Monday 26 August 2013

The Future of Love

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young couple

“If we are to have a future, we need to work together towards a common goal of survival. It needs to be one where humans, animals and machines have finally found a way to understand each other and live harmoniously. If we don't love our future, and see a future of love, there will be no future.”
— Mickie Kent

If you are an admirer of the Disney Pixar animated movies, you may have heard of the Pixar Theory, where every character you've seen lives in the same universe on the same or different time-lines. The basic concept of this theory is that love is the crux of the entire Pixar universe. The love of different people of different ages and even different species finding ways to live on Earth without destroying it because of a lust for energy.

If you look at our real world, most of the great wars that have been fought have been over resources and energy, and because we haven't been able to live well together. This causes regression. only when we have worked together have we been able to progress in our evolution to a point where out intelligence as been able to develop highly enough for us to question our own origins. It seems we are being outnumbered by violence and ignorance, and as our "parents" these are reproducing more and thus donating to the gene pool - it looks like it is no longer the fittest that will survive, but the fittest to ultimately destroy that survival.

I am not saying that Pixar or its movies are a blueprint for how we must proceed in the future. That is just fantasy. But the precept that love is the key to our survival is an important one. With the current crisis facing us in modern times, things are not working. From the violence in Egypt, to Russia's political warfare against gay rights, battles are all the rage. So is deceit.

Russia is really embarrassing itself with it recent spate of epic fails. The mayor of Russia's fourth-largest city, Yekaterinburg, has been using unsolicited images of famous women to sing the praises of its "rape-free environment". Of course, this was ridiculed by everyone, and it even provoked a parody campaign featuring Breaking Bad meth-chef supremo Walter White, championing the city's drug-free nature.

But Russia is not alone in its downfall. In Korea, we can't even go to a promotional launch without weapons these days, and have it descend into violent mass hysteria. There seems to be a push for domination, not only over our resources, land and all things living, but over who we choose to love. The news of British teenage girls flown abroad for forced marriages has shocked many, and it is a terrible sign of the times. Now more than ever, we need a new solution. And we need to stop lying to ourselves.

So, how can we change the world we live in? What does the future hold for us in a decade or fifty decades from now? It is obvious that we need some great ideas into how to change the world from the current state it finds itself in today.

Working together is the key, and working together fairly and with equal respect (with love in short) to create the new technologies of the future that will herald in a great new dawn for not only our species, but all live on Earth. We are always looking at the future to some extent, hoping for something better than what we have now, but the groundwork of all futures are laid in the present, and done so with an eye on the past.

Futurology: The tricky art of knowing what will happen next

A 1972 book which predicts what life would be like in 2010 was reprinted after attracting a cult following, but how hard is it to tell the future?

Geoffrey Hoyle is often asked why he predicted everybody would be wearing jumpsuits by 2010. He envisioned a world where everybody worked a three-day week and had their electric cars delivered in tubes of liquid. These colourful ideas from his 1972 children's book, "2010: Living in the Future", helped prompt a Facebook campaign to track him down. His work was reprinted with the year in the title amended to 2011.

“I've been criticised because I said people [would] wear jumpsuits,” explains Hoyle, the son of noted astronomer and science fiction author Fred Hoyle. “We don't wear jumpsuits but to a certain extent the idea of the jumpsuit is the restriction of liberties.”

Hoyle's book is a product of its time. The move towards a planned society with an emphasis on communal living colour it.

“Most of it is based on the evolution of a political system,” Hoyle notes. The author also predicted widespread use of “vision phones” and doing your grocery shopping online. He is one of a long line of science fiction authors to have tried their hand at futurology, the discipline of mapping out the future.

“If you go back over the years in terms of science fiction and fantasy you find many very brilliant simulations of futures that have occurred,” says Richard Rhodes, author of "Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems, and the Human World".

Perhaps one of the most celebrated pieces of futurology by a science fiction author was Arthur C. Clarke's prediction of a network of satellites in geostationary orbits [effectively remaining at the same spot in relation to a fixed point back on earth]. The idea of satellites in geostationary orbit had been floated before but Clarke was the first to see the possibilities for their use as relays for broadcasting and communications.

And HG Wells was years ahead of his time, predicting nuclear weapons in 1914, and later inspiring physicist Leo Szilard. In more recent times, author David Brin, in the 1989 novel "Earth" and in his other works, predicted citizen reporters, personalised web interfaces, and the decline of privacy.

“The top method is simply to stay keenly attuned to trends in the laboratories and research centres around the world, taking note of even things that seem impractical or useless,” says Brin.

“You then ask yourself: ‘What if they found a way to do that thing ten thousand times as quickly/powerfully/well? What if someone weaponised it? Monopolised it? Or commercialised it, enabling millions of people to do this new thing, routinely? What would society look like, if everybody took this new thing for granted?’”

Conscious efforts at futurology go back a long way. In 1931, to celebrate its 80th anniversary, the New York Times went to several prominent men for their predictions of what life would be like in 2011. There were “hits”. William Mayo predicted a 70-plus-year lifespan. Other predictions about an ageing population and less importance for national boundaries were promising. But there were bad misses - certainly for Michael Pupin, the physicist - who predicted the equitable distribution of wealth. A similar exercise had been undertaken in 1893 - looking forward to 1993 - for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Florida as a major tourist destination and fast trains are among the hits, but there are many misses. Politician John J Ingalls was one of the most prescient when he wrote about travelling from New York to London in less than a day.

Predictions, failed or successful, tell us as much about the time they were made as they do about the future. Go back to the early years of the Cold War and predictions of catastrophic nuclear war were widespread.

“It is the dog that didn't bark,” says Rhodes, also author of "The Twilight of the Bomb". “In the nuclear community in the years after World War II, they were pretty clear if we didn't eliminate nuclear weapons, if they didn't get it under control, there would inevitably be a nuclear war. They didn't see the deep existential fear those weapons induced in leaders of the various countries.”

And it's easy to get things wrong or to miss a potential development, because an insurmountable obstacle seems to stand in the way. One common wrong prediction, made by utopian socialists in the 19th Century, and cropping up in 1893 and 1931 and many times since, is the idea that mechanisation just has to go a bit further to earn us all a life of leisure.

Hoyle's three day week for 2010 has failed to materialise. “People are going to have to work very hard. It's gone the other way. People are working seven days a week. I'm very pessimistic now,” he says. But Hoyle got it right when predicting the role of the vision phone. And the vision desk sounds rather familiar too. “The glass on top of the screen is made in a special way so that when you write on it the camera photographs what you write.”

If you predicted today that within a few years time key electronic devices like phones, GPS and media players would be embedded in the human body, you would hardly be saying anything daring. “It's fairly straightforward to extrapolate from existing technology - that tends to be what people do,” says Rhodes. “But the really important changes are almost inevitably complete surprises.”

The proliferation of the computer and the microchip comes into this category, according to Tim Mack, president of the World Future Society. “Computers were all looked at as big data crunchers,” says Mack. “People missed that – the embedding of chips in just about everything.” Futurology is big business now. The defence industry picked it up a long time ago, but now it's used in everything from consumer technology to food firms. And it will still prove delightful to read 2010′s predictions in a century's time.

We humans decided a long time ago that living together in cities was the best way to organise ourselves. Over half of us worldwide now live this way. We've become an urban species, and urbanisation means living together in ever decreasing smaller circles. Surely this again means that working together will become more important than ever? So how will we run our super cities as they get bigger and bigger?

As our cities grow faster than ever, there are challenges we are all going to face. There are projects to give cities a "mission control" - in effect a "brain" - building a comprehensive system based on live information about emergency resources with the latest tracking technologies to link up with crews and authorities to solve crises in the city as fast as possible. But such systems, which are already employed in mega cities like Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, are not only about solving issues that may rise today. It's about collecting data and analysing it, and so learning how the city works, and how it be changed for maximum, effective output - without wasting valuable energy and human resources. Other patterns, such as time of accidents or crime may also help with prevention.

Such systems are about turning cities into organisms in effect, and mega cities with "brains" is a great example of how cities will be working together in the future. More than anything, it is the system's potential to be able to learn, adapt and predict to such a sophisticated degree that will mean either survival or destruction for our increasingly complex living spaces, because it will be more responsive to change.

It is no secret that children are probably the most responsive, or resilient to change. And as Whitney Houston once sang - children are our future. But some children take a step further into the future than others. Take Taylor Wilson, for example, who at the age of 14 built a nuclear fusion reactor in his garage, or Jack Andraka, who invented a diagnostic tool to detect pancreatic cancer when he as 15. A very great thinker, who was once one of those children and built a particle accelerator in his garage when he was 17 years old, and now is Professor of Physics and at the City University of New York - and an expert in all things futuristic - is Michio Kaku.

