a program is to survey the potential research environment, and begin networking to establish collaborative relationships. While an appreciable amount of preliminary work has already been done in these respects, the kumbha mela festival of India provides an unprecedented opportunity for such a goal. This is so because among the literally millions of attendees, thousands of long-term adept virtuoso yoga practitioners are attending. I have been invited by several of the latter category, masters who have demonstrated bona fide advanced yogic abilities, and who are major figures in an extended network of such practitioners. My invitation is specifically to meet, interview, establish on-going collaborative relationships with, and observe demonstrations of advanced yogic abilities by numerous long-term, master practitioners. In particular, I am scheduled to observe a demonstration of the extraordinary bhugarbha samadhi technique, in which the yogi is buried underground for a period of several days or more. This practice, which has been observed and confirmed by several Western scientifically trained researchers (including a member of my research team), has revolutionary implications for Western physiological and medical science, for it provides support for yogic claims that hibernation-like states of “suspended animation” are indeed possible. This invaluable opportunity will offer the chance for further observation and understanding of this immensely important phenomenon, and will precede a clinical study of it at the Autonomic Physiology Laboratory of Columbia-Cornell Medical Center under my direction in spring 2001. The yogis have also agreed to the plan for physiological/medical research on yoga in the US and India, locations to be discussed.
Survey, Subject Recruitment, Interviewing, Observation, and Institutional Networking in Preparation for A Research Project on the Indic Science of Yoga – A Proposal
Introduction
Fewer than two dozen clinical studies of advanced, long-term virtuoso yogis have been performed over the past 70 years, yet these few studies have shown that the yogic science of India possesses an extraordinary storehouse of scientific knowledge concerning the potential for enhanced functioning of the human body and brain. Although, incredibly, these studies have been practically ignored in the West — despite an apparently increasing if often undiscerning openness to the consideration of Asian medical thinking – a mere perusal of their results reveals revolutionary implications. For this small body of studies demonstrates – albeit in an initial, preliminary fashion – a full spectrum of powerful potential enhancements of health, and physiological and psychological functioning, including:
- voluntary, innate analgesia as or more powerful than that produced by opioid and other major pharmacologic analgesics;
- the ability to control bleeding and blood flow, an ability for which there is no Western biomedical analogue;
- dramatic enhancement of the immune system, including the ability to combat antibiotic-resistant and other multi-drug resistant organisms;
- the ability to control temperature and metabolism to such an extent that hibernation-like states are possible;
- enhancement of the innate regenerative and aging retarding capacities of the body, to make extension of the life span and “health span” possible;
- profound enhancement of fundamental cognitive capacities including learning, memory, creativity, and analytic thinking.
One of the first steps in such a program is to survey the potential research environment, and begin networking to establish collaborative relationships. While an appreciable amount of preliminary work has already been done in these respects, the kumbha mela festival of India provides an unprecedented opportunity for such a goal. This is so because among the literally millions of attendees, thousands of long-term adept virtuoso yoga practitioners are attending. I have been invited by several of the latter category, masters who have demonstrated bona fide advanced yogic abilities, and who are major figures in an extended network of such practitioners. My invitation is specifically to meet, interview, establish on-going collaborative relationships with, and observe demonstrations of advanced yogic abilities by numerous long-term, master practitioners. In particular, I am scheduled to observe a demonstration of the extraordinary bhugarbha samadhi technique, in which the yogi is buried underground for a period of several days or more. This practice, which has been observed and confirmed by several Western scientifically trained researchers (including a member of my research team), has revolutionary implications for Western physiological and medical science, for it provides support for yogic claims that hibernation-like states of “suspended animation” are indeed possible. This invaluable opportunity will offer the chance for further observation and understanding of this immensely important phenomenon, and will precede a clinical study of it at the Autonomic Physiology Laboratory of Columbia-Cornell Medical Center under my direction in spring 2001. The yogis have also agreed to the plan for physiological/medical research on yoga in the US and India, locations to be discussed.
https://infinityfoundation.com/dr-william-bushell/
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-seaberg/tasting-the-universe_b_829817.htmlMost significantly in my quest, I reached out to Ganden Thurman at Tibet House. I’d met and grew to admire Mr. Thurman during a previous stint as an Internet editor. I suspected there was something deep and metaphysical happening behind these waves of magenta, persimmon and indigo lighted “photisms” synesthetes see and he seemed to agree. He assigned his staff medical anthropologist, Dr. William C Bushell, to mentor me through the project.It wasn’t long before Dr. Bushell had consulted with his friend, the gifted Dr. Neil Theise, a longtime Buddhist practitioner and stem cell pioneer, who came up with the following from a 9th Century statement by the Zen Master Dogen upon his enlightenment:“Incredible, incredible, inanimate things proclaiming dharma is inconceivable, it can’t be known if the ears try to hear it, but when the eyes hear it, then it can be known.” This implied, Dr. Bushell explained to me, that no enlightenment is possible without synesthesia! This is not to say all synesthetes are enlightened. But the highest levels of practitioners recognize synesthesia as some sort of doorway to Nirvana.