Kaku was a child from a very poor background, but he had big dreams, and they won him a scholarship to Harvard University, and what set him in the direction of working in theoretical physics and working on string theory. In essence he is trying to find a theory for everything, a unified link that connects one and all with the answers to everything.

Kaku is also an expert on the future, and he tells that us that within a decade computer chips will cost about a penny, and that the internet will be everywhere and nowhere, including your contact lens. Technology and machines will be submersed and meshed into our way of living, and in the future we will need to learn how to work together with our gadgets in a more harmonious way. In the future, it's envisaged that even our wallpaper could be intelligent, turning into a holographic doctor during medical emergencies, or just changing colour to suit your mood for that day.

Another theory futurists put forward is not just about increasingly technologies, or lack of city space, but that for the longer term survival of the human species it needs to become a two planet species. It is thought we need to sort out the kinks in our interplanetary travel, and strengthen our space programmes if we don't want to go the way of the dinosaurs.

Recently, skygazers have seen the high point of the annual Perseid meteor shower - which occurs when the Earth passes through a stream of dusty debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet. In about a century, this comet should get close enough to Earth so it can be seen Haley's Comet-style. In a a few thousand years - the year 4000 or something - it might hit the Earth. It's twice as big as the one believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. Futurists say it is very probable that, in two thousand years from now in the sky-blackening fallout from the impact of a 26km lump of space krud, humanity will perish.

Dinosaurs were wiped out by a comet
Dinosaurs did not have a space age programme.

The Earth is in the middle of a cosmic shooting gallery, and the odds are we are going to get wiped out by an asteroid or comet at some stage. Look at Chelyabinsk in central Russia and the meteorite that hit there in February. That city was hit with an asteroid that blew up overhead. If that had stayed intact for a few more seconds, it would have hit the earth with the force of about 20 Hiroshima bombs. And it just missed the Earth by seconds, that;s how close we came to a disaster just a few months ago. It further demonstrates how we don't really monitor all the potentially dangerous rocks out there.

Perseid shower in 2014 to accompany supermoon.

The fact is our ultimate survival is not just in our own hands, but it will only be by working together that we can be assured of any certainty that when a challenge does arise, however large, we are ready for it. Many futurists are unified in believing that we do have a brighter future ahead of us, because science is the engine of prosperity. All the wealth we see around us is due to science, and science will continue to generate jobs, new industries, make life easier, extend the human life span - and all this will only be done by great minds working together - not necessarily thinking alike, but thinking with love, with passion, with that spark that drives us to create rather than destroy. It will come at a price. The future will also come with less privacy, but we will have more abundance of wealth and a more convenient life.

One thing that is certain, is that our brain will mark us out as being different from other animals, and knowing more about how they work will be crucial. I wrote a very popular mini-series called "Love Your Brain" which delves into the workings of the brain, our evolution and what it means to be human. I enjoyed a huge response my readership via email, and it created some interesting discussions. When it comes it the brain, it's fair to say we almost have no definitive idea of how it works. We've been studying our brains for hundreds of years, but we still don't know what a thought is, or really what memories are - never mind autism, or schizophrenia.

That's because we don't understand enough about the anatomy of our brains, how our brain cells communicate and connect with each other. But in the future that could all change. In an incredible leap forward in our understanding of that most complex of structures, one of the world's most talented neuroscientists, Karl Deisseroth, has unveiled an incredible new technology to reveal the wiring of the brain.

Deisseroth's revolutionary technique reveals every brain cell, every connection, in detail we never thought possible. It is hoped this will transform our understanding of detailed brain structure, and tin doing so, help us to finally understand how our brain really works. From the outer cosmos, to the inner universe of the mind, high resolution images of living neurons in the human brain could guide us to unlock the secrets we have within ourselves. It will be a unique window into how a brain adapts after injury, or enlarges after learning something new - a glimpse into the human brain, and into the individual itself functioning in real-time.

It may help us answer some of the moist profound questions of all about personality, mental health and even consciousness. We've never trapped consciousness in a bottle. There are many ideas what it looks like, and what its scale is - is it in one place, or everywhere? Is it fast, or slow, or both? We might see an answer to these questions in a decade or so, if we stop our fighting and petty squabbles over land, resources and religion and look to working together under the opportunities provided by science.

With the pieces of the consciousness puzzle starting to appear with amazing new technologies, if we continue to pursue science in a passionate spirit of togetherness and camaraderie, then our future looks great. We can start to see our future with unprecedented clarity, which give us not only hope, but armour against an uncertain future.

Some say nature is the true technology, and that any human technology is built only to pervert nature, but today we know that we can build tools that are in harmony with nature, which are ecologically as well as ergonomically sound. Taking this one step further, especially towards understanding our brain, is to actually utilise the hormones and chemicals in the brain to create harmony on our lives and the world at large. Harmonising our gadgets with nature is one thing, but we also need to harmonise ourselves to our environment.

For example, work on serotonin - one of many chemicals in the brain that helps transmit certain signals - has been done to see how controlling serotonin levels and functions influences people's decision making. The research seems to suggest we are more spiteful when our serotonin levels are low, and although it's a complicated system and scientist still don't have a string grasp of how it works, it is very suggestive that if we can harmonise the chemicals in our brain, it may help to us to react less violently, or at least more calmly, in everyday situations. If you are chronically stressed, this will, over time, tend to deplete serotonin levels, which could shift you towards a more spiteful or retaliatory strategy. This has been done in primates, and it is not one hundred percent certain it corresponds in humans, but given our close-knit genetic kinship, it is almost likely.

Could understanding our brains be the true roadmap to peace? Could control of our mind also lead to other greater powers? When people talk of the future, we are also promised a form of immortality, or life after death. Cryonics, from the 1960s, is a well-known technique of freezing bodies for a future period when medicine has advanced to a stage where it can fulfil that promise, but will such resurrections every come to fruition? The problem is that it's no trivial matter to freeze and de-freeze someone after their death. As we are made of over 70%-80% water - ice does something weird to the cells that we're all made of, which is who we are, after all, cells that interconnect.

Water expands as it becomes ice, and in effect becomes too large for the cell. As the ice crystals form, they're basically disrupting all the machinery inside the cells. They can poke through the membrane, and splinter them. There is a potential solution to this, where the freezing process is done so quickly that there isn't time for this to take place. One of the ways scientists believe this might be achieved is be using very, very cold liquid, such as liquid nitrogen, but science is still unsolved on the matter.

Is science too focused on immortality?

There also needs to be discussion about the fact that the human population continues to grow and we are getting older and older, especially in developed countries, and at some point as a society we have to have a discussion about how old we actually want to get. Is there a point when we need to have science not over-emphasise on things like cryonics and focus on other things - such as fighting issues that cause the deaths of the young, for example, rather than worrying about extending our general lifespan. The ideal is have a healthy young person live to a healthy old age and not suffer too much through illness. We need a much more realistic discussion about what is a dignified end, while science tries to resolve how that end can be postponed for as long as possible.

Of course, futurists know that a lot of what they theorise depends on unsolved science, and that it will be solved some time in the future, but without the passion and drive pulling people together to work towards a common goal for the betterment of all life on Earth, then this will remain a pipe-dream. Currently, we carry around with us not only our dreams, but very sophisticated materials in our pockets and bags that makes up our own personal technology. These use up planetary resources, too, and the problem of our resources will remain an issue in the future. For example, we use rare earth metals to make many of our technologies, including smartphones. There are nine known rare earth metals in the world, and 90% of these come from China, but we do not have an endless supply of these materials.

Will we continue to war over our resources? Or will we find more peaceful solutions by working together? Well, some believe help could be at hand. As unlikely as it may seem, there are people planning to mine the surface of the Moon. Asteroids are some of the richest sources of metals in the solar system, and that means that the Moon, which has been bombarded by asteroids, will have billions of years' worth of asteroidal metals lying in its soil for the taking.

Most of the heavy metals we mine here on Earth were also dumped here by asteroid impacts. At a mining facility in North Ontario, they're pioneering sampling equipment for mining the Moon. It is seen as the next wild frontier, but is mining the Moon really feasible? We've always used brute force to mine, with enormous drills and machines and bombs, but this won't necessarily work on the Moon. Asteroids hitting the Moon will have had their minerals vaporised on impact, scattering far and wide through the lunar soil. It could just be a case of scooping up the minerals on its surface, but even that is easier said than done. Machines for digging on the Moon have to deal with dust that behaves like none you'll ever see on Earth.

Scooping up Moon dust poses another problem you don't get on Earth. Those areas in permanent shadow could be frozen solid, and much colder. Whether scooping, digging or drilling, it's obvious humanity will have to get equipped before it tackles Moon dust as a resource. But that presents another problem, because flying heavy machinery up to the Moon is the last thing your want to do, engineers say. This is because launching and landing, soft landing, something on the Moon is very expensive. To imagine the expense they work with, it's estimated to land a one litre bottle on the Moon would take about a quarter of a million US dollars.

Earth from Moon satellite view
Will Moon mining become a viable industry one day?

Thus, even though the technology to harvest lunar soil is real, and mining its surface deposits are thought to be possible, it would would have to compete with terrestrial mining back at home. Competing against big business is always going to be a block, unless it become the cheaper option. The question in today's world is not whether the imaginable is possible, but whether it would be economically viable? New developments are transforming the way governments and big businesses look at Moon mining all the time, although - whether this audacious plan could work is uncertain as of 2013 - one thing is clear, it will only be achieved through cooperation.

It may even make more sense to keep lunar resources on the Moon itself, and use it as base for future space exploration. In terms of future resources, the real value of Moon mining is so much more than just a source of raw materials. A self-sufficient mining base would give us our first home away from home in the solar system. We could mine there to create the equipment we need in situ for deep space travel. It goes back to the futurists' theories about the human species needing to become one that has the tools to colonise and habitat other planets in our universe in order to secure its survival. The potential rewards from that are astronomical.

Scans of the Moon also show there is helium-3 on the Moon, and some people theorise this can be used as fuel for fusion reactors of the future, but the real question of resources comes into question when we speak about helium on Earth. There is only a finite supply. If we run our of helium on Earth, it will cause major problems. It's the best refrigerant we have, for example, all the diagnostic equipment we have in hospitals is cooled using helium.

Helium is the only atom species that escapes into space and leaves the Earth's orbit. The worst time-frame estimate we have in terms of running out of helium is a likeliness of 50 years, and a clear likelihood in the next century - so we have many problems we need to focus on, rather than killing each other for resources that can be utilised just as well by sharing. Evolution demands it; it used to be thought that being selfish would help a species survive, but the science now says that not only is it important to be generous, our species' survival depends on it.

Moreover, collaboration leads to great ideas. The search for alternative energy sources is relentless, and some projects are as bizarre as they are imaginative. Fuel cells that run on urine is just one such example, broken down by a cocktail of bacteria to generate electricity. There is no shortage of urine, even in remote places, and fuel cells like this could be used to power everything, from lights to mobile phones.

The collaboration of science and technology is also bringing our widening our understanding of nature. A spider's web is one of nature's most deadliest traps, and now scientists have discovered why some are so effective. As insects fly, the movement of their wings builds up positive charge, and that draws the web towards it. Scientific video documentation shows that the moment the two touch, it's all for the fly. And it will be all over for us too, if we don't learn to cooperate with each other. The future could be spider's web that catches us with our incessant flapping, unless we learn that the future will be kinder to us if we learn to live and work together in harmony. we are all hostage to the same kind of fortune.

If we work together, we can reap the rewards of new discoveries - and we live in an age where new discoveries are being uncovered all the time. For instance, a team of scientists in Florida have discovered that light not only makes plants grow, but can be used to change their flavour. The different wavelengths of different colours of light affect the molecules for taste and smell. We could see this technology in our supermarkets, and even in our fridges, to get the most of our grown produce of fruit and vegetables.

Food and energy resources are the main bulk of futurists' predictions because they are important issues for our survival. But luxury items will change, too. Case in point, modern fabrics may be unrecognisable in the future. Fabrics may change their colour simply by movement, like an opalescent butterfly wing does in nature. It is also an example of the micro-structural control that will come into fabrics and textiles. They are being termed as technical textiles. Electronics may also be filtered into our clothing (glove phones are already on the market), and in the future people predict that we will see interesting materials much more responsive to light and sound being used to fashion our clothes, for the tastes dictated by the times.

Smarter windows to make us more energy efficient?

Our building materials are becoming increasingly hi-tech. Self-darkening windows have been around for a while, you can even get them on aeroplanes now. However, a new smart window made by a team of researchers in California can now control the amount of heat and light that pass through it They use a window coating made of two things. One of them is semi-conductor nano-crystals, which acts as sponges absorbing heat from the Sun's rays. The other is a special glass which can darken when a current passes through it. When the two are put together and a voltage applied to it, the amount of heat and light passing through can be controlled. If you put smart windows like this in offices, or homes, or in cars, you could dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for air conditioning especially in hotter climates.

Clothing, food, gadgets - our childhood is always filled with fantastical images of the future, and one "gadget" we are always assured we'll be sharing that future with is the intelligent robot. We share our lives now with increasingly sophisticated technologies, but artificial intelligence has yet to emerge. When it does - if it does - it will mean that we shall have to learn to live in real harmony with them, too.

Over 30% of robots are currently built in Japan, and because of the Shinto religion, which believes there are spirits everywhere, people in Japan already believe robots have their own spirit, and is one reason why they are so popular and respected in that country. Living in harmony with a respect for all things is true for anything science turns from the imagination of fiction into the reality of fact.

Some robot enthusiasts still believe we are capable of creating machines that can deal with the mess and unpredictability of the real world. For instance, robots are now being built with sensors as sensitive as human touch, to make them much more useful than your average robot. It might not sound like much, but touch is essential to how we get feedback, and that is a weakness of robotics today, so a robot's sensitivity to subtle objects (such as a plastic cup) is a giant leap forward. Some have even more impressive tricks to make them alarmingly human. Some robots can now extract information from their touch, and are able to differentiate between a sponge and a stone simply by touching it. Elegant software and hardware have given robots an amazing sense of touch, an essential attribute that heralds in the humanoid robot of the future.

Naturally, a sense of touch alone won't bring about the intelligence robots we have come to know from the imagination of books and films. But a growing number of researchers are working on it. The scientists at Drexel University have set themselves an even more difficult challenge. They are working on designing a robot that can think like us. Why would we want to build robots that can think for themselves? Well, not only for the benefits they might be able to give us to help mine for resources in space and man flights into the deeper regions of the solar system, but working on them can also give us an insight into an even deeper cosmos - the mysteries of our mind.

These robots can not only help by going to places we can't go - like a nuclear disaster zone - their creation may also help us get closer to the mysteries of our own. In reality, such robots are still a work in progress. We would have expected robots to walk and use tools a long time before this, but all the human actions we make are incredibly hard for robots to replicate. We take them completely for granted, so imagine the challenge to create a robot that not only moves like us, but has the potential to think like us, as well.

Such robots may also be useful in therapeutic environments, such as with autistic children, and what is amazing, some believe, is how quickly we attribute mind and emotions to what is essentially an object, but behaves like a human - even if only remotely. So, will a robot ever be built that can do all the things we unconsciously do? Most of what we do everyday that is second nature to us is in our subconscious, and if intelligent robots are going to be part of our future, they will need to have the sophistication to understand that. It's a really important part of thinking like a human being, and some would argue that WE don't have that yet!

And if we somehow do manage to create thinking, learning artificial intelligence, will we be able to pad the years of human learning that it takes for walking, touching, and thinking into a shorter space of time? If we put aside the ethical implications until their theory becomes fact, for the initial building of such robots to be economically viable, they will need to be not only good learners, but quick ones, too. Talking about economics might seem like it cheapens the innovation of science, but throughout the centuries it has been the chase of awards and prizes that have spurred scientists on to achieve great things.

The internet was invented after such a project, so was the GPS system. Prizes have always been dangled as a carrot in science to change the direction of it, too. Look at DNA sequencing. James Watson publicly stated that he wanted to win the Nobel Prize, and that's why he decided to work on DNA, and that changed world history. So even if money isn't at the heart of most innovators, recognition is, and science prizes do mean something to those that want one. The Nobel Prize does inspire the next generation of scientists to bust open barriers and change world history.

Whatever scientists say about wanting to help the human race, most are ego-driven people. It is a self-serving attitude, but one that can ultimately provide a greater service. Yet, spurred on by teams working together for the betterment of humankind, the possibility that we may one day have a useful, functioning fully-autonomous robot remains a part of the futurists' dream.

De-constructing these dreams for a better future is a bit like de-constructing the movements we take for granted, we realise that achieving these dreams is in actuality very hard to do. The best way we will learn, as as the robots of the future no doubt will, by making mistakes. It is a massive investment into our future, and the best way to move forward will be to let our passions for a better future drive us there. It means we need to put an end to warring over superficial divisions, and begin to embrace you we really are.

As we gaze into the future, we have to recognise our diversity as a strength, when people from all races, colours and creeds can come together for the common good of the species, and of the entire planet. It is a vision of the future where humankind can overcome many of its problems to desire nothing more than a peaceful quest for knowledge, with one of its guiding principles being the peaceful coexistence of all living beings. It may sound like something out of Star Trek - or the Pixar movies - but it is a worthwhile dream. Because it's one with a future.