Bushell on youtube
I will try to contact him about the noncommutative secret of nonwestern meditation!
He is very close to discovering it.
Bushell is citing MO Magnasco
Prior work from the Magnasco lab has touched on many aspects of sensory processing, including auditory, visual, and olfactory functions. For example, together with A. James Hudspeth, he created a mathematical model of a “trapdoor amplifier” in the hair cells of the inner ear—a concept that challenged some of the most basic assumptions about how the human ear processes sound. His work studying birdsong, which followed the expression of the ZENK gene, allowed researchers to watch learning and memory at the cellular level in the brains of canaries. And in a sound analysis breakthrough, Magnasco created an algorithm that transforms sound into visual representations—with far more accuracy than any method previously available—closely replicating the system used by the human brain.https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0011116
An individual hair cell can make only a miniscule contribution to an ear's spontaneous otoacoustic emissions [16]. Each observed emission must therefore represent the synchronous activity of numerous cells. How, then, are these oscillators coupled to one another? What determines the spacing of successive emission peaks? How are spontaneous otoacoustic emissions influenced by concurrent stimulation with pure tones?
In birds and mammals, weak sinusoidal inputs do not increase the firing rate of afferent fibers from its resting level. Instead, they partially entrain afferent firing at the frequency of stimulation, resulting in more regular firing (Johnson 1980; Köppl 1997). Only when stimuli exceed the threshold by 15–20 dB and the neural response has become completely phase-locked does the firing rate increase significantly. The mechanoelectrical-transduction process of an individual hair cell exhibits similar behavior: a threshold stimulus causes noisy spontaneous hair-bundle oscillations to phase-lock to the input, whereas the amplitude of oscillation grows only after the stimulus has increased tenfold (Martin and Hudspeth 2001). When fluctuations are taken into account, the hypothesis of critical oscillation recapitulates the phase-locking behavior of both oscillatory hair bundles and auditory nerve fibers in response to weak stimuli (Camalet et al. 2000).
The system thus experiences an effective global coupling mediated by local interactions, a property that leads to several unexpected behaviors. The most striking phenomenon is the presence of waves of synchronization that advance in both directions along the array (Figure 2A). Note that these waves represent the phase behavior of coupled oscillators: they in no way imply the presence of traveling waves on the basilar membrane! There are also extended periods of alternating antiphase synchronization among oscillators and cyclic motions of defects between phases. These unusual characteristics are reflected in the power spectrum of the simulated emissions (Figure 2B), which differs from experimentally recorded spectra in its lack of well-defined peaks.
i.e. noncommutative. The Natural Resonance Release of 50 Microsecond quantum Sub-angstrom Sound
For a synapse with R = 20 release sites and an intrinsic frequency of 100 Hz, as an example, the probability of releasing four or more vesicles during a 50 μs period increases by a factor of 400 in the presence of cooperativity.
A weak external force induces a rearrangement of the frequencies of spectral peaks; further increases in stimulation cause a repulsion of peaks with frequencies near that of the external force. This counterintuitive behavior results from changes in the population of oscillators that contribute to the repulsed peaks. Increasing the amplitude of the external force causes oscillators with natural frequencies at ever greater distances to synchronize with the input. As a result, these oscillators lose synchronization with their original groups. The frequency of the median oscillator within each of these deprived groups therefore moves further from that of the external force.
Varying the frequency of external stimulation provides further insight into the system's behavior (Figure 6D). For a fixed magnitude of the external stimulation, the bandwidth of oscillators that become synchronized remains constant as the frequency changes. The spectral peaks adjacent to that of the external forcing therefore stay separated by a fixed frequency interval. As the frequency of the external force increases, synchronized groups whose oscillation occurs at frequencies between that of the forcing and that at the chain's high-frequency end are compressed in frequency. When the spacing between adjacent groups drops below a critical value, the entire segment of the chain undergoes a rearrangement, resulting in one fewer synchronized groups. A complementary pattern emerges at frequencies below that of the external forcing. After each rearrangement, the remaining synchronized groups recur at the same locations, providing further evidence that the size of a stably synchronized group is tightly bounded both above and below.
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