Yours in love,

Mickie Kent

Monday 19 August 2013

A World Without Love

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Rabbits kissing

“A world without love is unlovable.”
— Mickie Kent

In my "Profit with Love" article I had mentioned how there would soon be no women represented on the banknotes we use in England and Wales. Well, I was both happy and saddened to read that this would soon be rectified thanks to a woman who started a campaign over the matter. Why saddened? Well, the lady in question, Caroline Criado-Perez, said that she started receiving abusive tweets the day it was announced that author Jane Austen would appear on the newly designed £10 note.

We are a strange species. Messy, angry, confused, destructive and yet creative, tidy, calm, certain and loving. It all depends on who you see, or what you think. Perception is key; but whatever way you choose to look at things, if we base all perceptions on love, then it's impossible not to see us all as individual miracles.

Even the most sceptical human being can't fail to be moved by the miracle of life. Brands are always trying to sell us something, so whatever message they give will always be attached to inventive ways to make us part with our hard-earned cash - but have you seen that recent LG commercial? The one that tells us:

You have over 100 trillion cells. You crawl from 5 months after birth, and then the walk for the rest of your life. You use around 4,200 different words and have up to 50,000 thoughts everyday you make around 1,700 friends and meet 95,000 people in your lifetime, but it only takes a split second for you to fall in love. You'll share 540,000 laughs and cry 3,000 tears, and you'll dream 104,000 times. Everything about you inspires me, to me you are perfect.

This image of perfection mentions how we strive to communicate and reach out to people everyday. My six-part series "Love is Communication" focuses on just that very thing, and I have had literally hundreds of emails thanking me for the information I provided to be freely shared by like-minded people. Many called it a "game-changer", many called it "life-changing", but really the information is just common sense. It is similar to the hype over how the majority of us equate being single with loneliness. Loneliness is a state of mind and soul, not a state of relationship.

Indeed recent research seems to point to the idea that singles are growing in numbers, and so may become the dominant living unit, and therefore less social disadvantages/stigma will exist in staying single. Researchers such as Rutgers University sociologist, Deb Carr, say that over the past 30 years, the health gap between married and unmarried persons has narrowed to almost completely close. They go on to say that, once people accept their "singleness" - make peace with it so to speak - they do just as well as most married people.

The point is that being single doesn't mean you live in a world without love. The advice is you need to do being single right. As most researchers would concur, there's a big difference between living alone and living "isolated". My series on communication, and other articles I have published, all mention how long-term isolation can become deprivation, and is a no-no when it comes to your mental and spiritual and physical development.

Even the ways we tend to end our isolation can often have the opposite of effect of making us even more isolated from healthy social contact. Too much time spent in front of our screens may or may not make TV viewing distort our outlook on the real word, or playing too many games distort the way we interact with each other (but in the real-time world we generally don't wear headphones when we speak to each other and threaten to shoot to kill). Or just by isolating ourselves on the internet - and thus leaving ourselves vulnerable to the dangers of websex and hook-up sites that promote dangerous and risk-taking behaviours, which can eventually result in real life dangers ranging from sexually transmitted diseases to physical abuse and the loss of life.

Moreover, statistics show that people who are isolated from human contact, social connections, and activities are much more likely to die at an early age. But isolation and loneliness doesn’t only occur amongst singles. Many married people are very lonely and isolated in marriages where there is little to no interaction with each other. They face the same health risks of loneliness/isolation as singles do, say researchers. The key to staying healthy and happy - whether you live alone or with a spouse, friend, relative - is to maintain positive human relationships.

Often times, singles have a much more expanded network of friends and acquaintances than marrieds do and they make more frequent contact with them. Recently, research has shown that maintaining an active social life - activities with friends - is key to staying healthy and living longer. It would seem that singles have couples beat in that area. That seems a crazy statement to make, doesn't it? Especially on a blog so focused on its belief on love, but what the evidence is telling us is that - irrelevant of our relationship status - if our world is without love, then we are sentencing ourselves to our dark and dismal life.

The best way to live single, stay happy and healthy is to:
  1. Seek out more social connections – join groups, clubs of like-interest people you can meet up with once a week or every other week. Find a safe, trustworthy place to meet like-minded people with weekly, monthly daytime group activities.
  2. Go where people go - get out of your house, go out for dinner, movie, whatever. Yes, it's nice to have someone join you, but sometimes a friend is not available, so don't be afraid to go solo. Enjoy your own company, don't be afraid of it.
  3. Being single, you can make your lifestyle, living environment, hours, whatever you want it to be. Create the life you want, but be responsible in doing so and avoid reckless behaviour.
  4. If you're older, make sure your home is fall proof. Secure throw and area rugs to floors with rug tape, watch electrical wires cutting your path. If you live alone, you want to make sure that you don't fall where you could lie on a floor for hours. Always have a backup plan of who will come to check in on you if you don't answer the phone.
To sum it up, despite the best efforts of friends and family always trying to play matchmaker for you, there's absolutely nothing wrong with living single. In some instances, your married/partnered friends may even be a little jealous of your freedom in only having to account for yourself.

On the other hand, if you're single and truly hoping for a relationship, don't wait for it to find you, and don't settle for a fix-up if the person isn't a match for you. Take responsibility for your own happiness and put yourself out there. Similarly, if you're content living alone and living the single life, there's no reason why you can't be as content and healthy as happily married people. Take time to eat right, exercise, and live responsibly. Think of it as being happily married to you – promise to love, honour and take good care of yourself.

— For more on this subject read "Healing Loneliness with Love"

In years past, if you weren't married by the time you were 30, or if you were an older person who hadn't replaced a lost relationship within 3 years, your friends, family, and many people had that pitying tone when they asked how you were. It was like there was something inherently bad or too sad about being, or staying, single. There is nothing wrong with being single. What is important to note is not to take anything for granted.

As well as taking ourselves for granted, we tend to take time for granted, too. But time is a very strange concept. The theory of relativity is that you're right about your perception of time, and everyone else is wrong, and so our perception of it varies from person to person - when we are bored it feels like time is going much slower - and moment to moment. We have come to realise that time itself does actually go slower sometimes, for instance, nature messes with time near black holes in space.

But do we have a grasp on what time is? Time can play tricks on you, and it can impact on your life in surprising ways. The human concept of time is fundamental to our survival as a species. Many of the accomplishments of higher thought are down to our ability to visualise the future. It's how we make plans. We long believed that no other animal has been blessed with this simple but powerful way of thinking, but sensational new evidence has emerged that perhaps we're not as unique as we like to think. This miracle of perfection extends to all life.

For example, scientists enigmatically call our ability to visualise into the future as mental time travel. For decades it was thought to be a uniquely human ability, something that set is apart from every other animal. But new research in this area is redefining our relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom by reading the minds of rats.

The revelations came from experiments that allowed rats to choose what they ate. The rats know there are different flavoured foods dispensed in each corner, with a countdown tone telling them how long they had to wait for that flavour. Low pitch means they get the food quickly, high pitch means a long wait. In this way the rats haven't just learnt to look for the food with the shortest wait, they know where their favourite flavours are, too. When a hungry rat hears there will be a long delay for a favourite food, it hesitates. It seems to be using a very human-like kind of thinking, weighing up the options about whether it is worth the wait. In other word's it's planning ahead.

However, simply interpreting an animal's behaviour is not hard scientific evidence of its thinking. Scientists found a way to tune in to the rat's receptor cells, brain cells that are active when a rat is thinking about a specific place. And it was discovered that sometimes a rat wasn't just thinking about where it was, but where else it could go next. Studies have interpreted that as being an imagination of another location. This is first evidence that this special skill of being able to plan ahead is not uniquely human, but is a skill we share with other animals.

The interesting thing about this is that it says something about evolution. Whatever it is we do as we're mental time travelling it occurred in animal evolution at some point where we had a common ancestor with rats. Therefore, if it has been conserved for that long, it means it's much more fundamental to our survival than just planning ahead for your next meal. If it goes that far back in the tree, you'd assume primates, birds, we be candidates too. We also share other inherent development stages, those that are built in to how your body will function. For instance, with our body's circadian rhythms and how a baby "knows" to be born at nine months.

The intelligence of dolphins

Studies are showing that dolphins are some of the smartest animals on the planet. It seems they could even rival humans - at least when it comes to remembering their friends. Every dolphin makes a whistling noise that is unique to that animal, and researchers in the US have just shown that dolphins can recognise the whistles of companions, even if they haven't seen them for 20 years. The evidence suggests that long-tern memory plays a role in social bonding in dolphins, just as it does in humans.

As a human animal we are extremely arrogant in the way we judge intelligence; we judge other non-human animals' ability to think about things based on ours. But trying to survive, trying to find new places, trying to remember where you've gone, trying to imagine going forward should be a fundamental ability of most animals. Similarly, with such revealing scientific research, studying our universal also makes us humble. It shows us we have to get away from this anthropocentric way of thinking of animals - both our brain and a mouse brain is a bunch of particles doing a very complicated computation. It gives us fantastic insight how complex all live is at any level, and we are not on top of the tree, but merely one component in the circle of life.world order

When we look at cosmic history, compared to our planet's history, we are a very tiny dot in the scheme of things. The age of the universe is something that scientists have wrestled with for a long time, although now it is believed to be 14 billion-odd years old, but there is a huge gap in our knowledge known as the Cosmic Dark Ages. Scientists can trace the story of the universe right back to the Big Bang, but there's an important part missing. The time when the first stars were born and started to forge the very stuff our world is made of.

Love the world you're in

So when it comes to how stars and light itself began, we're quite literally in the dark. What happened to the universe in its formative years? Although we understand the physics, we can't simulate on a computer how those first stars came to be. The universe starts with a spark of light, and then there is dark until the first stars are able to form and produce starlight, initiating what we have come to know as the Cosmic Dawn. Although we can see flashes of energy fro the first atoms, we've never been able to see how they became the first stars.

The universe's teenage years are not as yet a part of our knowledge. Although scientists have pictures of the evolution of the whole universe, this is a really important exception - this one tantalising gap where those early stars began to forge matter that built our universe, transforming simple gasses into the building blocks of life. When we say we are made of stardust, this is when it all began. But we've never been able to detect those first flickers of visible light.

The Cosmic Dark Ages have remained beyond the scope of even our most powerful telescopes, but now scientists have found a way to shed light on that distant darkness. The low frequency array LOFAR mapping radio-waves from the time the universe was born. Scanning the dark fog of hydrogen that made up the universe before the stars and galaxies formed, to scan for tiny little holes that signal when the stars formed. It's painting a picture of the universe which we don't have. We may finally see what the first dawn looked like, a postcard from when the universe became recognisable to us. Thanks to this technology, for the first time we can scan the dark fog of hydrogen that made up the universe before the stars and galaxies formed. Gaps in the fog are the give-away signs where the gas turned into the first stars. We are in effect looking for tiny holes in the universe.

It is believed that gradually the hydrogen gas was amplified through gravity into big clumps, galaxies, stars, planets, and to all of us here. No one knows whether they were stars or black holes came first. Some think super-massive black holes started first. We used to think of black holes as the bad guys of the universe; they just ate things up and destroyed things, but now we're beginning to think they were very important in the whole formation of galaxies. We often think of black holes as vacuum cleaners that suck anything up, but they now thought to be actually very hard to feed - like a child, that spews out his food - and maybe in a similar way it was those beasts that first lit up the universe by this sloppy feeding process.

But this technology also highlights something else, about how we need to work together to get the results that will yield the best answers for our times. Radio telescopes are nothing new, we've been using them to map the skies for decades, so why haven't they been able to reach back to the cosmic Dark Ages yet? At that distance hydrogen's radio waves become stretched and you need a dish the size of Europe to make sense of them. LOFAR in the United Kingdom is part of just one of a network of listening posts, working together they create the equivalent of a Europe-sized radio telescope.

There is a huge fibre network that links the stations together and takes all the data to Holland where it is put together by a massive supercomputer. It's painting a picture of the universe we don't yet have, poised to finally show us what the first dawn looked like. It looks like a ridiculously low-tech solution to a fundamental problem, but it's an elegant bit of physics, going back to the early days where huge amounts of money weren't thrown at problems, but we still managed to discover huge amounts about the universe.

Love the body you're in

Before we get nostalgic, another one of the major ways we want to slow down time, or control it, is when it comes to human ageing. Bats may seem an unusual candidate for seeking out eternal life, but in nature, there is a hard, fast rule - how long you can live for is typically predicted by how big or small you are. Small things live very fast, think of a mouse. Whereas big things live much more slowly, they live in a slower lane. This is always said in the number of heartbeats as well, as it is a rough estimate of metabolic rate. The faster you life, the shorter your lifetime.

BatsBats defeat this rule. They are very unusual in that they live very, very fast, and yet can live for an extremely long time. So, the secret of an extended health span lies within their genome. Generally animals have a certain amount of time that they can keep their cells regenerating, and then they stop. In each one of our cells we have all our DNA. And along each length of our chromosomes, we have these repetitive regions known as telomeres. There's a big problem in how DNA replicates, because every time your cell divides and replicates your DNA gets shorter and shorter.

Telomeres are at the end of our chromosomes, which allow us to deal with all this replication. There is a theory that cells can only replicate so many times, because what is believed to happen is that as the telomeres get shorter and shorter they get to a critical point where the cell dies. It is similar to exactly how many heartbeats you can have over a lifetime. In regard to bats, therefore, scientists have been asking if bats have some way of lengthening these telomeres or stopping them from actually degrading? So instead of nasty, blood-sucking vampires, next time you think of bats, think of them as holding the secret to everlasting youth!

The idea is if we can find the genetic factor that makes the bat so remarkable, we may be able to use it for ourselves. So what is it that bats are doing? As we age some of our genes get switched on and off; there's an ageing related disregulation. Do the bats not experience this? If not, then what is it they're doing that allows them control of the regulation? And then the important question is how would we do this?

Having such a long way to go on this subject shows just how difficult it is to slow down time - in many ways. Another element of regeneration is rejuvenation; when it comes to internal organs breaking down or wearing out, we've been relying since the 1950s on transplants. There are remarkable new developments that could be from the realms of science-fiction, where scientists are now experimenting with growing organs and transplants from stem cells. The most potent stem cells are embryonic ones, as their job is to create every other type cell in our bodies. After six days if doing that, they're gone. It is the metaphorical Biblical God within us creating the world in six days.

But there is another type of stem cell we all still have, these are adult stem cells. They help our bodies repair themselves. Scientists believe they can use these stem cells to build organs that matches the body, kind of like bespoke human transplantation. Experiments are now trying to replicate one of our mist complex organs, the heart - which is an extremely complex three-dimensional structure with an intricate vascular system. Vasculature, or blood vessels, are really the Holy Grail of this type of tissue engineering. Doctors expect to be able to transplant hearts of these kinds into a human in less than ten years.

One day, it might be possible to generate any human organ using this technology. You could grow these organs when and where you needed them, and you wouldn't need anti-rejection drugs, because biologically they would already be part of the patient. What is currently confined to a laboratory, may in the future become a normal part of medicine. The motto behind it is to give the body the tools it needs and then allow the stem cells we have to do their job. It's cutting-edge science, and the type of experimentation we can now do in these areas in nothing short of spectacular.

Love the time you're in

“We speak of Time and Mind, which do not easily yield to categories. We separate past and future and find that time is an amalgam of both. We separate good and evil and find that Mind is an amalgam of both. To understand, we must grasp the whole.”
— Isaac Asimov

In science, working together is reaping more benefits that ever before. There is a growing movement that describe themselves as hackers - not in the old computer science term - but people who liberate technology, apply imagination and possibly achieve world-changing results.

For instance, we have been using tools for thousands of years, but recently those tools have become a lot more sophisticated and our relationship with them has changed. Back in the day, we understood how the gadgets in our lives worked, we could take them apart and fix them. But these days, modern gadgets are altogether more complex. We don't really understand how they work, and it can make us afraid to open them up and learn their mysteries. However, virtual pioneers are now part of a new hacker movement aiming to change all that. It's all about unlocking the potential of technology for yourself.

In this respect, hacking is taking what exists, improving upon it and sharing it. The lure of getting creative with technology is bringing people together. It might sound like just a bit of fun, but the urge to make things is fundamental human; it's a chance for everyone to unleash their inner creativity. Just the act of turning one object into another means you not only learn a lot, but it empowers you - and that is the beauty of hacking proponents say. It can also make a difference to all our lives, by bringing cutting edge technology to the masses because the recycling of component parts means it is a lot more cheaper.

We do knock the games industry for the violence and the isolation it creates amongst its community users, but the industry has made technology so cheap - such as sensors and graphic cards - that scientists have been able to utilise parts to use for life-saving equipment and sophisticated detection warning systems (such as for earthquakes). Gaming is even a good way of crowd-sourcing, to get people together to help power studies and research in citizen science projects.

Arguably, this is where real creativity is unlocked, where it is not only fun, but pushes people to think outside of the box, turning objects that may have been designed for recreation use into an object that could save lives. From virtual technology to real-world value at an astonishing low cost - this is a prime example of how working together is more important than ever. For instance, the Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by a non-profit charity - a complete computer that will work when you add a keyboard and monitor - which only costs £30-40 to make.

In developing countries, finding cheap ways to develop things is the norm, but in developed countries the uses are endless. Inventions such as where scientists in Japan have managed to embed hundreds of electronic sensors into durable, stretchy super thin film could change the way we look after our health. A patch made up of these sensors could replace all the bundles of tubes and wires that we currently use to monitor everything from heart rate to muscle activity. The patch is designed to be worn anywhere on the body like a second skin, or even inside it.

In another example, a species that knows all about working together, the spotlight is on bees at the moment because their numbers are falling. But scientists think they've worked out how their beautiful geometric honeycomb is made thanks to bees heating the beeswax of an original circle, allowing surface tension to pull the points into the shape we recognise, which look so regular they almost look human made. Or how about levitating droplets of water on sound waves? Researchers in Switzerland have for the first time used a technique to mix liquids together without them touching anything that could contaminate them. This could radically change how we handle everything, from DNA samples to hazardous chemicals. Answers and innovations that have resulted in cooperation - amazing what working together does for us!

We haven't even skimmed the tip of the iceberg in terms of innovation. From portable water filtrations systems to clothes and helmets that seem normal but become inflatable "air-bags" during a crash (by design students in Sweden), or best of all, to using a dangerous animal's own genes to combat its own threat. If I asked you which animal had killed more humans than any other in history, what would you're answer be? Would it be mosquitoes? Now a team of British and Brazilian scientists are engineering mosquitoes for a mission that could save millions of lives. Ethical issues aside, scientists say they are part of a battle against a disease even harder to control over malaria - dengue fever, a disease which has no cure or vaccine.

The deadly bite of the mosquito

The mosquito is one of the most successful and one of the most deadly animals on the planet. And now the complexity of its main weapon has been revealed in astonishing detail. For the first time, researchers have filmed beneath the skin of the host as the mosquito bites. Videos show how formidable a creature the mosquito is - its main needled-like mouth part is not rigid but bent, almost at a right-angle. It's made up of six different mouth pieces, thin filaments that help to pierce the skin and to grip onto the flesh. The main tube splits into two, with one side putting out saliva while the other side is sucking blood. It is hoped the information will give us a better understanding in finding defences against a mosquito bite.

Dengue has become an epidemic in Brazil, and affects over 100 million people every year. The way it spreads so fast - reaching as far as southern Italy - is what makes it so dangerous. Eradicating the mosquitoes that carry the disease is difficult as they reproduce so much, but some scientists believe that genetically modifying mosquitoes so that they did not make it to adulthood. This level of tampering with nature is dangerous, some say, but done ethically, others believe it could have a good future. But scientists also do self-experimentation, there are many unsung heroes that have tested their experiments on themselves for the technological and medical advancements.

Two men who really did do it for themselves was Larry Patrick and Colonel John Stapp - both of whom tested their bodies to the limits of their endurance to help humankind. Back in the 19050s before crash test dummies were invented, scientists had to experiment on themselves, and these two pioneers tested how the human body would react to high speeds and collisions. They endured great pain and discomfort, but both lived well into their eighties with good health.

And if we don't want to be left behind, then we need to hook up to these movements of knowledge and togetherness. Find you flow, link up, and start creating, or manifesting the dreams that will change or build a new world for you to succeed in all that you desire. These are opening possibilities for new ways for humans to live their dreams.

Furthermore, working together, we can update and shift our energetic success patterns, and enhance the energies of our intuitive guidance in a way that resonates with our soul. You can attain your highest dreams with much more ease, grace and joy in a lot less time. But the vast majority of people have lots of habitual patterns that are outdated. Updating them mentally is the key to manifesting your new dreams.

Ready to get your groove on? Have you ever felt frustrated with manifesting your dreams with visualisation? If your answer is yes, you're not alone. Many people understand the basics of manifestation, but when it comes to actually applying the mechanics of it to manifest your desires, this can be a little trickier than some folks realise. To help you with the manifest applications that will aid you to see consistent results in your life, here are 7 steps to gaining your manifesting mojo:
  1. Always start from what I call a "Happy Place". People often overlook this one. You must always make sure you're in a "feel good" positive vibration before you ever even think about setting an intention or goals, so that the goals you set will be infused with the same positive energy. One way to immediately increase your vibration is to think of one thing that you're grateful for in your life right now, no matter how big or small. Do this and you'll be surprised how quickly your energy will shift towards the positive!
  2. Set a clear intention to enlist the help of the Universe. Write down your intention and repeat it each day WITH CONVICTION so you signal the Universe that you're ready to receive the help and guidance you need to make your intention a reality.
  3. Create a clear, measurable goal. Get clear on exactly what you want. If you want to make more money, exactly how much do you want to make? If you want to attract the relationship of your dreams, what qualities or characteristics does this person possess? Get clear on what you want so that the Universe will know what to send your way - and when you receive it, you'll be able to recognise it.

    Is the best goal no goal?

  4. Create powerful affirmations that support your goals. Create affirmations that describe what life would be like once you achieve your goal. Ideally they should also detail the thoughts you'll be thinking and the actions you'll be taking to move closer to your goals. Keep them short and powerful, make sure you use positive, present tense language, and say them aloud daily for maximum results.
  5. Visualise with emotion daily. Take even just a few minutes each day to visualise what it is you want to manifest. The most potent time of the day to do this is the last 5 minutes before falling asleep or just when you wake up. Also, when you are visualising, make sure you're really allowing yourself to fully feel all of the emotions you'll experience once you've manifested the object of your desire. This significantly multiplies your manifesting abilities and helps you to learn to love and embrace every emotion.
  6. Take consistent action, big or small, in the direction of your goals. The Universe rewards action! So each day, aim to take one action that will create some forward momentum towards what it is you want to achieve - and you'll be opening the door for the Universe to send even more light-bulb ideas, "chance" meetings and other unexpected opportunities your way.
  7. Expect wonderful! Once you've followed all of the 6 steps above, your final step is to expect the abundance of the Universe to flow in your direction. Life is your wonderground! Keep your eyes open for the people, opportunities and resources the Universe will send into your path, and be ready to reach out and grab them when they do!

As a bonus along with these 7 steps are two more that will help you. Meditation is also an important part of visualisation, as it can help you get "in the zone" - and breathing is THE huge factor to help you achieve this. It will help keep you focused, motivated and its mindful attributes can enhance your consciousness to greater awareness.

There is a breathing method that is said to even help you lose weight while you do it, so for those interested they can utilise these two steps into their breathing programme. Note that the steps below are for you to do standing up, but you can do them just as easily sitting down to get you in the right frame of mind before you begin manifesting.

  1. Tighten the buttocks and place one foot in front of your body while placing 90% of your body weight on your back foot. (Or tighten the buttocks whilst seated.) Once you're in position, breath in for 3 seconds while lifting your arms above your head. Then exhale contracting all the muscles in your body to help you get all the air out, for 7 seconds. It sounds easy enough, but most of the air comes out in the first couple of seconds, leaving you to flex your abs as you run out of breath.
  2. The second method requires you to stand up (or sit up) straight and tighten the buttocks. Place one hand on your abdomen and another on your lower back, and breath in for 3 seconds while sucking in your midsection. Finally, exhale for 7 seconds and suck in your stomach even more.

A happy side-effect to manifesting in this way is that you can also have fantastic, inspired day, and know you have come closer to building a better world for yourself.

Keep in mind, that if you're tired of working too hard and then crashing, or trying to emulate other successful people with limited results, then groove to your own "single" beat first, to understand your own unique pulse, before you rush to pair it with another's own unique chime. This is how we need to be "single" and yet not be isolated from people power, whether than be in like-minded support groups, or connecting with your twin flame. It's about building your own world - with love.

Yours in love,

Mickie Kent

Monday 12 August 2013

Love Your Brain-3

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Click to go back to the main menu for Mickie Kent's Love Your Mind, Body and Soul Series

“The brain is more than the black box to our flight system. It is more than a computer. It is more than the sum of its parts, and it is more than the sum of all our body parts. It is as vital to our existence as the heart, and yet, without normal brain function, even though the heart can keep us alive, "who we are" can die or disappear. Conversely, the brain on its own - pickled in some laboratory jar - is no good either. Its deepest secrets are lost to us. So, we must love our brain, because we love our true self, which is an indivisible union that creates a conduit for the universal energy that sustains the life within us.”
— Mickie Kent

The real question many want to know is will we ever be able to replicate our brain in terms of a computer or hardware where we could download our conciousness, and thus escape disease, ageing and all the other complications that come with organic - and ultimately fragile and mortal - life.

As mentioned towards the end of part two to this mini-series, is this what philosophers mean when they predict technology will replace us in the future? But even though we may succeed in downloading our memories, and even create hardware that functions with as much sophistication as a brain, will we ever be able to download our soul - or that part of the mind we label as consciousness? I write about this in more detail in my two articles "The Love System" and "Delve into the Mysteries with Love", which reveals the latest scientific thought behind such theories.

However, when it comes to unlocking the power of the brain, this is more than just about the quest for immortality, or lengthening our time spans on Earth, it's about actually going in search if what makes us who we are - because before we can download it into a sophisticated bit of machinery, we have to find it first, and prove it exists. Now, naturally, we perceive we exist, so we must, and so arguably are evidence of that existence - but because we have failed thus far to be able to quantify or measure human consciousness, it still eludes the narrow grasp of rational scientists.

Yet, if we can replicate our carbon bodies into more sturdy matter such as silicon, then some argue it is not what the skull is made of, but what is inside it that counts. The question is how do we find the inner ingredients, and can it exist without the complete union of the organic body? Do we need the physical senses, the heart and the gut (which both are believed to have mini-minds of their own), the brain's own physical make-up of matter and synapses all working in harmony to create the perfect environment for not only life, but the font of where our human nature (our authentic self) springs from, exist?

Sometimes to the most complex questions, comes the most simple answers. Our mental life is only part of what we think, or feel, or do, but how we relate to others - which is just as important as communication is the vital drive to human nature. We have seen how it is through social unions that branched us off in our evolution to where we are today. Although we are born with a brain with all the tools and potential ready to fire, it does not develop in a vacuum. As we have seen in the first part of this series, we need to do a lot of learning to make the brain function to capacity.

Of course, love is a huge factor here, too, for the development of a healthy, cognizant brain, true love is food that keeps on giving. That is why we need to show our brain love, so that it can be nurtured into its most beneficent state to help us achieve our highest potential. And though technology may take us beyond the natural capacity of our brains, and help us do this quicker, wouldn't we lose who we are?

This is the question, with all the implications of ethics and morals, that has been worrying philosophers since we began to question our origins and the very nature of our existence. We exist, therefore we are - but just what are we? And where does the hub of "who we are" lie? If through technology, our universe could evolve super-intelligence, would this naturally follow that it would include super-consciousness, too?

Super-intelligence, by the definition given to us by our great thinkers, does not mean a "really clever human" but something that far outstrips anything our intelligence can do. It would be vastly superior to us. We obviously can't conceive what a super-intelligence might be able to achieve, any more than a kitten can appreciate quantum mechanics, but we can at least quantify things by thinking about computers as a comparative subject. Their processing power and the sorts of calculations they can do, the complexities they can simulate have evolved at break-neck speed. Computers may even one day evolve to test the underlying principles that set our laws of nature so precisely attuned to foster life, to play with the parameters of creation and see what might evolve. This "playing God" might seem to exhibit a part of our nature, but does that mean intelligence - and the curiosity it awakes - is the spark that ignites life into human nature, or the litmus test for it? Is it both? Or is the proverbial "chicken and egg" question, where we ask what came first?

The subject of computers simulating complex worlds such as ours also raises the question - could we ourselves be in such a simulation? Could what we think is the universe, be some sort of "vault" of heaven, rather than the real thing? And in using logic to cut out "God" from the equation, it takes us back to where we started. Could our super-intelligence be the god we have always imagined?

Well, the simulation hypothesis - that we are currently living in a computer simulation - some say should be understood literally. It's not just in a metaphorical sense, some believe we are literally living in a simulation created by some advanced species, in a computer they had built in their universe. If there is such a thing as a multiverse, then there will be on some of them intelligence that has evolved to advance way beyond our own, with the capabilities to create such hardware, and we are merely a simulated universe in their own computers "playing God" to see what will evolve.

In such a theory, everything we see, and our brains themselves, would just be parts of this simulation. And if we are simulations, might we have been created for a purpose? Might creation not be down to chance after all? Might there be a grand design and a grand designer after all - just not as we imagined, but just as our ancestors believed?

But are we just creatures crawling across a board in a simulated game of life? Are we little more than blips of data? There is evidence that some simulated games (however basic) could exhibit some of the properties of the "real" universe, but we can't be certain to any extent that the laws governing our natural world are like those games - but we do know that the laws governing our natural world are simple.

Does Destiny play chess?

We can write these rules down in simple equations, ad get simple computer programmes to simulate them, and from great simplicity we derive immense complexity. But even if our existence was inside some simulation, are we still real for all that? Speculations about the nature of reality, and whether it might be an illusion or a dream (indeed some great designer's dream) goes back for hundreds of years. Philosophers have been pondering if we are merely watching shadows on the cave of a wall, and believe them to be real because we have nothing more real to compare it with. But does it mean those shadows aren't real?

Even if the simulation hypothesis were true, surely it would just mean that reality was slightly different than what we thought it was, not that we suddenly discovered it didn't exist. For most practical intents and purposes, in such a scenario we have no reason to get depressed by the philosophical implications of such arguments. If we feel ourselves to be real, then we are. If the everyday aspects of life are real to us, then they are. It could be a simple as that. It's all going to feel the same, theorists surmise, regardless of whether we truly have free will or not, or if our life and universe as we know it, is "real" in some sense other than which we initially believed it to be.

It also doesn't really matter if the universe is going to end in a Big Rip or Big Crunch, for all the thinking we like to do about the big things, what really touches us emotionally are the everyday little things. It is these small interactions that makes our life feel real - and even if we were all living in some "Matrix-movie" style scenario, if this is where we are happiest, the "real" world can be the true illusion.

Our brain, for all its great thinking potential, goes where the heart is - or where the love is. More importantly, some believe it's these little things that make us who we are. The mundane, and the small, as simple as a single breath, and yet when focused upon with great mindfulness can unlock the vastness of the mind than even any great philosophical debate could hope to achieve.

In the ways that matter to us we are real enough. Whatever force has guided our creation, mathematical or intelligent, it has constructed from simple atoms, a being capable of thinking beyond the limits of physical investigation. These arguments show the limit of the reach of the human intellect - where our corner of the world is indeed a very, very small corner in a vastly bigger universe than we had ever imagined, where we might never, even in principle, be able to reach out to the other parts - while at the same time these arguments also emphasise the astounding reach of the human intellect.

We can begin to formulate theories and hypotheses that extend way beyond the world around us which we have evolved to cope with - of our birth, survival and death - because it turns out that our brain has the potential to grapple with fundamental questions of existence and the nature of the world.

So we shouldn't ignore or sideline philosophy or the big thinkers - who are really the big questioners. Not sticking myself in that category by any means, but you may have noticed that in the first half of this final to my mini-series, I have asked a lot of questions. There is a reason for this.

It is in asking questions that we not find the answers, but realise that asking questions IS the answer.

It is very important that we do not dismiss any ideas, just because we think they are irrational, or their arguments weak. They may have merits we do not understand. In searching for an alternative explanation to the religious accounts of our creation, cosmologists have uncovered a possibility that seems incredibly similar - an all-powerful, all-knowing, super-intelligent being. An entity whose motives are unfathomable, and whose existence is unprovable.

if we did dismiss out of hand every theory that seemed silly to us, we would have dismissed atoms, black holes and all sorts of other marvellous things which we have no trouble in believing in today, because it can be quantified, if not entirely explained to any great satisfaction, by the methods laid down by science. And when you ask a basic question about the nature of reality, don't you expect an answer that is a bit "out there"?

The universe, like our brains, indeed as part of our brains, is "out there" and mysterious, and untrappable - and that is indeed part of its charm and allure. If you believe there is no particular reason why our human brain should have evolved just far enough to be able to assimilate the deeper levels of reality, than the point is that we can, and we are doing so. And what is amazing is that we have made so much sense as we have done out of the external world. What's been discovered about our universe in the last decade or two, in the history of science, will be one of its most exciting chapters, with the best yet to come.

The key question of course the one I began this series with - which is what we still don't know. And that is the challenge for the coming century, but for now, maybe for us pioneers who love our brain, rather than lose ourselves in the grandiose vastness of existence, we can go small, as small as the breath, and focus on our own little slice of the universe - our brain. When we hold up our brain, what do we see? What does it reveal about us?

Neuroscience: a mirror to human nature

Many experts believe in the importance of neuroscience as a way of revealing previously hidden aspects of human nature and as a tool to help us overcome some of our most disabling problems. The advances we make in understanding the brain have, and will continue to have, a significant and lasting impact on our lives.

The revolution in understanding neurochemistry (however misunderstood it might be by joe public) has brought us important medical treatments for mental illness and neurological disorders, while the study of brain-injured patients has demonstrated that individual brain circuits make specialised contributions to our emotions and behaviour.

Research out of the University of Michigan reveals that good mood can boost brain power in older adults. The study showed that older people, after being given simple mood boosters like small bags of candy or thank you cards, did better on tests of decision making and memory - suggesting that older adults can improve decision making and their mood by putting on a happy face.

Boost your memory naturally.

Another study suggested that a smile-prone personality may be tightly linked to longevity. In the study, researchers looked through the photographs of several hundred professional baseball players who had begun their major league careers before 1950. Then, they compared their snapshots with health records. And it turned out that players who smiled the most in their pictures had mostly outlived their more straight-faced peers. In fact, players with the biggest, brightest grins were only half as likely to have died during any given year of the study period. (Here's another way your looks might affect your longevity.)

How smiles - or a lack thereof - may affect health status isn't totally clear. But we know that how you feel on the inside often shows on the outside. And happiness and emotional well-being have hundreds of health benefits. This is not merely about a sunny disposition about what smiles say, or stats on smiles. Scientists are trying to figure out the mechanism of the Sun's rays on the pineal gland, hypothalamus and the brain, suggesting that all the body needs is proper, natural energy to survive. The nergy from the Sun and the energy that gives us live is one and the same, so evidence that it would help power up our brains is nio big surprise. Our mood also lifts during the summer months, which comes full circle back to the theory of how a good outlook can benefit the brain.

Back to the Michigan University's findings, the idea for the study comes out of prior research on children that revealed they became more creative and had better cognitive skills when they were in a good mood. Since cognitive decline occurs naturally in ageing, researchers wondered if mood-boosting would help overcome some of this decline. The Michigan study was the first to show the power of positive moods in helping older people with these specific brain tasks. The researchers concluded that boosting mood in older adults - which can be done in various ways - improved their memory and helped them make decisions better.

Where does the brain store memory?

Memory is a basic function of your brain. If your cells are healthy, they communicate back and forth to your hippocampus - the brain's filing room, a region of the brain known to be important for learning and remembering - dropping memories in and taking them back out as needed. As we age that process takes longer because we don't have as many brain cells working together. Neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's further disrupt this communication as plaque - small clusters of protein - builds up to toxic levels. Eventually, patients are unable to access that filing room at all. The area of the brain responsible for processing smell is one of the first affected in Alzheimer's patients.

Lead scientist Ruth Propper, of Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey, says there is research which suggests simple body movements can improve memory by temporarily changing the way the brain functions. Memory can be improved simply by clenching the fists, this study suggests. Clenching the right hand for 90 seconds helps in memory formation, while the same movement in the left improves memory recall.

Past research has shown that right hand clenching activates the left hemisphere of the brain, while left hand clenching activates the right hemisphere. This has been associated with emotions - for example right hand clenching with happiness or anger, and left hand clenching with sadness or anxiety.

Memory processing is thought to use both sides of the brain - the left for encoding memories and the right for retrieving them. Future research will examine whether hand clenching can also improve other mental processes, for example verbal or spatial abilities, and memory of pictures and places, as well as words.

In such experiments, we look to brains to help us with new technologies, how our brains can be overwhelmed by them, or even how our brains are affected as children, during our most important stages of learning and developing intelligence. For example, Canadian researchers say the reason we struggle to recall memories from our early childhood is down to high levels of neuron production during the first years of life.

Read how to learn faster, deeper and better.

The formation of new brain cells increases the capacity for learning but also clears the mind of old memories. This could be behind the absence of long-term memory events from early childhood, known as infantile amnesia. Neurogenesis, or the formation of new neurons in the hippocampus, reaches its peak before and after birth. It then declines steadily during childhood and adulthood.

Do human cells have memory?

Since childhood, ever since we have been able to speak and form memories, we have been questioning why we are here and what we're meant to be doing. Some academics believe that a significant portion of our long-term memories date from the time when we're between 15 and 25 years of age, because it's a time of particularly fervent self-definition, and we use adolescent memories as a kind of fixative of personal character, foundation myths we tell ourselves about how we came to be the people we are.

Can we wipe the slate and start again?

Memory is complex, precious and all powerful; our memories are malleable emotionally driven and can live on for decades. Quite simply memory holds the key to who we are, but it's also the lock, because loss of memory equals loss of self and identity - think of sufferers of Alzheimer's disease. Some have described such a future as the dark night of the soul. When our brain is eclipsed from its energy, our essence falls into darkness.

But although the onset of memories may mark the onset of self-realisation, a meandering exploration of the emotional texture of memories - which are simply echoes of the past reverberating in our heads - this can become just a poetic paraphrase, rather than an explanation into what makes us tick. We can also allow our past to hold our authentic self hostage.

Memories can run out of our control, we know the sheer brute force of a memory that forces it way through to the conscious mind whether you like it or not; and some of us may need to physically "move" our memories in the brain when they take over our lives.

Neurologists tell us that memories are made up of dynamic connections, and through certain therapies we can learn to rewire or relearn our past experiences. Something in the wiring, within that circuit, needs to be changed via talking therapies or programmes specifically designed to rewire the brain and detach us from the shackles of the past.

Click here to rewire your mindset for success!

In the past the thinking was that the brain was inflexible, that memories were set, but today it is believed that the brain is without doubt very malleable. As you grow and age, and lay down your memories, you are building new connections - because as neurons fire together, they wire together. As you're learning, you're building new associations, but sometimes these can be erroneous.

Due to personal or public trauma we can disrupt a connection, or make one that is so debilitating for us it stops us from living our lives. But if the connections in our brain can be altered, they also be strengthened and improved. The Latin term Tabula rasa is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects of one's personality, social and emotional behaviour, and intelligence.

The term in Latin equates to the English "blank slate" (or more accurately "scraped tablet", which refers to writing on a slate sheet in chalk) but comes from the Roman tabula or wax tablet, used for notes, which was blanked by heating the wax and then smoothing it to give a tabula rasa.

It's believed the writings of great thinkers such as Avicenna, Ibn Tufail and Aquinas on the tabula rasa theory stood unprogressed and untested for several centuries. In fact, our modern idea of the theory is mostly attributed to John Locke's expression of the idea in "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" in the 17th century. In Locke's philosophy, tabula rasa was the theory that the (human) mind is at birth a "blank slate" without rules for processing data, and that data is added and rules for processing are formed solely by one's sensory experiences.

As understood by Locke, tabula rasa meant that the mind of the individual was born "blank", and it also emphasised the individual's freedom to author his or her own soul. Each individual was free to define the content of his or her character - but his or her basic identity as a member of the human species cannot be so altered.

It is from this presumption of a free, self-authored mind combined with an immutable human nature that the Lockean doctrine of "natural" rights derives. Locke's idea of tabula rasa is frequently juxtaposed with Thomas Hobbes's viewpoint of human nature, in which humans are endowed with inherent mental content – such as with selfishness.

Tabula rasa is used by 18th Century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to support his argument that warfare is an advent of society and agriculture, rather than something that occurs from the human state of nature. Since tabula rasa states that humans are born with a "blank-slate" Rousseau uses this to suggest that humans must learn warfare.

The tabula rasa concept became popular in social sciences in the 20th century. Early ideas of eugenics posited that human intelligence correlated strongly with social class, but these ideas were rejected, and the idea that genes (or simply "blood") determined a person's character became regarded as racist. By the 1970s, scientists such as John Money had come to see gender identity as socially constructed rather than rooted in genetics.

Tabula rasa is also featured in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. Freud depicted personality traits as being formed by family dynamics (such as the Oedipus complex, etc.). Freud's theories imply that humans lack free will, but also that genetic influences on human personality are minimal. In psychoanalysis, one is largely determined by one's upbringing.

Connect to love for a healthy brain.

Does the brain make the mind, or the mind make the brain? We many never know conclusively, but whether we are a blank slate at birth or a product of inheritance, some today believe that we are a mixture of the two - and of neither at the same time. That there might yet be a new theory out there to better explain why we are the way we are. But exploring our world, and now beyond is what humans do, its in our genome, and it is no surprise that this curiosity is also diverted towards ourselves.

This exploration of our minds and bodies is eventually going to come to a point where we realise that the real secret, the real way to love our brains, is to connect it to our emotions - to be harmonised in such a way that one works in union with the other, to compliment rather than be a chimp to our success. For loving the brain doesn't mean - as the science shows - that we need to demonise our emotions in favour of a completely rational mind, or vice versa. Neither should we allow the destructive sides of our emotions control or sabotage our efforts to get on in life.

Rather, we need to understand both our feelings and our mind, and mediate between the two to capture a synergistic harmony which will bring us in balance with our authentic self and our external world - real or not as the case maybe.

Read more in this series: -1 -2 -3

Yours in love,

Mickie Kent